A review on the course
In the course Economics of Organizations, I learned more than I thought I did. I looked at my pervious blogposts and thought about something that stood me by about that subject. The biggest value that this course had for me is that is gave me the realization about the complexity about some theories. For example, the principal-agent theory was more me just an agent and just a principal, but the prompt about this subject said that in practice, this is a little different. Since I had to write about this, I started to think about a time that this situation happened to me. With not only this prompt but more of them, it helped me think about situations in life and how they can be different from what I have learned.
The second thing that I found valuable about this course is that I learned new things, just as the gift exchange and hold-up problem. Those are small things, but highly interesting to learn and read something about. Besides learning those new things, I had to reflect a lot and I started to see that organizations are just big groups of people. By reflecting on organizations problems, you can already find the problem and complex models are not always necessary.
The pedagogic approach in this class was very new for me. I’m used to a class where there is a slide presentation on a screen and where we had to read a certain chapter every week. I’m also not used to online exercises, just like blogging. I prefer the approach that I’m used to, but maybe that is because I should get to use to this new way of teaching before I found a way how it works for me. The blogging, however, was something I found very interesting. I think that we should apply that more in classes. I had the opportunity to let the class ‘lecture’ sink in before I start discussing about it in my blogpost. This way I could be more thoughtful about the way I was writing about the subject and I also remember the content better. Blogging was also a nice way to express my thoughts without making the class bored with my thought. The fear of answering wrong is also taken away, since there is not a personal answer, just an electronical one. The reactions we had to give on the blogposts that were mandatory was also a good way of making the students discuss with each other and I started to find is easier over time.
My blogging developed over time. I started with only opening a word documents and just starting to type the things that the prompt was asking. However, I felt that it wasn’t a smooth story and I started to think a little more about the transition between the parts that I wanted to discuss in every post. Later in the course I found out that the best way of doing that was reading the prompt, thinking about it for a day, think about an idea and then write some things down before typing the blogpost. In the beginning a blogpost took me one and a half hour and now it takes me around three hours. However, Excel was much easier for me. It took me always less than an hour and I found the material easy, since I covered most of it in other courses. Most of the times I was scanning the text instead of reading it, because it was a little much sometimes. When I didn’t find the solution on the question, I read the text and then I understood it. I did watch the video when it was recommended.
Some things that I would have liked to see in this courses are some overviewing documents. I would’ve liked an overview of all the subjects we would cover in the whole course. In addition, a hardcopy summary or slide presentation in the end of the lecture would’ve helped me a lot in this course. I would see what the teachers most important views are and I could apply the lecture notes more easily to the blogpost to make them more thoughtful and relating. I also like one thing to be improved and that is the feedback on the blogposts. I did never such a thing, so having a template or summary of how to write blogposts would give me a head start in understand what was expected. I also would like more personal feedback on the writing, so I could adjust it to the following posts to improve more in my writing.
