From time to time I take courses. It seems that University Graduate-level courses on HR issues are rare to come by. However, I have opinions on how courses ought to be structured and graded.

This course at UNT has the following issues:

1. Due dates (times): When an asynchronous course is offered online, and it has assignments that are due before the end of the course, these dates and times should be end-of-day anywhere on earth. Working in a different timezone from Denton, Texas (where UNT is located) should be an assumption for an MS-LS program that is fully online.
2. Ideological commitment to APA citations: It is gob-smacking that the MS-LS program at UNT is committed to APA citation formats in every assignment. First, Chicago (author-date) as a citation and referencing within a document is so much clearer when one needs to cite a diverse set of material types. One would think that librarians would be able to distinguish these diverse types from each other. Second, the way APA gets integrated into the curriculum is amazing. Points get deducted if they are not present (that has never been my problem, thanks to Zotero). But the point is that this should not be the emphasis of a writing assignment. If the level of composition and academic rigor on the part of students requires this then I don't know where the bottom of the barrel is.
3. Instructions are Outdated: That is, as far as courses go, they often get recycled through Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, etc. multiple times. That is, they get re-used, sometimes from a shell course. The re-use in this case is obvious in the instructions as some things stated in the instructions to be in the assignments tab do not appear in the assignments tab, but elsewhere. Additionally, links are broken, and assignment parameters are simply unreasonable. For example, one assignment asked the student to use budget materials from 10-12 years of history at the library they work at... well some students do not work at a library, and the very library used as an illustration for the assignment only lists the last seven years which is more in line with best practices for non-profit management.
4. Instructions are Marginally Relevant: In another assignment on budgeting, there is no training in the course on cost centers. Budgeting is simple, there are two categories revenue and expenses, and each has its categories for the classification of expense/revenue and organizational unit. Then each also has a method of funds transfer. Then reports are run by any factor: revenue, classification, organizational unit, method of transfer, or combination thereof, etc. There is no attempt in the coursework to show the student what a section (small organizational unit) budget might look like, what a special project budget (for a grant) might look like, or what a department budget might look like. One would think that a bottom-up approach to teaching fiscal management would make sense... I guess that is too far beyond the minimum viable product offered.
5. Content is Outdated: That is, there are a ton of links in the course. The content at one of those links was taken offline 6 years ago. From an accessibility standpoint, this should be illegal. From a consumer protection perspective, the University is offering a sub-par product that discriminates against individuals with certain educational support needs.
6. Assignment Relevance: The general approach to assignments is framed in old traditional approaches to orienting the librarian as a consumer, instead of a proactive generative member of knowledge production and sharing economies. For example, the budgeting exercise for serials budget focuses on comparing and balancing a spending plan between monographs and serials. However, in today's context libraries are often open-access publishers, they are in consortia and they may have access to state-purchased information resources. Additionally, they can look at the costs of Inter-library-loan costs. These other options are not well structured in the exercises, and therefore not highlighted in the curriculum.
7. Objective and subjective grading: In this course the rubrics used are funky. The grading scale is something that categorically provides points in the allocation of 3,2, and .5. Such a scale does not allow for equitable qualitative gradience. In a way, the rubric forces the bell curve, which is kind of the ideological antithesis of a rubric.
8. Hidden Assignments: The final project is hidden till after over half of the term has passed. This is unacceptable. As a student, I have already paid for the project (the course) and am responsible for my best performance. If I feel I need more time to perform the tasks required in the assignment, then it should be available for me to review.
9. Technology use in Assignment Delivery: Some assignments require submission of a .doc file whereas a .pdf should be equally optional. The technology used is not in focus, rather the subjectcality and intellectual merits of the content should be what is in focus and being graded.
10. Material Accessibility: I have difficulty reading and writing. People, including professors who teach reading and literacy, have told me this. This course has no oral lectures. The content must be read in Canvas. This may be good for screen readers but is not good for humans who have trouble reading. Canvas makes the content flow according to screen width. Some students need static written materials as is seen on paper or PDFs. I am one of these students. I find material access in this course challenging. The fact that the administration of this school does not understand this about pedagogy is discouraging.
11. Content Comprehend-ability Through Logical and Page Layout Structures: Just like a newspaper article has a format with a headline and content (the content may also have internal compositional structure), a letter has a format such as addressee and positioning on the page. Visual layout, where ideas occur on a page, communicates to readers as much or more than the actual content. This course, as presented via canvas has gone to great lengths to remove any structural visual layout support for human readers to interpret content based on page layout structure. This makes reading the content much harder. The space between lines is unhelpfully large. Content that is more easily understood via tables is removed from tables. In general, the content in this course is less comprehensible due to a total disregard for page layout structures.
12. Character Level Encoding: Throughout the online course material, one finds – and other "interesting" sequences of characters. The source is truly unknown. However, having worked with Unicode and web development for several years I know that it is likely one of two issues: A) that the content was written in a non-Unicode character encoding and then pasted into a Unicode-based context (such as Canvas)(read more), or B) was automatically generated in MS-Word and pasted into a UTF-8 context (read more).