This is Josh Machado’s open education website in which he will be making blog posts about EDCI 339 – Distributed and Open Learning. Here, he will outline his learning journey and reflect on past experiences to better connect with and understand the material offered in the course.

About Josh

Hey everyone! My name is Josh, I am a fifth-year student here at the University of Victoria in my final semester, aiming to earn my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science by the end of this year. I’ve had the (dis)pleasure of navigating through university courses from the beginning of COVID through to where we are today. I half-jokingly say displeasure only because of how rough things were during times of uncertainty, just because of the severity and abruptness of the situation that professors or students could not prepare for.

A bit more about my educational journey and how I got here. I attended a smaller high school with only 110 students in my graduating class in 2020. I took the IT course as my elective option every year from grade 9 through 12, in my last year doing an AP CS course in which I obtained a course credit at the university level for our intro CSC course. I always saw myself going into higher education to obtain a bachelor’s, and because of my aptitude and how much I enjoyed computer science, that’s the area in which I pursued my degree. A lot of people nowadays seem to get into CS degrees for the money, and I’m glad I got into it because of my love for coding and general enjoyment and how easy I found it to pick up. Although I would be lying if I said the money wasn’t a nice addition as well!

I’ve learned through the 4 co-ops that I’ve completed that I really enjoy continuous learning and exploration. I think its especially critical in the tech field where there are always so many new technologies to stay ontop of. I think keeping up with the latest security flaws, updates, technologies, languages and more is a great way to keep engaged with my work and always question if things are able to be done better. Because of this, I plan to just pursue a full-time career once I obtain my bachelor’s. I considered pursuing a master’s, but I don’t think it will do much for me at this point in my career and for what I’m aiming to do. I do see myself pursuing this in the future, but it would have to be to advance my career for something like the machine learning or artificial intelligence space, as well as be funded by my work, and I’d like the ability to do it alongside my work as well.