Activity 9.5 Case Analysis Effectivness

Activity 9.5 Case Analysis Effectiveness

I think that the case analysis was very effective in facilitating deeper research and understanding of unmanned systems by the students as well as getting a better idea about the challenges ahead.  While the class was very thorough and covered a wide range of topics nothing helps the learning process and the expansion of knowledge as much as research.  Searching and sifting through the vast amount of information available to us today opens you up to finding information and stories that you never would have thought to look for.  In this aspect I think the case analysis excelled in its purpose.

This tool also helped to develop more analytical thinking about the problems faced by unmanned systems and made us more aware of opposing or just different viewpoints on these issues as well as UAS themselves.  This type of decision making is can be very relevant to my line of work as a UAS flight instructor.  Because this is such a new and growing industry with many challenges facing it now and in the future good decision making will be crucial. A case analysis provides the ability to have well thought out and logical reasoning about and issue and puts it in a package to present to others for review and consideration.  I don’t think there are many areas that this type of paper and problem solving would not be applicable. A recent example that would this type of research would have been applicable would be when I was working on finding a way to improve the process for updating our lesson plans.  We used Six Sigma practices for this at the time but this process of researching and presenting a case analysis would have been just as effective.  Another example would be using a case analysis to show some safety of flight issues that we have because of inexperienced personnel being put in decision making positions.  A case analysis could be used to show them what the problem is and how to fix it in a logical and subjective manner.

I don’t really see any way to improve the process for an online class. Of course in actual classroom environment more collaboration between students and more frequent feedback would be very helpful for this process.  For this class I think it was done as well as it possibly could be.