After a long and hectic week of commencement, Civitas, scavenger hunts and feasts, it came time for classes to start.
The morning started out like any normal morning at 851 California Street with students waking up, making their way through their morning routines, eating breakfast in their rooms or the dining hall, checking emails, and so on and so forth. Today, the average routines were infused with a hovering feeling of tension and anticipation.
It was the first official day of school, and unlike every other first day of school experienced previously by students of Minerva, this one did not require packing up books in a backpack and making a trek to a classroom and waiting for a bell to sound; this first day of school started and ended by opening a computer.
The Active Learning Forum (ALF) is, for all intents and purposes, a fairly new piece of technology and it is not perfect. Couple this with the fact that 112 students are live streaming video and audio, in the same place, all at once and you are bound to have some technical difficulties.
Some of the problems which occurred were situations such as poor or crackling audio and inability to see video; circumstances which can make learning and participating frustrating. The tech team was on the job however, and resolved the majority of problems throughout the classes so that by the end of the two classes things were running smoothly for most people. For those issues which were not able to resolved in class, and in order to ensure that the issues of the first day do not become recurring systemic problems, the tech team fixed the issues, with the help of a number of volunteer members of the Inaugural Class who logged back onto the platform to be a sample group.
The ALF is a new approach to learning, and one that will continue to be an adjustment in the first days of classes. Despite technical difficulties, the first day was overall a positive experience and a good way of starting off the year.