I think
the structure of this class is really creative. It also provides me lots of
interesting organizational management concept to think about. For example, I
think the Illinibucks idea and transfer pricing is interesting because I never
think about the charge of goods and services between different divisions within
one organization. I remember we write blog post about Illinibucks. When I wrote
a paper about Bitcoin for my final project, I relate my concern of the market
to this idea, even though their functions are different. But I realize that
people’s behavior in hoarding Illinibuck might create deflation in the market.
I have a better understanding of my opinion and rationale of it. I used to
think this class is not that relevant to pure economics because it somewhat
focus on human’s behavior in the organization. But at the end of semester, I
realize that we can use some economic knowledge to explain the reasons of these
behaviors. In my opinion, this is the most valuable take away point for this
course.
Online blogging is really a good idea because
people can learn more by self-reflection and think about the material in a more
freedom way. I think the interaction in comment is really important because
sometimes we learn more from other’s perspectives. However, the shortage of
blogging is that it is too freedom. Sometimes I don’t know whether I am right
or wrong, and getting panic if I see the comment that I did something wrong. It
allows me to read other’s post before I start writing, even though I try to not
do it and finish the post independently. But sometimes I will just be
influenced by other’s thought and hard to come up some creative one after that.
And I feel like I can derive the concept relevant to class from one experience,
such as group project or previous internship, which is both a good and bad
thing. But overall, I like this format of constructing the class because it is easier to relate course materials to our experience and make it more applicable.
It usually doesn’t take me a long time to do Excel
homework and blogging. For Excel homework, I will go through the instruction in
Excel and watch the tutorial on Youtube if necessary. Honestly, I am often
stuck by several questions in Excel homework. So sometimes I will discuss them
with my classmate or send them an email to make sure my understanding is
correct. It usually takes me longer time to write the blog post, depends on how
I familiar with the topic. However, since most of them are based on experience,
the average time for me to do blogging is about an hour.
Sometimes I think that it is a little bit harder to
think about examples different from the example in guidance before we really
learn the concept. So sometimes we will misunderstand the purpose of the pose.
I will suggest that for some abstract concept, we can have a 100-150 words
reflection post after the discussion section and clarify some misunderstanding
concept in the original post. This might be easier for the instructor to
monitor whether we really understand the idea. Also, I feel that in this
structure, honestly I will seldom read textbook and only refer to some concept
when I prepare for the exam. I am not sure whether there will be better
substitute of reading textbook. But if we can have more updated news article to
help us understand the concept, it will be more interesting than rarely reading
textbook.
