When looking back on this summer course, there are definitely things that I wish I knew better before I started. When I signed up for this class, I knew it would probably be challenging but I didn’t fully realize how time consuming it would be. I feel like some expectations were levied that I didn’t fully recognize, or understand. And given the past few weeks I have some suggestions for making the class better.

First and foremost, this should not be a summer course. There’s too much in the syllabus alone to justify the course being taught on a shortened scale. Either the objectives of the class need to be simplified, like taking out the project management week and extending the time spent learning JavaScript, or it need to be a longer course.

Second, the class needs a TA. Like the other technical classes I’ve taken, it’s paramount to have someone go through and make sure you’re actually clicking the right buttons and understanding the concepts before the class moves on. Only having one person there makes it really hard to do that, so a teaching assistant needs to be in the class if we aren’t going to go over the nuts and bolts.

Finally, I think expectations need to be managed on both sides more before this class is taught again. I know many people in the class, like myself, felt like things moved too quickly and not enough time was spent actually going through concepts we learned. For the most part it just seemed like a sprint to touch on any possible thing that could exist in web development. Instead, I think the course should correct and only teach more of the basics. Codecademy was useful for some things, like CSS and PHP, but it wasn’t a good use of time to work multiple hours on something that we then never really touched again, like jQuery.

Overall, I was able to learn some things in this class, but oftentimes I was more frustrated than excited about what I was learning. The class needs to be essentialized for PR professionals and journalists. While I appreciate that there were good intentions to get everyone familiar with web development, it needs to be scaled back before I could honestly recommend it to a classmate, especially one with a full-time job.