As every summer starts approaching I always wonder to myself, should I take an online class? The answer to that this summer is YES! In fact I will be taking two summer courses, both of which will be online.  This year A&S has made it really easy to see all the courses that are being offered over the summer and they have even color coded them to help make your search easier.  You can filter the courses by sessions, a selected list of courses such as A&S humanities or you can just browse the entire catalogue to find something that you might be interested in taking.  This year A&S has made it really easy to find all the courses being offered and I would encourage you to check it out and take a class (or two)!

Over the break, I had taken an online winter intercession Course (STA 210), this course was designed to be a semester long course but was jam-packed into 9 days.  Since I am still on USP I needed this class to fulfill my requirements and graduate but it was not one that I wanted to spend an entire semester doing.

While I was thinking I was doing the smart thing by cramming it all into just over a week long course, it was difficult to do.  First because I was out of town for the first week of the class and it was difficult to stay motivated to complete all the assignments every day but second because there was so much information being thrown at you at once it was easy to rush through the assignments to get them done.  This was my approach to the class and while I felt great that I had completed all my assignments and did well in the course, at the end I felt as though I had not learned much from the course.

If you think about taking a winter intercession course, I would strongly suggest not taking the approach that I did, to rush through everything all at once to get it done, but instead take the time to sit down, learn the material and get what you want to out of the class.  Also, make sure you are ready for an intense 9 days of course work!

I have been taking ITIQ Web Publishing (A&S 100-205) which uses Canvas a system that is similar to Blackboard but in my opinion it functions much better.  One of the first things that I noticed about Canvas was that the login page took you straight to your course, where BB (Blackboard) takes you to another landing page where you have to select your course from a list.  Another thing that Canvas does better than BB was the way that you can switch between courses, there is a drop down at the top of the page that you just select a different course.  This is much better than having to go back to the BB landing page, wait for it to load and then select another course from the list. 

Canvas is much faster and everything on a page loads very quickly.  There are two sections on the BB landing page that I don’t know what they are about because they never load, which doesn’t matter because all I want are my courses anyways. 

Canvas does not have extra external things clogging up the work area.  Instead, on the homepage, it has a menu that is easily navigable (unlike BB where things can be buried under other things in the menu), as well as a “To Do” list on the other side.  This is much easier for finding things that you actually want and need. 

Something else that I really liked was the grade system on Canvas, you can see when assignments are submitted, rubrics for the submitted assignments and then grades and comments about the grade all in one place.  However, there is a feature that I really love, which is the “What-if” scores feature, where you can change any score to see what your overall grade would be if that was your actual score.  So, if you did not want to do an assignment and wanted to see how it would affect your overall grade, you can use this feature to do so.

One thing in Canvas that I did not like very much was the way that a student could post a comment to an assignment.  Usually announcements are not meant to be interactive and if there were question or problems specifically that a student was experiencing then they could just post it as a comment.  This allowed the entire class to be able to read what they had posted.  I think that in some instances, students did not realize that this was public and posted things that I’m not sure they wanted other students to see, such as grades, specific questions to their project or excuses for turning in assignments late.

Something that I think BB does better is the messaging system, I like the layout of Canvas better but BB’s seems to be much more functional and you can send the message just on BB or you can send it to people on BB and to their emails as well.  This is a feature that I really liked but I did not get to try much with Canvas. 

Another thing that I like about BB is the fact that they have an Android app and their system works well with most mobile browsers (excluding Blackberry) whereas Canvas does not.  Canvas does not even have an Android app which means that I had to do all my work at a computer.  I couldn’t even write a message on Canvas with my phone it; since it worked so terrible with my phone.  I know they have an iPhone app but since I don't have an iPhone I could not try it out.  This is probably the most major thing that I like better about BB.

Overall, I think that Canvas is a much better option for courses and I liked working with it better than I ever have with BB even with their newest updates and redesign.  Even though there are some things that could be improved and made better on Canvas, like their mobile apps and support, I still prefer the entire system over Blackboard.

For the past week I have been getting used to life in Spain.  For the month of May I am studying here with Francisco Salgado-Robles, a professor in the Spanish department. Last Sunday for the first time ever I took a plane out of the States and made the journey to Spain.  Right now I am living in Seville which is in southern Spain about an hour from the coast.  I have been here, in Seville, for a week now and I still get lost when I am going to my classes.  I am also doing service learning so I work at a Children’s Hospital.  

I have been to many places with some of rich history of both Spain and the United States.  For example, this past weekend my class went to La Rabida and la playa (the beach) where we saw the monastery where Christopher Columbus (in spanish he is know as Cristobal Colon) went to get monks as warriors for his ships.  

I also went to Cordoba (about and hour north of Seville), which had buildings and structures that were built in 780 BC.  There was a cathedral that was also a mosque, that is because the Christians and the Arabic people fought over it. Something very interesting about it is that there are over 800 columns in the Mezquita-Catedral and they are all from different churchs that were captured and torn down.  They are all of different sizes but all together they form a beautiful Mezquita-Catedral. Just the other day I visited the Cathedral de Seville, which is very beautiful. 

There are 6 naves and in the middle of the church there is a huge choir area which blocks more than half the church from seeing the alter.  There is a tower which is 37 stories tall and all of Seville can be seen from the top of it.