Christian Proff
Switzerland

"Staff were usually available at short notice with feedback on questions and comments."

Christian Proff is a Verification Engineer from Switserland. He participated in the online program Leadership Essentials for Engineers.Read about his experience.

What was your motivation for enrolling in the course?
I thought this program would be an interesting complement to the classroom courses I had followed previously. It would give me practice in dealing with situations one will often encounter in real life without any preparation. As I have a fulltime job and a family, the format which allowed me to study every now and then proved very useful, as following a classroom course would have been impossible for me.

How would you describe your online learning experience?
The peer-review of essay assignments (where learners evaluate each other) felt a bit strange at first, though most participants took this seriously and provided useful feedback together with their rating of the submissions.

Staff were usually available at short notice with feedback on questions and comments. What I would have really appreciated, would be the possibility to download slides as in other courses on edx, as most course material was in the form of videos mostly without written summaries in a downloadable format.

What did you think of the online learning environment?
The edx platform provides all the features a remote student needs: downloadable instructional videos, access to course discussion forums and contact with the lecturers as well as the assignments and tracking of the course progress. The mixed grading with few multiple choice tasks and mutual feedback allowed me to gain insight into my own progress.

What is your advice to someone who would like to take a similar online program?
This course series allows those with rather practical leadership experience and training to add skills usually not taught explicitly, but in an implicit manner, absorbed on the job. Some of the exercises might be not directly transferable to one’s own working environment, but are valuable additions to a portfolio of leadership tools.