Kyle Lewis

Professor Donovan S. Bisbee

COM 3045
20 December, 2020

Dear Professor Bisbee,

The Fall 2020 Communications 3045 was an overall laxed but engaging course. With what has
been going on in the world and with the circumstances being abnormal, understandably the
course had to be taught and facilitated with challenges that would have other not have been
present. I am not a fan of online courses despite being someone that is not outgoing. Also, you
were very aware and understanding of these unusual times and accordingly managed the course
which is also appreciated. There were some issues I had such as having more than one final
assignment or project, courses being held via blackboard collaborate instead of Zoom or just
being recorded videos on YouTube (I had some issues trying to go back and re-watch), and the
syllabus (which I understood was subject to change) did not have dates and we had weekly
updates instead. I learned a lot and enjoyed the course otherwise.

This course is about law and free speech which has immense potential for learning or even just
for the sake of conversation. Much of what was taught was interesting and relevant to the course.
There was also lot of fun in-class activities that occurred which further bolstered a learning
environment. The readings (and especially how you intended the class to use them) were great.
What helped was that this was not just a regular and boring course of lecturing but much of it
was interactive and even the actual lectures were interesting.

This course was not free of flaws and there are a few. There were what I would personally
consider to be multiple final assignments. This is not issue of there being too much, but it is an
issue of redundancy and a little bit of tedium admittedly. There was a wiki, a final project, and a
reflection letter. I personally felt that there should have been at least one of these instead two or
three as one would be enough to end the course and for us to demonstrate how we learned.
Another issue was the choice to conduct the course on blackboard collaborate instead of Zoom
which is just a subjective gripe with the course as I prefer Zoom and it just makes it easier as all
of my other courses utilized Zoom. Finally, the biggest issue I had was the syllabus and the
schedule as while we knew about the assignments to expect, we were not sure when about work
like the Circumletio and the final project. The issue here is not that the details may not be
finalized ahead of time, but it was with the inability to plan ahead of time for them (like a whole
month or two before). Maybe this is not actually an issue.

This was a great experience throughout the semester, and you taught the course well.

Sincerely,
Kyle Lewis