This blog post will discuss a story about my best learning experience in a course that I took during my undergrad degree.
Share a story about your best learning experience (could be a formal course or something more personal). Why did you enjoy it?
During my software engineering degree, in the 3rd year, I took a Database management course in which I was taught about Database design, Data analysis, Concurrency and robustness, and Efficiency and scalability of databases. The lectures were online as I took that course during the pandemic.
For that course, there were 4 assignments and 4 quizzes in total. The course was properly divided into 4 sections. After each section, there was 1 quiz and 1 assignment due. The content of those assessments was solely based on the material covered in the section. As this course was during the pandemic there were a lot of options for missed assignments or quizzes due to sickness. Before each section, there would be clear goals with interesting examples for motivation. Also, along with lecture content, our professor used to post book page numbers that would reflect the same information as taught during the lecture. As he told us that ” It can be a matter of personal preference for students if they want to follow along with lecture or to read the book as some people do better by reading books”.
For each assignment, there used to be bonus questions that used to be challenging to program but they gave extra credit if you coded them properly. For example- if the assignment is worth 20% of the total course (4 assignments each worth 20%) and there are 20 questions each worth 1% of the course total. There used to be 2 bonus questions that can help you get 22/20 in that assignment and boost your course grade. This kind of bonus provided a good motivation to do assignments. Also for all the assignments, we could use any programming language to do assignment unlike most courses requiring knowledge of single programming knowledge
This kind of flexible and well-organized course was my best learning experience.