Straighterline Intro to Communications Review

[embitca]

As promised, here's my review of the SL Intro to Communications course. I finished it up this week with a 98%. If you need a public speaking class, I think this one is pretty easy and the grading on the actual "speaking" component is very easy. The first speech, Self Introduction, is technically not graded, but does give you 10 extra credit points so by the time I got the grade back from that my class grade was 106% which made for less stress on the exams.

For the other two speeches, Informative and Persuasive, I actually did quite a bit of work on the topics for both of those, but it was probably overkill. I essentially READ my speech from my manuscript which the instructions specifically say not to do and I got a 98% on each of them. I did try and speak directly to the camera as much as I could though. Even reading from my manuscript I still had a few "umms" and "aaahs" on the Persuasive speech, but I didn't feel like rerecording. It clearly didn't impact my grade much if at all.

The graded tests are relatively easy since you can look up info in the book. But I think skimming the chapters beforehand is a good idea so you know where to find things. I found that the Mid-term and Final Exams both contained questions from the previously graded tests. Setting up with ProctorU was easy and I paid the extra 8 bucks to take my test immediately rather than schedule it in advance.

My main complaints about the course are all the errors in the quizzes. Most of them are coding errors. For example, on a true/false question the correct answer is "FALSE" but then when you submit the test it marks the answer as incorrect and then says "The correct answer is False" which is the answer you gave. I sent the first one of these over to SL to fix, but there was so much back and forth with the Support Desk for it that I gave up. I'm not being paid to provide Quality Assurance. There are also errors in the textbook itself where the Answer key to the questions at the end of each chapter has the wrong answer marked as correct.

I also think the Lessons that SL gives for this course are a waste of your time. Just read or skim the textbook and then do the quizzes over and over so it generates a bunch of different questions. Do the quizzes at the end of each chapter in the book and there are some online quizzes you can do as well.

Another thing to note is the course is unbalanced in its workload. For the most part, the early part of the course has each topic covering one chapter, then you get to Topic and 7 and Ch. 6 is stretched out over both of these, unnecessarily in my opinion. Then Topics 9, 10 and 11 cover Chapter 8. And then you get to Chapter 13 and it covers the rest of the book, Chapters 10-15 which is completely ridiculous. Those later chapters would be much better to absorb if they each had their own topic and their own quizzes. It's a lot of material to cover and it is the main info that you will need for your oral presentations. Granted, even in these chapters much of the info can be skimmed. There's a ton of samples of what they are talking about.


One other major annoyance for me that isn't SL's fault: SL is using the 4th edition. McGraw-Hill is up to a 5th edition and during the week that I was studying for this course they went and killed the website for the 4th edition which is a real shame because it has even more quizzes for you to work through along with other material. Thankfully, Archive.org has some of it archived so I'll link it below.

Additionally there is also a much earlier version of the book for which McGraw-Hill has kept the website online so this will probably be helpful as well. Link is here: Student Center

Archive.org copy of 4th Edition - Unfortunately the links seem to only work through Chapter 6 which is a shame, but you can try the earlier version I linked above.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions!