The biggest challenge I faced during this course was getting familiar with the technology / sites involved. Being that it had been over 11 years since I took a college course (even though It’s the same university) a lot of the systems / sites used were brand new to me. Learning new systems like the ODU portal / Canvas took a bit of getting used to as I felt like I was diving in head first at the beginning of the semester.

Utilizing the Cengage platform to complete the virtual labs / simulations was challenging as well. There were many times the virtual machines within the labs didn’t want to turn on or would not take certain inputs when typing into the command prompts. Case sensitive symbols etc. would not show up correctly and I would have to resort to using the virtual keyboard and click on each individual character.  I learned it was important to not do assignments the last day they were due in-case there was technical difficulties when it comes to to the virtual machines working. By the end of the semester I was to a point where if something froze up or wasn’t working, rather than spend an hour troubleshooting it I would just come back to it the next day or later that night and the problem would be rectified on its own.

The last challenge related to these systems was setting up an ePortfolio. I spent at least a few hours just deciding which platform to use. I couldn’t get the URLs on each page to update in WordPress so decided to try a few different other sites but ultimately made it back to WordPress and figured out enough to get going. This is probably in part because I had never done anything like this which made me think back to my undergraduate courses. I definitely wish I had some classes that had an assignment like this, especially if we were able to do it in lieu of a long research paper.