Dani Werner
1/5
I recently completed a course on Understanding Autism, which is ironic because the course and the platform are terrible for anyone who has autism.
But before I dive in, let me give you some background. I have worked in online technology for 10 years, 8 of those in educational technology. I have worked for an online school and two companies that build education platforms. One of those built a Learning Management System (LMS), which is the online environment in which students and teachers operate, sharing information, assignments, and grades. I am passionate about education as well as accessibility, plus I know what a *good* experience looks like, which is why I feel qualified to tell you that my experience with Learning Curve Group fell far short of good.
The platform itself is outdated and clunky. It's annoying and tedious to navigate through it, as well as on a single page of endless questions. Those questions could have been broken up across pages, or even just spaced better, as just looking at 50+ questions and answer boxes lined up without gaps filled me with dread. So unmotivating and distracting! (Even just a button to collapse all the questions so you can open one at a time would help...)
If you find it easier to write out your notes and answers in another tool that's cleaner and less distracting (I like using Notion), you're not able to copy and paste your answers into the boxes. You can't even copy and paste within a box, so you have to highlight and drag text inside the box to rearrange sentences and paragraphs, unless you want to rewrite what you've already written.
Deadlines and expectations were unclear. Nowhere in the LMS did it tell me when assignments were due, and I was expected to work this out based on vague details. Even the naming of assignments was confusing. I had three, ordered as A, B, and 2. Yes, you make sense of that.
I will say, the workbooks I was provided were well-written and interesting, but that's where the goodness ended.
The assignments were made up of so many questions that basically asked you to regurgitate information from the workbooks, but in your own words. They literally said in the workbooks which section corresponded with which question. So many of the questions also felt super repetitive, so you had to figure out how to share the same information but in a slightly different way. I don't think the assignments added anything to my learning at all.
I'm someone who does online courses for fun and loves learning, but this was awfully dull. The only reason I ended up completing the course is because I didn't want to pay a fee.