MGT566SX: Post-Mortem Thoughts

DISCLAIMER: This post is mega-long and not "proper blog length". Got that. Get yourself a nice cup of tea first.

It's important to me that nobody in the future has to go through what I did with this on the frustration side, and that everyone can have a happy experience with this course from the get-go. Doable.

If you want to cut to the chase, just "Scan" the RED parts and don't attempt to actually read this.

First of all, I'd like to get this spit out right at the start: I spent most of the quarter being frustrated as hell and behind in most of my work in this class.


For me personally, a High Anxiety state of mind does NOT lead to effective learning or to a restful night's sleep. This course was unexpectedly challenging for me on the technical side, and for whatever reason, the diffculty caught me very off guard.


In spite of that, I have learned more from taking this course than from any other course I have taken in the past 3 years, which is saying a whole lot. I cannot imagine my life or my brain or my future as a businessperson WITHOUT this course, frankly, which is also saying a lot.


I cannot recall an experience quite like this one in my higher educational history (this is my 7th college and/or university experience) of putting in more time with less to show for it that I can think of, maybe ever.


I realize from many years of studying cognitive processes and taking a barrage of personality tests and from my own experiences teaching in both undergraduate and MBA programs, that some people are actually motivated to drive harder when they have lots of obstacles to overcome. I also know that they are not the majority. Most people -- including me -- do not learn all that well when they feel constantly blocked or stuck -- and the reason why does not matter in terms of learning. Frustrated is frustrated and in general it is not conducive to effective learning.


I'm not totally sure what to think about that, except that I'm getting more OK with the lack of tangible results as I think "Beyond the Course" into my future.


For me, the level of constant frustration from a variety pack of technology shortcomings (=no prior knowledge whatsoever + wrong equipment + 2 major stints of low or no internet connectivity) was fairly crippling, to the point where I almost dropped this course twice, even with the known consequence of not being able to graduate.


Pretty serious decision for me to choose quitting (I am NOT a quitter by nature -- really seriously). The good news is that I feel that there are solutions to most of this for others who might be in future classes.


I have given this a lot of thought. Knowing what I know now AND leaving aside for the moment my other thoughts about workload and balance between our 4 courses AND time expectatons for working professional people at BGI who are enrolled in the 2-year program AND everything else (worthy conversations, but not right here right now) that have been on my mind about this MBA program, I will give it my very best shot at sticking to the AI way with a problem/SOLUTION sort of a format:

What worked? How might my experience be of benefit to this course in the future?

1. Christopher Allen: I was signed up for a different DLM section and I requested to be switched into this one after meeting Christopher through Libba & Gif in August. I am magnetically attracted to really smart people who want to share what they know with others. I cannot even express how grateful I am for this experience and for the incredible level of personal attention I received from Christopher. I have taken plenty of BGI courses where a question posted on the Channel took days to get a reponse -- or was never responded to at all. Thank you for being so available and for being so responsive so quickly.  Also highly appreciated was the polling for student feedback during class times, and the resulting changes that were made along the way to the course content and flow. Even though most of the time I was clearly at the back of the herd, I still felt "heard".

Future: TA's? Mentors? Teams? The inclusion of TA's would (obviously!) really help people like me AND help keep some long emails out of Christopher's Inbox. Win/Win. I realize that the logical tendency will be to have Mac and Social Media Whiz Kids in those TA spots, but I would really encourage some use of at least one TA who has some strong background in explaining technology to people who do NOT have this background in their back pockets already. A different skill set than being lightning fast at doing it for themselves. What seems very elementary to those of you who know these terms and tools was really NOT even remotely obvious or intuitive to me. Tasks that took others 20 minutes took me 4 hours or 8 hours or even more. I think a lot of that was avoidable.


For example - I did not even know to look for the multitude of most excellent tutorials that are available for free on YouTube -- I had no idea that there were so many instructive pieces on YouTube (no joke -- I had no clue). Over the winter break I plan on rereading and redoing all of the info on Delicious and bookmarking and tagging, which I do not totally understand how to use effectively yet, and which I also realize is all vital as a foundation.


I realize that the student demographic at BGI has migrated significantly since I applied in Spring 2008 to a MUCH younger demographic (in 2007 it was median age 37-38 with a large % with previous higher education and several years of professional work experience), so maybe this issue will solve itself. As BGI students become younger and younger, maybe everyone will come with a Mac and already have accounts and working knowledge of Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, tagging, bookmarking, blogging, video shooting and editing, iMovie tools, and all of the "Basics" that were so totally foreign (and very time-consuming to learn all at once) for me.


Might it be possible to balance the courseload and/or assignments to take into account the fact that not everyone is starting from the same place -- but in a way that does not drag down the learning for those who know what they are doing already? I would love to see this course be a bit more user-freindly for people like me (who REALLY desperately need to take this course!), and at the same time also take into account that with 4 courses and a full time job that includes travel, there are only so many waking hours in a day to do all of this stuff.


Maybe this would be a worthy topic for a BGI "Creative Session"?


Another solution might be to assign one-on-one "mentors" or 3 person teams with one advanced user, one social media "dinosaur" (like me!) and/or relative Social Media newbie, and maybe one person in between, who can be a team for the whole course. The question then is how to have that happen without placing undue burden on the more experienced person...? I realize that my lack of knowledge and corresponding onslaught of questions would have worn out anyone carrying a 2-year course load who works who maybe has friends or family or a life. I would not have survived this course at all were it not for the incredible time-generosity of Christopher and of a few students who willingly gave me literally hours and hours of their personal time to walk me through the series of obstacles I encountered -- but should hours of mentoring time and energy really be "expected" from fellow students?


Sending out round after round of "please help me" pleas to my classmates hoping someone would have time for me did not feel good. I would have felt vastly more comfortable with a "go to" person for my continuous rounds of questions about Delicious, video mechanics, blogging, iMovie. Could there be optional "How to" interactive tutorial resources or Elluminates for beginnners for each new tool? Or maybe for each area there could be a few volunteer "Class Experts" who are willing to help others but only some of the time on one designated topic so they don't become overburdened --  for example specific students might volunteer to help others based on topics -- specifically on working with Delicious, sound editing, or shooting video footage, or setting up WordPress blogs, etc.


YES - the readings and resources were excellent, but I think it's also possible to add some more personal or in-person tools to help bridge the gap between reading/seeing/studying something and actually doing it, while also respecting real world time constraints.


2. Technology and Tools: What worked was I bought a Mac the day before the last Intensive. I had to get on my PC to look up how to turn on my Mac (for real). Even knowing NOTHING about my Mac and never having used one in my life before that day, it still saved me time, additional frustration, and I believe was the single deciding factor in my ability to deliver any deliverable at all for the final Social Change video assignment. I know Bonnie would agree with me on this - she got her Mac the same time that I got mine.


Everything for me about my course experience changed for the better from that second on. I happened to find an iMovie beginner's class at my local Apple store and I took it at 9am the day the last Intensive started, 24 hours after I got my Mac. Crazy? Kind of, yes. Is there a better way? Most probably. It is what it is, but I know that I would have and could have benefited infinitely more from this course - and contributed to it more - had I started out on a Mac and not attempted to do this with a PC.


To be clear: The Personal Learning Journal blog and some of the other tools were completely workable on a PC, and I get that. The video portion of the course -- which as it turns out was quite signficant -- is where I feel having personal use of a Mac is not really optional.

The future -- Macs:  I believe should simply be a required tool for this class, if video is going to be as major a component as it was this time. Either students should already own one, or at bare minimum, get their hands on one and learn their way around the OS and iMovie a few weeks BEFORE the start of the course. Possibly BGI can work something out for student access to Macs for this class so it does not turn into one more additional or unexpected major expense for students.


Frankly, it is NOT cheap to rent a Mac from a professional service ($500 a month or so) which was my original intent -- it turned out to make more financial sense for me to just buy one. This was not exactly in my financial plan for this month, and this course and these tools are so vital to business success that I feel this really is worth solving in an affordable way for ALL students. Buying or renting a Mac should not be a [financial] "requirement" for students to take this course, but I feel very strongly that finding a way to provide PERSONAL ACCESS to a Mac for EACH student to use for this course should be taken into consideration as a "must solve" issue, not as a "nice to have" issue.


From my point of view, I understand the idea of sharing or of pairing people up, but my learning would have been greatly diminished if I were not the "operator" of the Mac and had instead been peering over someone's shoulder or somehow grabbing 1/2 hour here or there on someone else's. I did have access to people who own Macs, but by the time I figured out I really needed one, borrowing a Mac was not possible (I really tried) -- everyone needs theirs to do what they do, and the number of people in my local network who have multiple Macs and were free to loan one out to me on short notice was nil.


One other solution would be to simply remove the video requirements from the course content and make sure that anyone on a PC can easily do all the assignments with no disadvantage over the Mac users.


Interestingly, in spite of the magnitude of my frustration and complaints about this PC vs. Mac situation, I do not believe that I would learned half as much as I did if I were assigned to a team with Mac users and I had stuck with my PC and never had the hands-on experience of having to muddle together my own video on a Mac. It was valuable and a key learning area, but it is super-clear to me that over 100 hours struggling into the wee hours of the night with MovieMaker on a PC was indeed an avoidable sunk cost this quarter.


Maybe the compromise of assigning the PC People to teams with Mac People is the practical interim solution, but I strongly recommend searching for a solution based on the premise of  "Access to Macs for All" for the duration of this particular course.

3. Course Integration: What worked was that I was able to use some of my tools from this course in CRL (and for Marketing as well) and vice versa. My final presentation for CRL was a short spoken summary of what I learned plus a slide show that I was able to VERY QUICKLY put together in iMovie with my one-day-old Mac. Magical!

Future - Cross-pollinization: I do realize that big ideas on how to integrate Social Media tools into the other courses and into BGI life in general are under major discussion right now. Excellent!


For me, this was an incredibly time-intensive course. In order to try to keep my chin above the quicksand in this course (iffy, very frankly), all 3 of my other courses at various times were totally placed in the back seat. As a result I was faced with a cumulative end-of-the-quarter mess of being behind not just in this course but in all 4 courses.


I realize that compared to most of my classmates my situation is an anomaly, and I don't really have much perspective on how much my experience even applies to other students who might take this course in the future.


Either way, it seems like the integration of Social Media tools into the BGI experience in an intentional and applied manner has great value to our overall experience.

4. Personal Learning Journal on Blogger: Worked! Blogger was simple, good, mostly happy (inserting images - slightly painful) and I was able to keep up on postings. Harder for me was keeping track of everyone else's postings and all of the responses. I still feel that the Personal Learning Journal  was the one thing that really kept me anchored and saved me from feeling totally lost in space.

Future - skill level reality check, time check, and Blogger: My "Beat" should have been on Blogger and I most likely should not have attempted a professional WordPress public blog.


Catch-22 AGAIN: I have learned more from taking on a  professional innovation blog on WordPress than I did from almost anything else in this course. It is amazing. I would not take it back.


The experience (sugggested by CA) of contacting innovation blogger Drew Boyd, interviewing him, and then posting about it provided a huge learning leap for me. So did the exercise of my "research post" on innovaton taxonomy, which I have since discovered is a major hot topic on innovation experts' blogs -- who knew? Very cool. (Much more to come in the next 2 weeks: http://www.dellaforma.com/)


However.... because of my lack of technical know-how, I fell 2+ months behind on the Beat assignment, got totally stressed out, and was not able to be a valuable contributor to the overall "Beat" conversation between students. I missed a lot and I know it.


Today, on December 13th 2009, I am not sorry that I chose what I chose to do in the big scheme of things (having a public professional blog was encouraged in more than one class by Christopher - it sounded good!), but it was not a wise choice for someone who was already in over my head with the most basic tools.


In the past 2 weeks I have become totally immersed in the professional innovation strategist blogosphere and have read, commented, tweeted and RT'd on this topic, and more. It's all good, but I know that my super-steep learning curve on the professional blogging scene did not fit the expectations or timing or the intent of the Beat assignment.


Because my professional/public blog could have a DIRECT effect on my professional career, I became concerned about making sure it was done properly - for good reason. This was invaluable, but the time "opportunity cost" was too big of a tradeoff in the framework of a one-term course in my case.


Bottom line: Blogger is a FANTASTIC playing field for people like me. Possibly stressing that a public professional blog is for "advanced users only" might be enough to avoid overcommiting timewise in order to just get up to speed.


Time: I was left wondering if the actual time it takes to read and to craft a thoughtful response to multiple postings on multiple topics each week (on the Learning Journals and then later adding the Beat postings as well) might be time-tracked by students somehow during the actual course for future reference in course planning hours.

5. Elluminates, readings, links, course information on the Channel AND class effectiveness at Intensives: ALL WORKED in a really big way. The care and consideration and thoughtful planning by Christopher was supremely evident. It is impossible to express how much of a difference this made to me and to everyone else taking this course. Thank you.

Future: I gave up on the Suggested resources completely after a while once I figured out that I could barely keep up with the Required ones. I don't think there is anything at all "Wrong" with how this was all done, but for me, it really took me quite a while to get my arms around the fact that as a 2-year student with a more-than-full-time job, I was just going to need to be happy with my own level of learning.


What took me so long was really understanding that I was not going get the same type of learning experience as 3-year students OR students who had some prior experience with these tools OR students with no job or a part-time job OR students with Macs OR students who have reliable 24/7 access to high-speed internet connections. Not sure what the solution to this is, but I did get it finally, which is good.


Possibly the suggestion for the Creative Session on how to balance different student experience levels with the course content might bubble up some solutions to this as well. The thing that helped me the most in this area was all of the simple words and posts of encouragement from fellow students and from Christopher. Appreciated.

6. "SHIP EARLY AND OFTEN": Worked. I cannot possibly describe how much the repetition of this phrase (endlessly; often; in every Elluminate and at every Intensive!) saved my life in this course.

Thank you.