Critical Reflection

What was covered in module learning:

Before I started this effective communication module, I set some goals for myself, such as to improve my presentation skills and writing skills. Personally, I am one who is afraid of large crowds and tends to have stage fright. During presentations, I would start off doing okay but when I make eye contact with the audience, I would start to get nervous and lose my train of thought. I am also able to speak fluently when I am in front of small crowds and my friends. For this part of the presentation skills, I felt that there are still rooms for improvement. I am glad that Professor Brad gave us many opportunities such as project sharing and pitching to share and build up on our self-confidence. This way, it can allow us to learn from one another and also give feedback to help them improve. One challenge that we faced throughout this module, is having difficulty to speak loudly as we are wearing masks. As the mask makes our voice muffled, we need to speak louder and clearer. 

The next goal that I set for myself is to improve my writing skills. As my language is not strong, I tend to have fragmented sentences and multiple grammatical errors in my work. Throughout these 13 weeks, Prof Brad has taught us various skills and tools to use when writing a report. Language skills such as to avoid the use of first and second person were taught. Prof Brad also taught us how to do citations of a website or article using the 7th edition of APA style. This module has taught me to do in-depth research to be able to understand the topic well and using different ways to paraphrase the sentences. After 13 weeks, I felt that my writing skills have improved although there are still some minor mistakes in the writing. 

What was covered in project learning:

From the project learning, I learnt that having teamwork and good communication skills are the most important. As a group, we have to work together in order to complete the project. The project required a lot of research to be able to understand the topic better. We split the project into various parts and assigned each part. After our individual research, we combine all the ideas into the word document and help one another to add on more information if required. I also felt that having good communication is the most crucial part in a team in order to do the project well. With the lack of communication, we are unable to convey our ideas smoothly and sometimes our ideas or views may clash with one another. During the start of the project, due to the lack of communication, the team did not take the time to think of a topic properly. This resulted in choosing a topic that was difficult when it comes to in-depth researching. Throughout the project, I felt that the team did not communicate well, which led to a few disagreements. As our topic of the project was a little difficult to research on, we had to spend quite some time and open up many different websites before we can find the information we needed. There were a lot of references and appendices used, so we had to do citations for all of them. It was a challenge as we had to check the website against our appendix. Overall, I felt that my team did a great job on this project, although I know that we could have done better.