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Do Online Schools Provide A Quality Education?
"After the dot com 'boom' settled down a bit, and I was no longer required to work 80 hrs a week, I decided that after ten years of being absent I would go back to school and finish up that elusive CS degree. Well, after shopping around a bit I found a very good, well known, University that was offering the degree, online.
'Cool,' I thought, no classes, all on my schedule, save gas, and I could work at 2 am if I wanted. I thought I had found the perfect way to learn.
BUT, after just one semester, I am starting to have my doubts. I am sure this is the way to go in the future, but I'm not so sure that the schools has got all the kinks worked out and I am beginning to believe that the professors, and possible even the schools, see this as a way for them to teach a class with a minimal amount of effort and cost.
You basically have a public conference area (a web based discussion group for comments) that you, the other students, and the professors participate in. This works very well because your assignments are given out on a weekly basis and you have a whole week to post comments and complete your assignments. You are required to participate in the discussions and then post your answers to quizzes in a private portfolio where it is graded by the professor and then returned to you.
Most of the professors participate in the conference like you are in a real classroom; with student asking questions and the professor responding, though, it is not real time.
But some of the professors only want you to post to the public discussion groups and never have you post to the private portfolio, basically this means they don't have to do anything accept scan the conferences and give out more assignments. They don't have to look over your work and give you any feedback. I bet it takes less than an hour a week to do this. Also, this allows other students to see the answers and just repost them.
The only thing this person seems to be doing is sitting on his butt all week; telling the students to just follow the syllabus for reading; and occasionally surfing the discussions groups to see who is there. That sounds like a very good deal for them, but I am not getting much out of this.
I also feel that ALL of the professors are very behind-the-times when it comes to IT. Just today I had a professor tell me she would not allow me to post a PDF file to my portfolio because she was worried about getting a virus when she read it?!
A few questions come to mind: Is this a quality education? Should the professors be required to show what they have done because they don't have a real classroom to attend? How much effort should a professor put forth for an online class? This has always been an issue in a real classroom, but now we have a whole new twist. Shouldn't professors be required to be a little more techno savvy before they give a course like this? Shouldn't the schools be reevaluating the 'new teaching style' and making some adjustments?
I am so angry with the way the school has set this up I will probably return to a normal class environment here at a local college, at least I know the guy is going to show up!
Has anybody else been to an online college? What were your experiences?"
I had an excellent experience at university of Phoenix Online. While I did experience a couple lazy instructors, there were requirements for daily discussion and interaction with other students about the material. This led to a situation where the material was covered in great depth almost in spite of the instructor.
With online courses you get exactly what you said. The biggest thing you are getting is credit. I have read lots of books, just reading them doesn't mean I learned anything. Credit is good.
'nuff said.
They teach people to ensure Microsoft's future monopoly.
It depends on the course.
Calculus - yeah, read the book, do the assignments, complete the exam. Hooray, you know calculus - you pass.
Literature - much more subjective, requires more work on the part of the professor/TAs.
It's important to note that many professors "skate" in real life university as well. They give the lectures, and the TAs do all the actual work. Some make themselves available between classes, some dont.
Quit whining.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
They give me a quality education, from EXPERIENCE I ALREADY HAVE!!!!!1111 I signed up right away and my degrees from a FULLY ACCREDITED university were hanging on my walls within days.
And this class is part of a CS degree?
Never took an online course myself, but I was pretty amazed at the amount of work some profs did for some of the distance ed courses I took. Just out of curiosity, does this so-called prof have a number where you can give your own fedback?
Democratic USA - Government of the corporations, by the Corporations, for the corporations.
I am starting to get a bad taste in my mouth about the amount of effort that some of my professors are putting forward in my courses. I feel like some of them are "skating" and all I am paying for is a book, a posted syllabus, and a final exam.
Sounds like they are providing a pretty darn authentic college experience.
Education is what you make of it.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
No...and that said after graduating 3 years ago. I came into this world ignorant, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, expect for my anonymous coward post. But it's true.
I would love to finish up my degree...i am living in germany and URI is a little too far away to drive there...not that there were ever any parking spaces anyway. So the reason for the post was - can anyone suggest online univeristies that are certified (USA)
thanks
back in college i hardly learned anything from a good percentage of my teachers. there were a few exceptions... but all in all i learned more from myself, from my friends, and from doing projects than anything else.
:)
btw.. how is the virtual dating scene at an online university
The art institutes offers several courses in an online format. It is much like the way you said.
To me it depends on the person facilitating or teaching. Since the art institutes have set up the course. Content and assignments. its up to the teacher to bring in other insights. From the couple classes i have taken. 1 was very good at bringing in more than what the course set up. The other just went by the book.
Its hard to say if its worth it or not. its very convenient. But i dont know if im getting everything i would like from the courses. maybe they just need time to work out the problems.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
I think I skipped some classes entirely and got an 'A'. Mainly the ones that followed the book pretty well. Frankly I'd like a setup that could have existed since the printing press--just Q&A and maybe professor time, tests, and a good book.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
The best online class I had was inPortein Crystalography with
Brierberk College in London inpartnership with a University in Israel..
Classe were online from IUPUI campus(Purude at Indianapolis) and discussions were held in a MUD..
and this was 1994...:)
Don't Tread on OpenSource
...which was interested in moving a few of their courses over to the web. I was hired to do much of the programming. At the end of the year when they did standardized tests and satisfaction surveys they found that the courses where they cut the in-class physical face time down to 20% of what it had been before and replaced that other 80% with interactive web content, the knowledge acquisition was almost identical and student satisfaction actually increased.
On the other hand, for the courses that they offered entirely on-line both knowledge acquisition (by performance on standaraduzed tests) and student satisfaction declined (something like 15 and 10 percent respectively, IIRC).
Now they have switched several other courses over completely to the 80/20 format, but offer fully on-line courses only as correspondence alternatives.
lysergically yours
Not just online colleges are like that these days. The majority of schools are just there to sell you a degree. On the note of taking classes online though, most modern universities and even small community colleges offer many courses online. My school, Indian River Community College, does this. They are often actually harder than the normal classes here but IRCC is the exception rather than the rule from what I've seen.
I am starting to get a bad taste in my mouth about the amount of effort that some of my professors are putting forward in my courses. I feel like some of them are "skating" and all I am paying for is a book, a posted syllabus, and a final exam.
I feel that way about my profs. and I don't go to an online school.
Basically, in addition to the book, the sylibus, and the final exam, an online class should provide you with work (which you are supposedly motivated to do) and rapid responces to your work. Therefore allowing you to quickly learn by example and understand your mistakes. If you are able to motivate yourself, and already know enough about the subject to find your mistakes, you would be better off simply buying a book.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
The concern with virii in PDF documents is valid, if a bit overblown.
The 'Peachy'
virus/trojan is one example.
In a physical classroom. Why should a virtual one be any different?
By that, I mean that besides just knowing what you're teaching, you have to have at least some clue about how to present it/collect assignments. Again, why should an online discussion group be any different?
all I am paying for is a book, a posted syllabus, and a final exam.
Sounds like you online folks aren't missing a thing. Sounds like an authentic reproduction of the college experience in the real world. I was afraid they wouldn't be able reproduce all the nuance of the real thing.
I have looked into the on-line thing a bit, but the ones I have encountered are pretty high. In the range of $375 per credit hour, so a single course ends up costing about $1125. Thats a lot to take a course. What kind of prices is everyone else paying?
you get what you put into it.
Forget about the Prof, as long as you do the work and understand the information, you're getting a good education.
Besides...grades only matter to the non-beer drinker.
Hmm, it seems, from your question, that you may, want to take some English classes, to reform your overuse, of commas.
And thank god you can't be here, one less god damn car I have to contend with.
You'd better shop around.
Quality varies greatly, as do student expectations. Some students simply want the credits and there are certainly programs out there willing to offer the "skate" option.
However, I know plenty of professors/instructors who are passionate about online education. They spend much more time now with online stuff then they do for an in-class class. Answering emails, homework help, IM sessions, group chats, etc. And, it works and students are happier because it fits in their schedule. But in each case that I can point to as a success, the instructors are working harder.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
at the top engineering and computer science schools, professors mostly just care about publishing and research, and teaching is something that they are required to do. Their lectures are just rehashing the higher level concepts that are included in the textbook and the TAs are the ones who will really help you with the problem sets/homework if you are stuck.
so just work through the material yourself and teach yourself! that's the way it works -- no spoonfeeding
I am starting to get a bad taste in my mouth about the amount of effort that some of my professors are putting forward in my courses
I'm sure we've all had professors in our day that have been sub par. That is when you must take it upon yourself to learn the material on your own. In my opinion a professor should only be used as a back-up tool for your own learning... no matter how good or bad the professor might be.
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
Last year I took a Discrete Math class. I hope it's the last (and only)online class I'll ever have to take.
the whole idea of "on-line" is that you don't attend ... unless you can convert yourself into electrons or light pulses and shoot down the cat5 and fiber, in which case you certainly have a marketable ability/talent already.
Since it's leaving you feeling cheated, when they ask for "real" money, fax them a copy of a $100.00 bill. When they complain, tell them that you're giving them virtual money for a virtual education. If they had given you a real education, you'd give them real money.
Mind you, you have learned a real lesson, I hope ...
For example, my last class was a law and ethics class. I probably spent 20 - 25 hours a week working on my papers for that class. However, I was greatly appreciative of my professor of that class because he provided me with detailed homework assignments. In addition, when I got feedback from him, it was on the order of 3 pages long. However, my class before that was not as good. The professor in that class would just give me a grade and not tell me why I received that particular grade. However, all the of the professors that I have had have been very open about communication. In fact, my current accounting professor and I have talked every weekend since the class has started.
Maybe some schools take it seriously and others don't? But, I can tell that I am working my butt off. I haven't had a whole lot of slack time.
It would be a benefit if you disclosed which school this is. The big problem with on-line edu is knowing whether you are getting what you paid for and the value of the education compared to a traditional method and there's going to be the wheat and the chaff, just a with schools, and separating the two is key.
I did a C++ class on line. I withdrew and got a refund when I could.
My problems were partly due to the way the class was run and partly due to my own nature. I had a tough time getting work done because there was no 'scheduled' time for me to show up any where. Rack this up as a failure on my part but I just tend to be more successful at getting work done when I've got to show up to class and turn it in.
The lack of in class time was tough because I couldn't sit and look at examples while the instructor was there to talk about how things were done. I missed that time to discuss with the instructor and other students. I know I'm not the only one who struggled in that regard. I did meet up with another student early on and help her learn how to set up and use her compiler. (free borland compiler)
On the class failing side- when I emailed the teacher with questions, responses were not prompt. His lectures were posted and there was no good method for getting further information to clarify points made in the lecture, etc. It was basically as you describe. Read a book, do homework, take a final.
There may be some who can use the format to advantage but it did not work well for me.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
...at a tradional school. Some of professors loved to shrug off my questions telling me the answer was in the book. Having read the book I knew that answer wasn't there or fairly obvious so that was the only reason I asked in class. You dont always get what you pay for... :(
I help administer an installation of WebCT for a community college that has a fair amount of online classes. I've found that Web classes seem to be very similar to standard brick and mortar classes in terms of quality.
Sometimes there are very enthusiastic and helpful teachers, and sometimes there are teachers who are not. Typically, if you have a problem with a teacher, you complain to student or academic affairs, or perhaps their department head. Pretty much the same thing you would do had you taken the class in person. But overall, I see very little difference in the quality of education in online vs. traditional learning as a whole.
I'm going to this one online school. It's case based study. The professors (who go by code names of taco and cowboy) seem to constantly have spelling mistakes in their assignments. Not that it matters, as most of the students simply respond to the public discussion forum without having ever read the assignment.
But it's not all bad. I am learning a lot. In fact, perhaps a bit too much.
It's college. You just pay them money, take tests, do homework, and get a grade. Colleges are just like any corporation, except they have a football team. They're all the same and the only people who don't think so are the ones who got mommy and daddy to put up $25,000 a year so they can act elite.
This sort of slacking in education on the part of individual teachers is nothing new, and is not limited to online courses. It's human variation at its finest... Or worst, since when it's a teacher slacking, it hurts all the students under them.
I often tell about an experiment I did in college. I wrote a English Composition 101 paper with some carefully crafted mistakes and submitted it to the four teachers that taught that course. The final grades were: D, C, B, and A. For the same paper.
Of course, there's no real solution for this problem short of continuous monitoring of teacher performance. (If you are in school, fill out those teacher evaluations!)
If I were to pick an online education provider, I would look for one that has a well established evaluation system for it's professors/teachers.
~ Nonsanity
I've had some very good online classes with lots of interaction with the instructor and students and I've had really awful classes where all you get is the book and final exam. It really just depends on the instructor and how they set up the class. Before taking a course I would suggest that you talk to the instructor and ask what the class will be like. That way you know if you're just paying for a book or if you're getting a quality class.
The only thing this person seems to be doing is sitting on his butt all week; telling the students to just follow the syllabus for reading; and occasionally surfing the discussions groups to see who is there. That sounds like a very good deal for them, but I am not getting much out of this.
Yup, that sounds like pretty much every professor I had! Infact, there was one "intro to unix class" where the guy just printed off MAN pages right before class and used those to "teach"!
Couple that with people who have TAs do the grading, and the fact that at research oriented uni's (like mine) the professor is busy trying to get grants, screw the kids!
A lot of university classes are like that- and in those cases you are either paying for a "name" university, or you are paying less for a non-name uni.
Now I just finished my masters from the Part Time Engineering program and I had some friends take the same classes but the on-line versions: its a mixed bag.
If the professor has a set of slides that they teach from and they are top-nothc quality, then you don't even need to go to class! (this was true in undergrad for my CIRCUITS course- the text book blew, but his bound class notes were INCREDIBLE. start studying 6 hours before the final, walk out with an A)
So I'm sorry your professors stink. Its the SAME in person.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I never got huge amounts of feedback from my assignments in school, beyond the obligatory "nice work" etc. I think your expectations are a tad too high.
And "techno savvy"? Quit channelling Jon Katz!
Nathan
Anyway, I don't see anything inherently *wrong* with the model -- provided
- you are someone who learns through reading or doing but at least you don't require someone to explain it to you
and secondly- the materials are high quality -- this is, of course, true for any learning endeavour: start out with subpar information and it all goes down from there
I do think it takes a lot of self motivation and discipline to do this well, though. It's also awfully easy to skate by -- theoretically, if it's not a programming course (or maybe even if it is) -- by *recognizing* the material w/o solidly *understanding* it. The difference b/n knowing it solid and having it be familiar is a vast gulf.I liked the flexilibity that it gave me -- I completed the material in no time flat which was extraordinarily convenient.
Those who give up their power willingly deserve none.
to get a virus from a PDF, it sounds like he/she has bigger problems than a lack of effort.
'In knowledge is power, in wisdom humility.'
The rest of my school is a complete joke, and the major reason is the professors. I've had to take classes like intro to publishing that are supposed to be followed up with more advanced classes like layout and typography, but it just turns out to be the same class twice because none of the professors are really that knowledgeable. The professors teach class like it was high school, putting major emphasis on attendance and then letting students just hand in complete crap for their assignments.
I'm slightly older than average for a college student (25), and I've been working as a graphic designer for a couple of years before deciding to complete a Mass Comm degree, and I've handed in things that I've done in a half hour, and would have gotten me fired from my job had I presented it to a client, but the professor would give me an A.
There is absolutely no reason in any of the classes to try, because basically everyone gets good grades, the difference between the highest grade in the class and the lowest is usually
I guess what I'm trying to say is - lazy and incompetant faculty is definately not a problem solely on online courses. I'd be willing to bet these same teachers would just skid by if you took a real world class. If you know your stuff already, I'd just say deal with it and get the stupid piece of paper (like I'm doing) If it's something you'd like to learn, and don't already know then search around for a different professor in the same program. If they're all crap then start looking for a whole new school.
Good point!
I will probably return to a normal class environment here at a local college ... at least I know the guy is going to show up!
I did my A-Level computing at a local college (UK). The tutors kept quitting, we went through at least six, and most likely more, some for only one week. More time was spent telling the tutor what we had done then learning, and there were people there who thought this was what you did after a typing course, and wanted everybody to go at their pace.
Just because the place is physically there doesn't automatically mean it will be any good.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
I attended the University of Phoenix.. I'm already in the field I want to be in so I went to UOP for the piece of paper and right to proclaim my Friday morning coffee first. Do the professors distribute up-to-date information? 50/50...a hit and miss scenario. Did the information stack up against what I already know? NO, if you are already in the field then you will have a leg up on your classmates. After tons of money poured into my education, do I feel enlightened? NO Do I feel it was worth the money, few hours a week wasted smoking cigs with classmates, time spent writing reports, performing every presentation for my group? YES I didn't go to college traditionally like some of my friends. I went to the military, then got a real job after it, then finished my schooling. The real question is what is your purpose? Do you want your degree fast? Do you need more information on how to do your job? Do you just need that paper for Mo' money? It's a fine balance for them all. Some schools offer the gambit and others do not. Whatever you do, if you are already in the field you want to be in...don't waste your money on a school you don't feel comfortable with. Nothing like paying $300 a month back for 10 years..talking about ouch!
... going to a virtual school to get a virtual degree which will be printed on real paper? :P)
In all fairness, all degrees are virtual as compared by the fact that you 'meet' the requirements as set forth by the school. Read some of the earlier requirements- programs change significantly over time (I think the CS dept went thru 3 revisions in 10 years- no i wasnt there that long
Now as for skating, realize your profs are new to this too. They don't have the hands on experience to fall back on in the classroom. Maybe if avatars and webcams get more popular you'd see more, but without going to a physical class it just isn't going to be the same- you can't override 12 years of grade schooling with 1 year of 'virtual' college and come away NOT disappointed.
While it's not an accredited institution, the professors at GameInstitute were always on the ball. They gave weekly discussions via IRC, they have the messageboards, the textbook was in pdf or online in a powerpoint-style presentation with audio commetary. They are also soon expanding to offer accredited courses. However, their courses are very specific and detailed. I don't think I would trust any online institution with a *real* college education. The preconception that everyone on the internet is trying to screw you as well as the fact that just being at a college sitting in the class as part of the learning experience would keep me from trying it out. It's just as easy for the students to get lazy as it is for the professors unless they're dogging you 3 times a week.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
I just finished a couple years of online courses to finish up my fourth year of a Bachelor of Arts from UMASS Boston after I moved out of state.
.. Prometheus seemed pretty lame to me. One of my classes used Centra, which was a little better. As a group in one class we used Groove, but the standard complaints (speed, interface, etc.) apply there.
..
If it hadn't been for online courses, I never would have received my degree from the university I had spent so much time at. Transferring credits would have been a nightmare, I already went through it once before.
My biggest beef was the online client
Is there an opensource project geared at this niche, to compete with the likes of Prometheus, Centra, and Groove? From my experience at least, the biggest thing holding back online courses is the cobbled together "environments"
You may as well be in a library reading the books on yur own... your simply spending your time paying bucks to get a "degree". Education is supposed to be a much more immersive experience, in which your entire world is focused upon whatever subjects your learning for certain spans of time. From the chalk-board to the many students to the profesor and all the hands on materials along with real hands on lab projects you can show to your fellow classmates and teachers in TRUE real-time.
When your simply posting and returning data from a web-page, and reading material be it online or off... you are not recieving an education, you are paying for the right to research and to attain a degree from it.
There are reasons why test taking is done in a class without access to the net and other such things. It is because you are supposed to test the actual mind and skills of a human without those resources at hand. This enables you to learn what you DONT know and to sharpen those skillsets.
Hence online education is kinda a joke. Ilearned a long time ago, i can learn anything i want without a piece of paper that says i did. So if your gonna go to school... make sure you go to the one with the biggest name.... cause thats all that matters in the end, youll learn what you want to know no matter what.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
I do have some complaints, though:
- The whole curricula was the standard texts and notes "grafted" onto an online interface. The material and method of moving through it was a "transplant" of a traditional class lecture, lifted onto an online format. This does not work well - kind of like taking a book, scanning each page into a graphic file, then posting this as an online version.
- We were provided PowerPoint lecture notes taken from "live" lectures, though without the benefit of seeing the lectures (my suggestion : record the "real" lectures and have online students purchase as DVDs or VHS)
- I missed office hours and the ability to chat with knowledgeable graduate students when I got stuck. With some conceptually difficult material, you really have to hash over it with a live mentor to understand how it works.
- No real socialization with other students, owing to geography.
- "Group" projects were a nightmare of conference calls, online chats, emailing drafts back and forth, etc.
The good side is it allows folks with full time jobs to get degrees. It also allows folks to get specialized degrees that may only be available at a handful of institutions."dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
I go to Depaul and they have online (Distnace) learning. It's the same as the "real" Classes except you watch the classes via webacast. The webcatss are available to regular students as well. Although a little boring, they are a pretty good fascimile of being in class. They have seperate views for the whiteboards and etc.
Most classes have discussion sites and a website where you post assignments. It seems to be pretty well run
After seeing this guy's grammar, I think he deffinitly needs to take some English classes...
Due to credit diffecency due in a large part to my taking every programming class available, I ended up in an alternative high school. This was where most of the potential dropouts were sent (so as not to hurt the others schools funding due to the number of dropouts). Let me just say that when improperly implemented, these systems set people up for failure.
Throughout the computer courses, it was specifically stated that "This program [the computer learning software] is a supplement to the book, and is NOT intended as a replacement for it." Well, because of the low funding (too many dropouts - imagine why), the books were not available. The courses mainly consisted of a page where it would have 30 or so possible answers, and a date,event or name. You were supposed to pick the associated answer (after all, you read the book already), then move on. Every time you got the wrong aswer, you had to answer 3 more correctly before you could continue. Fortunatly, I learned to take notes (selection window, alt, e, copy, alt-tab, ctrl+v), so I could continue at a decent pace. Note taking was allowed. So while most people failed out after just a few weeks (the courses were _impossible_ without notes), I passed my senior english class in under 24 hours (I did have to rent mcbeth, and write a report).
In short, if you are a die-hard student (or really hate the place like I did), or if the program is _properly_ implemented, it can be a great tool. In the wrong hands, it's just failure waiting to happen.
Contact Me (got tired of viruses emailing me).
In my, limited, experience with online classes, I have determined that you will learn about 50% of what you would in a class room on average. So if the course is a gen-ed requirement, and all you really want out of it is 3-4 credit hours towards your degree, go online. If its part of your core classes, and you need the knowledge, go to class.
Instructor laziness plays into it quite a bit as well. Some people just don't work well from home, some do. Just because your professor has a doctorate in Mathematics, does not mean he has learned any amount of self discipline. I recommend talking to other students in your class about their experiences with other teachers at your school, and plan your education accordingly.
I only took 2 courses so far, and I am very impressed with how they handle and treat the program. Everyone invloved is very professional. The teachers actually go out of their way to accomodate both on and off campus students. My experience has been extremely pleasant, and I'm very satisfied with what they offer.
I've attended a CCNA (Cisco Network cert.) course for the last two years, and basicly all the education was done by the online material. We did have possibilities to go to school and talk to real, physical, actually-existing teachers, so in the beginning we were about 20 people attending each lesson.
By time we learnt that what the teachers said was straight off the course material, and the more we read, the less the teachers seemed to know, so eventually we were only a group of 5-10 (depending on how you count the students) who went to school just to chat with eachother. The lessons became meetings where we discussed geek matters, and all the education was done at home, with nice results.
Since the material was basicly saying the same things over and over again chapter by chapter only introducing one or two new subjects for each and one of them, we learnt how to read it, and our efficiency was increased significantly compared to other courses. So, these courses we had, using up 300 hours on our schedules, in the end only needed 50 hours to read and pass the exam. The rest was coffee breaks.
All this was good in the light of learning things, but socially it was a disaster. There were a few people I only greeted once in 6 months because they did everything at home. When you met the people somewhere, you wouldn't recognize them.
I guess, if you want to learn something, the online classes are good, but if you want something more than that, it's pure disaster. I got my A+, but I don't know all the people in class, despite 300 hours on the schedule.
I took a class online at my university and was very disappointed. we were given a total of two assignments, one quiz, and a final exam for the entire semester. I really didn't learn anything.
I did about 10 online classes from 2 different colleges.
Your right, some professors can be lazy, but that os the same when your actually attending the classes.
I can say this though, I took a few of the online classes at a CC in So cal and there was 3 times as much work in those online classes as there was physically going to classes at the same school.
I took the same professor in two classes, one oceanography and one geology, his online class was way more work.
Overall I felt I learned more with the online classes, I spent more time doing work rather than chewing the fat with the hunnies around me.
I went to the university of phoenix online for a few classes. Though I do believe in the fact that school is what you make of it, I found a few problems with this school and therefore discontinued.
1. books were chopped up to fit the five week per class format - resulting in five chapter books
2. if class mates needed to, they could procrastinate quite easily and still get full credit.
in the case of (1) alot of the subject material was diced up and not in the greatest of formats. In (2) the problem is that alot of your grades are based on team effort, and with teamates habitually procrastinating this causes sever group problems. Just this morning I was reading about a law school online, sounds to me like they are getting the format right, they had streaming lessons from the instructor, and lived in a similar region so that if they needed some intensive group study, that could take place.
I took the traditional route and went to a brick and mortar school for my CS degree. While there, I met a number of very interesting people. Some of these people asked me to help them revive the school's sailing team. A boatload of CS and physics students engaged in a non-profit startup in the middle of the Hudson river is hardly what I expected, but I'm very glad that it happened to me.
Along the way I learned that graduate work is fun and picked up an MS degree as well.
While my education allows me to check the "has a BS" and "has an MS" boxes on job applications, the real benefit came from the faculty and students I met over the course of my four years.
That having been said, I think there is an enormous opportunity for online education. My education was expensive, and in this economy there is no guarantee that you will have a job on graduation. High quality schools have can accept only a limited number of students. The Internet is an incredible way to inexpensively disseminate information to a large number of people.
The original universities expanded substantially as books and paper became more and more available. Surely the internet will change education to an even greater extent.
Is anyone aware of a website that compares and contrasts various online university programs? Or allows people to discuss their respective experiences in some sort of forum? It seems that would be useful. But that could also be extended to "real-life" colleges as well.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
Welcome to college. Some profs can't use chalkboards. Some can't use computers. Some can't talk to students effectively. In a brick and mortar school, you'd know which profs suck, and avoid them. By the end of my undergrad degree, I was picking classes based on profs, not on the subject matter. Better a lame subject by a great prof, then engaging material by a dullard.
My experiences with online education are limited. The last time I was in school was 1997. The school was just beginning to experiment with some classwork online. Basically, it sucked. Not only were the profs not 100% (but they were okay, given that it was their first online class) but much of the class wasn't terribly online savvy.
Personally, I prefer F2F classwork. YMMV.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I took a graduate level biochemistry class at a state university in texas, and after the first class, the professor had some emergency and couldn't teach the rest of the semester. So, instead of cancelling the class or having another professor teach it, they got a TA who had taken the class the semester before to teach the class. What a rip!! Half of the class failed the first test, which was written by the original professor. I dropped it shortly after, less 3 hours a week for 3 weeks, and around $50 (not including a non-refundable $150 book).
I can't imagine online classes being as full featured as going to somewhere like an ivy league school. Online classes just seem sort of "junior college" to me. But hey, if you finish and get your degree, good for you. You acomplished your goal.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
I'm just now in the application phase of signing up for an online program with a well known university and am interested in what others have to say to this. On one hand I'm excited to be going back to school, but at the same time I'm hesitant for the exact same reasons.
Honestly though, I think that online programs are going to primarily depend on the professor just like a "real" college and sometimes a class you might think is going to be interesting is going to suck b/c of lousy teaching. That's just the way it goes.
Whereever you go, there you are
The question I would ask, is how is this different from what you see (or don't see in any class? Socrates defined a school as a log with a student at one end and a teacher at the other end. A online school is just providing a high tech log to bridge the distance (in time and space) between the student and the teacher. If the teacher or the student doesn't put in the effort and hold up their end of the teaching contract, then the log will be out of balance and things won't be good.
It sounds like your are holding up your end of the bargin and putting in the effort required. It sounds like the teacher isn't (sounds like the last extension course which I took, where the prof was a flake and came to class unprepared and unfocused). I would complain up the management chain, starting with the teacher. Since most online schools are pay-for-play, you should have some clout. If that doesn't work, then walk and request a refund.
I feel like some of them are "skating" and all I am paying for is a book, a posted syllabus, and a final exam.
So its like college but without the kegger parties then?
I am starting to get a bad taste in my mouth about the amount of effort that some of my professors are putting forward in my courses. I feel like some of them are "skating"
Likely those professors feel exactly the same way about the students taking online courses.
There is an ongoing conservative perception in academia (not without merit) that, quite simply, people that are dead serious about obtaining a quality education are willing to make time for classes and all the homework they entail. I have spoken with a few of these teachers myself; they all felt that anyone whose schedule was already so packed that they couldn't find time to physically attend lectures and discussions was probably better off postponing their enrollment altogether until a point when they had the time and resources to properly devote toward a formal education, rather than risk acquiring something of potentially lower quality.
One of them went so far as to speculate on the much more involved feeling one gets when actually sitting in a classroom surrounded by dozens of students and with the professor lecturing authoritatively at the front. Basically, such a setting makes it all seem more real and therefore adds unconscious pressure to the participating students to take the class and its material seriously--as opposed to viewing absolutely everything to do with the class on your own comfortable monitor, in your own comfortable home, where any pressure to succeed in the class has to be entirely self-generated. And don't kid yourself: motivation can often be totally unreachable without a kick in the pants. Hence why some instructors penalize for non-attendance. They don't do it out of meanness, they do it because such a policy helps students to learn when the students are not willing to help themselves.
The coolest voice ever.
I haven't had any online classes, but I know people who have taken them occaisionally.
Lazy teachers seem to be norm for online classes, it seems like most of the teachers don't even bother to put any effort into the class until well into the semester.
Plus is you aren't self motivated, it will never work for you especially if the teacher is lazy and doesn't post all of the material until it is almost due.
It seems like it might be ok for one of two classes, but I can't imagine getting a 120 hour degree this way.
Buy a book it's cheaper.
I did my BSc. (HONS) with the Open University. This has been going since the mid 1960s
:-)
:-) I took one exam in the US but flew back for a few others. In short the OU was very helpful.
In general I had an open book assesment every month, one week at 'Summer School' where most people tried to fit a year of student parties into a week and a final. Course grade 50% from assessment and 50% from exam, had to pass the final exam though to pass the course.
I found this an excellent way to study, I chose what was important etc. This is the reason I still can't do integral calculus
I also emmigrated from the UK half way through my degree. Simply gave the OU my forwarding address and kepy mumm about where exactly the stuff was being forwarded
In fact I'm probably going to do my masters with them as well.
Downside it takes a while to get your degree etc.
Unless some jock figures out a way to beat you up over the internet, you don't get the experience of a real school!
Having worked with a person who teaches computer courses online at an university I can believe that they skate, but in his case it is because he really doesn't fully know the material. His thing is that the smart students will answer the questions for him and that because he is teaching online he doesn't need to know the info just where to deflect the questions
you will find that professors in Real Life universities can be just as lazy. They print out the slides provided by the publisher on over head projection sheets, just read them out loud, and a few months later you get an exam (which is corrected , and sometimes even produced entirely, by students a year ahead and short on cash).
What do they care? It's not as if you can withold payment for a crappy course. Just be content that you got the credits, and go and drink beer or something....
They learned me how to talk good
I take some of my classes at an extended campus and some of them online. The online classes are good for classes where I just need to pay for a couple of credits but for the most part, I don't get as much out of them. Most of professors also offer versions of their classes online. I have had the same professors for both regular and on-line classes and I definatly liked the regular classes better. Some professors put quite a bit into their online classes and others don't do anything but give you a grade at the end. For my general education requirments, I would much rather take the class online because it requires almost no effort and I'm not going to learn anything in an "introduction to computers" class. Essentaly I am paying for the credits. On the other hand, I wouldn't want to take aviation law or aviation maintenance managment online. Sometimes "face time" is important and sometimes it is a waste of time.
.. is today. I thought about going to an online school, but I really couldn't find any rankings or the general feeling of when an employer looks at my Masters of CS from "Online Blah" vs "Brick & Mortar Blah" University.
Personally, I don't think I would be disiplined enough to take a course online. Class is started in a few minutes: Data Structures and Algorithms. Nothing better to do on a Wed night!
Live web cams
Hey, we've got a connection to the new fangled Interweb too! Can IRC while in class too, which is of utmost importance...
I don't like UoP because those commies spam people. I wouldn't consider them just on this alone.
scott
I personally believe that college is more than going to classes, reading the books, doing the homework. College is about meeting people and being exposed to new ideas. That is why I don't believe online degrees (or homeschooling) are not a good alternative for high school or undergraduate students.
I say that because I have learned most about programming, and system administration because my friends were all interested in it. They helped to be harness my skills in those areas. I remember when one of them helped me to install Red Hat 5.2 and he gave me several books that he has purchased on Linux, so I could learn how to use it.
Not in computer science have I been influenced by my friends and teachers but also in the area of politics, history, human relations, and just about everything else you can think of.
I believe that had I gone to college, my world would be a lot smaller, not because I did not get a degree, and did not know Linear Algebra, but because I would be missing on all those ideas that I have been exposed through those people.
The wife is taking UnivOfPhoenix, and I think some of the classes are laid out rediculously. I think too much time is spent "doing" things, and no time is spent actually learning anything.
For example, they have these teams "collobarate" to write a paper. The team lead, gets to write the introduction, each person gets a specific section in the body, and another poor sap gets the conclusion. What a stupid way to write a paper. The team lead is on easy streat writing a one paragraph into, each person writes something so so so so specific, as to not learn/grasp anything, or even learn how to structure an essay, and the schmuch who got stuck with the conclusion, ends up spending hours trying to cohesively tie everything together. In the end, you wind up with a paper that is poorly written, has no logical flow, etc etc. I'm all for group projects, but it seems they like to work in groups for things that don't need to be worked on in groups, and don't work in groups for things that make sense to be worked on in groups, etc.
And all the communication is done by usenet newsgroups? This has got to be one of the poorest mediums for this type of work. I hear people complain how the servers are slow, don't update correctly, lose postings,etc. And people are having a hard time even tracking threads/converstations and such, cause people keep attaching to the wrong thread, etc...
Some of my EE classes in college were also distance learning classes, but we had cameras set up in the class, etc. Then again, I had a special prof. He didn't believe in note taking, cause he said every minute you spend writing notes, is another minute you aren't paying attention. So he had all the notes, guides, tables, etc all written before hand, and organized into a big fat binder, that you had to buy from the bookstore. That and he was very interactive, but now I'm getting off topic...
Anyways, for the money that UofPhoenix charges, I think its a big rip. I think they should've had pre-recorded and/or live lectures in real/windows media/name your favorite format, and you watch those, and the assignments are assigned there, etc. Use instant messaging for live chats/lab sessions/one-one etc etc. Hell, even use email threads for conversations or turning in assignments, using PGP or equivelent.
Anyways, back to our regularly scheduled programming...
I registered for SWEN 5230 (graduate level Software Project Management) at the University of Houston - Clear Lake. A normal classroom class. You would expect to manage a project, or at minimum a group project in software engineering. I got none of that - rather the class turned out to be a online course where I never went to class. I took 10 quizzes, 2 exams, and a small stupid project. Complete waste of time and money. I paid $700 for a syllabus and three hours credit.
I teach at a 4 year public university that is starting to get into distance ed. I have taught one course in this format so far. I had about 35 students in the classroom with me, and about 125 more at sites scattered across the US, from Washington State to the Bahamas. Students at the distance sites could see and hear me; I could hear but not see them. At my university, at least, this distance ed. approach to teaching is not popular at all with the faculty. The technology isn't great; for example, there is no way to play traffic cop during a discussion and call on one person at a time, because you can't see hands. Older faculty resent the fact that it was pretty much imposed on us, without the faculty being consulted. At least I was warned about it when I was hired. One's workload is often much greater during a term when one teaches distance ed. For example, I had 160 students when I did it, compared to maybe 80 in a normal term. I had someone to help with the grading, but that only helped so much. (My field is in the humanities, so most of my grading is reading papers---not scantrons.) There is a lot of time spent on logistical issues when one is doing distance ed. that one normally doesn't have to deal with. For example, like most "humanitarians" I don't normally use Powerpoint, but for these classes it is more or less mandatory. Preparing materials (exams, handouts) to be mailed to the distance sites is time consuming. Frankly, many of our distance students aren't quite as good as our on campus students. Some are excellent, but if a distance site is located near a decent four year university then you can bet that the best students are at that four year school instead of in our program. The good students are ones who have no real alternative. Furthermore, many of the distance students have a very different mentality than our on-campus students. The distance students come out of community colleges, many of which really push the (inappropriate) idea that faculty will bend over backwards to keep students happy. Not to educate them, to keep them happy. So distance students have that expectation for us also. I don't mean to say that distance students generally aren't good. I am talking about one specific distance ed. program. There is such a definite pattern of teaching evaluations being poor for the first few times a person teaches in this format that we are all told not to worry about our evaluations--they won't be held against us. None of this is to let the poster's professors off the hook. It sounds like s/he is at a different kind of institution, one that specializes in distance ed. A lot of the problems at my institution have to do with the fact that distance ed is not our main focus, and instead of having dedicated faculty who teach only in this format and master it we have people who do it once every 2 or 3 years. But I hope students will be sensitive to the fact that someone can be a good classroom teacher and still struggle when they first start in the distance format. It does take a different set of skills, and there is no way to learn them except by trying and at first failing.
Many reputable engineering schools run off-campus versions of their Master's programs. (It's less common for undergraduate degrees.) Students on-campus take the class in the old-fashioned way; the class is videotaped and distributed via VHS tapes and FedEx or, more recently, via RealAudio/Video. Off-campus students are held to the same homework and exam schedules as on-campus students. It does require commitment since it's easy to fall behind when work projects interfere. Also, for courses with programming assignments, students sometimes have difficulty replicating the right setup. (Most of our programming assignments are on POSIX-compliant OS.) Usually, there are mailing list and bulletin boards, but students can also email the instructor or call him up during office hours.
There's even a 'virtual' university, NTU (http://www.ntu.edu), that bundles courses from major engineering schools. You end up with an NTU
degree in that case.
I teach almost all my graduate classes in this hybrid approach. The local video staff is *very* sensitive to student complaints and won't hesitate to call the dean to have a word with the instructor should the instructor be slow in answering student email, for example.
This is generally not cheap, but you get a real degree with name recognition and faculty that are (mostly) accountable for their behavior.
Most students are enrolled through their companies, who also pay the bill, but I don't think this is required.
As the subject line says: "never again!" I found it was extremely expensive for what you get (maybe $400, about the same as paying to take a UC class for a UC alumnai, and much more than the $45 night school at a JC will cost). Interaction between other students was haphazard, and it was difficult to arrange AIM sessions - which is only natural when you're dealing with professionals in different time zones. There's no possibility of lectures, and the class boiled down to "read the book, turn in homework, get back a grade and some brief comments."
I'm reading other posts that are saying "No learning - Ha! that's what *real* college is like! I kill me!" (+5 humorous) or "you take out what you put into it." I disagree with both these points. Being in a real college allows you to meet others interested in the subject, and allows an easy way to learn outside of reading the book - I really benefit from hearing lectures, from being able to ask offhand points of clarifications, from seeing how other students approach things, and just being in a classroom environment.
True, like any class, "you take out what you put into it." However, you also hope for a little something more. When I took an online course, I really felt I should have just saved the money and read the textbook on my own.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
It depends on what kind of classes you want to take. Embry-Riddle has a very good online program. They also have an extended campus at almost every US military base in Germany.
Just as you said. I've taken some that were amazing. I actually learned more in the online class than others did in a similar (different instructor) real live class.
On the other hand, I took one that sucked balls. Just like you described. Waste of everyones time.
Of course, at that school real classes were the same sort of hit/miss. THe trick was to drop early enough to save your money.
Apparently some people who weren't wroking 80 hrs a week knew enough fellow classmates to know which profs were good and which blew.
I wish I was one of them.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
My wife is taking an on-line physics course through the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. She's not in a degree program (she has 2 M.A.s already) but is keeping up her teaching certification (now in earth science) and qualifying as a high school physics teacher. As I look over her shoulder, it seems like a pretty good deal. They have assigned readings and a homework assignment (filled out on line) due every 2 or 3 weeks. Lectures filmed in a UVA classroom before students and are mailed on CD-ROM in RealPlayer format. Midterm and final are done online and proctored by a local teacher or other adult who has been identified by my wife to the UVA prof and whom the prof has also corresponded with via email. They have a Yahoo! group and weekly chats--every Wednesday evening from 8-9pm. Overall, I wish I could a have taken some of my courses this way.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
I, too, just started my first online course. It started fairly recently and I constantly log in and see no changes and no activity in any of the rooms. It appears we are simply required to hand in work based on the syllibus, which includes problems from the book and some group discussions. As far as I can tell, there is no intervention or guidance from the professor. Follow the syllibus, hand in the requirement on time, and I'll give you a grade.
:)
I guess it depends what you are looking for. I like the prospect of working by myself at my own will. I just might shoot the professor an e-mail in the next next week to make sure she hasn't died or something
BTW, I'm taking this course from a fairly well-accredited midwestern University.
I enrolled at Mississippi State University through their distance learning program. There's a good chance someone you're watching on TV has been through this course. It's three years, 17 courses, 50 some odd credits. Until I'm totally finished, there's no need to go to Starkville, MS or anywhere close.
I am impressed with the idea and execution. My lectures are delivered on both VHS tape and DVD (I watch the lectures on DVD, though at double speed!). My textbooks are standard issue, same as are used at brick and mortar colleges. Each course features weekly untimed quizzes (10%), quarterly timed tests based on homework (30%) and a timed midterm (30%) and timed final (30%).
The lecturers/professors aren't polished TV people... but which of your profs were? There are different instructors/proctors online who monitor a bulletin board, answer questions and ride herd. They are mostly attentive and helpful.
The tests and quizzes are administered online and are multiple choice.
The courses are run using WebCT software, which I am told is pretty standard with distance learning.
As in "real" college, sometimes I have to study, other times I do not. I have learned some interesting things (having gone most of the way through my first year)... even one or two useful things.
After the first semester, my wife asked if I had learned anything? I said yes. But, she noted, "how important could it be if you didn't need it in the last 20 years?" And, of course, she was right.
I found it interesting that before I was accepted, I had to send my transcripts and SATs to MSU. I was surprised the College Board still had my numbers, taken in December 1967 (back when SAT scores ended in single digits and not tens). I'm curious what these ancient records could possibly say about me now? It is living proof that when your teachers said something would go on your permanent record, they weren't kidding!
As a 52 year old, in the middle of my career, with a wife and family, this is the only way to go back to school. I'm a proud to say I'm a straight "A" student, something I never even approached during my first, ill fated, trip to college 35 years ago.
I'm in an interesting dilemma. I just finished my master degree and I am looking at a PHD/ Doctoral program. I have work/time constraints so full time PHD work is not an option. Looking at online distance self paced education has large benefits. I received the brochure from Kennedy-Western University and Cappella University. I concerned that they are just diploma mills yet from all I have seen they are legit. While the cost is pretty steep, the convenience I receive from going this route makes it worth it. Any graduates from these institutions have feedback that my sway my decision?
Professors are rarely so enthusiastic, and it shows -- online courses aren't really thought of as "real" classes by many profs, and so they use them as excuses to skip out of the kind of preparation required of real-life classes. (It doesn't help that, in my opinion, the WebCT software, a staple at most universities, is decidedly sub-par in terms of usability and functionality.)
Even in the optimal case, I think that you lose the intangible value of human communication in distance learning -- imagine the impossibility of doing law or medical school over the Internet, for example. By killing off the ability to engage in direct dialog, online classes don't even rise to the level of a single lecture.
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
Kennedy-Western University is not a regionally accredited university. Its only credental is that it is licensed by the state of Wyoming. Thats it. I wouldnt expect too much respect from a degree attained from them.
I talk about some of these subjects from the instructor side on my own weblog, The Intuitive Life, in particular you might want to check out I thought students had lots of opinions? and Lazy students, a rant, both of which address the same basic question of student interaction.
If anyone has further questions that I can answer, please feel free to drop me a note!
All my CS sylabusses and crap, were all in PDF, cause it was the only way to get everyone to be able to read it. Everyone probably had access to a windows boxen somewhere, but lots of times we were in the computer labs doing our assignments, and we want to reference really quick, and we want to be able to read it from the Sun Station or something. A bunch of people had linux boxes as their primary computers as well..
:)
That or the people that did have windows, didn't have the same version of Word you had, etc.
I only got irritated when I was doing my EE simulations, and the thing would only output PostScript files, or the prof wanted you to turn in your drawings is postscript format, to save paper, etc etc. I got to know GhostView really well
I've come to think of online education as Lowest Common Denominator Learning (LCDL). I've had instructors who value face-to-face interaction and the "art" of teaching admit that the college is moving more and more classes to the online format because it's cheaper to run.
My reaction after all the online courses I've taken:
Interestingly, the best class I've taken online -- which I'm taking now -- is a Perl scripting class. It's only 1 credit hour, 3 weeks. Why?
Okay, that was waaay more than $0.02!
"It's an erotic, spectacular scene that captures the thrusting, violent, vibrant world Bohemian spirit..."
During high school I took an online AP Statistics course. It was horrible; I experienced some of the same fustrations as this guy.
The most important variable in an education is communication, with both the instructor and other students. Although there does exist the possibility to make decent course-related conversation over the Internet, nothing beats live instruction.
Even a bad classroom teacher can still help, in both answering questions quickly and also giving the students a model of how not to approach the course material.
You get instructors who really care about the work and students, and then you get instructors who couldn't give a damn about you or the class itself, and basically are piles of flesh reguritating what the book already says.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
After some research, Capella is regionally accredited. I really don't see an issue with that university
Sounds good to me, you got all your work, everything seems to be going according to plan, do your work, if you have questions ask them, in many ways its better than being in a class because you can ask more questions.
I'd like to learn a bit more about how it works before i take one, but in my opinion the best courses are a mix of online and offline.
We use blackboard here, and the net and computers are used to assist with offline lectures.
The best part is your assignments, grades etc are all organized online.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I don't believe in "on-line" classroom education. Instead you should consider the opportunities the Internet offers you: an MBA from Harvard University; and by offering to help a desperate diplomat in a 3rd world country (usually Nigeria) you can get millions of dollars: enough working captial to start a medium size business.
;)
If you happen to get the money and the degree quickly, please update here. Many people have been kind enough to help out the diplomat, I hear, but are still waiting for checks to arrive.
There's nothing magical about online education. If the school is good in real life, the school will be good online. My institution, Virginia Tech, offers online courses that are taught by the same professors that teach classroom courses. They use the same materials; the only difference is that lectures are distributed via electronic mail, audio or online conferencing. The neatest courses, like our innovative Engineering Cultures class, are delivered through a tool called CentraOne that offers voiceconferencing that is surprisingly effective.
This actually improved some of my classes. For one technical writing course, my professor was blind and conducted the course through e-mail via a screen reader. It was one of the best classes I've ever taken, and I had no clue he was blind until after the course was over and I talked to a friend (I always wondered why he was so particular about what the subject lines of our e-mails were...)
The key is that all of these professors had prior classroom experience. There is no Free Lunch (tm). If the institution has a good reputation IRL, they will offer good online classes. Online only universities without real life backing are sadly not ready for prime time yet. Maybe initiatives like MIT's OpenCourseWare, and less prestigous initiatives like the VT CS department's online courseware publishing (http://courses.cs.vt.edu/ - great lecture slides on C++ there) will change that someday by providing a basis in quality courseware... until then, though, you're better off at your local brick and mortar educational institution.
I would just be careful of shady operations like Kennedy-Western University, whom is NOT regionally accredited (Dept. of Edu. recognized accrediation). That is my #1 criteria when looking at a school. This separates the Degree Mills from the legit. Just my 2cents
I took a few classes towards my MS in CS, and felt like I was throwing money away. For the most part, the teaching assistants did all of the work (if any), and that was very sub-par. I felt I could have read the book myself and gotten more out of it (and gotten to pick better books!)
I haven't attended an Online University, but I have been involved in serveral serious E-Learning projects on the developers side - also on campus related projects. Some of them being reference grade online e-learning systems and enviroments that I had the opportunity to design.
When doing E-Learning or setting up an E-Learning enviroment or teaching in an E-Learning enviroment there are a few things one has to keep in mind:
1.) Quality and content costs work and effort. The LMF may be SCORM compliant and cost 10 Million $, but if there's no quality content that has been set up by a competent team of developers, editors and teachers it's just a big hunk of code - and a big pile of useless, steaming excrement.
2.) E-Learning has benefits and drawbacks and so does classic learning compared to E-Learning. In your situation E-Learning may be more benefitial, but only if all involved know how to reap the benefits of E-Learning! If your Profs haven't the most basic skills of preparing and browsing online content - be it with their special system or the usual tools - it's somewhat pointless of taking lessons with them. Training the teachers is crucial to an online learning enviroment!
3.) E-Learning requires a basic skillset to even actually take place! Like normal learning and teaching requires skills like reading and writing, and, let's take math for an example, a basic knowlege of a formal language, so does E-Learning and E-Teaching require skills like proper e-mailing, online editing, preparing content for hypercontext, object-oriented thinking and a totally different subset of discipline. In class you shut up and listen and raise your hand when you want to ask something. And you only speak when asked (usually that is). Via E-Mail you use quoting and don't write tofu. (that's a simple example of this discipline thing)
With these points in mind and a whole lot more in the background I'd like to add that E-Learning hasn't grown up yet, imho. When I see the last remaining stashes of 'dot-bomb' cash being burnt on E-Learning projects that have no link to reality whatsoever (performance and usability wise) with hideously bloated databases that aren't even properly normalized and LMFs (learning mamagement frameworks) that cost enough money to give Etiopia a real chance and zilch usable content in them, I think it's safe to say one does good when looking closely thrice at an E-Learning enviroment. Be it as a teacher, scholar or the president of a university.
E-Learning/Online Learning will grow up when standards have prevailed and people generally will have grasped the concept of Hypertext and quoted commenting. Until then it will remain closer to pointless.
The rest is just detailwork by us developers and is mostly academic by real-world standards. Who in the end gives a damn if you use Smil or XML or JBoss or Zope? Right.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
that IT/CS education is a joke is nothing new .. .. i'd take someone without
never would i hire someone with a CS degree unless
they had experience
a degree faster than i'd take someone with a degree
given an equal amount of experience - the one
without the degree is likely more motivated, since
they aren't doing what they're doing because they
"went to school for it"
I took CS 3, my school's (required) intro to computers course. Learn the fundamentals of computing, *snore. Anyway, I figured that i'd rather take it over the summer and online, rather than listen to 2.5 hour long lectures on desktop publishing and what a server is. The upshot was that for the strictly factual material we covered it was fine, especially for people who allready knew the subject, we could simply do the work at our leisure. I got an A in the class and spent only about an hour and half a week completing work. Unfotuanately, the interesting side, discussions on computing ethics, was completely horrible because of the lack of a true discussion element. The web BBS we used just didn't feel as conducive to discussion. The fact that the teacher rarely (maybe twice) chimed in just fucked it up even more. Just a note, it also makes teachers lazy when other students will often answer posted questions faster than the teacher. Although I can't see that as a bad thing as long as they are at least read by the teacher.
Photos.
Most of this you will miss in a "WebClass". When I was teaching I could pretty well see who did not understand what I was talking about, and a few questions would help me getting on the right track. On the Web you'll miss mot of the important clues of how/or if the students understand.
When I was in grad school, I remember that I heard a lot of students grumbling and complaining to each other about the profs. You know people like these profs at your job. They're doing as little as they can possibly get away with in their undergrad classes. At many universities, teaching responsibilities only make up something like 10% of the consideration for raises and promotion. The rest is research, committee work, and such.
The only way a prof is forced to meet some minimum standard is year end evaluations from students, which contribute a little to his future raises and promotions, and feedback through administrative channels. I heard one student who had failed a class complaining to the undergraduate coordinator that the prof had basically neglected his duties. The undergraduate coordinator was basically saying that there was little he could do after the class was over and only one or two students came to complain. If, on the other hand, 20% of the students registered a complaint just before mid-term, then there was obviously something wrong. The prof would have probably been put under much more scrutiny. The department may have assigned someone to attend some of his classes and review the material he was giving the students. The prof is not at a university just to teach undergrads, but they do have a professional responsibility to you. The university is in charge of enforce a minimum standard of quality, but they can't do that without a lot of student feedback. If the university fails to act on such issues, then you might not like the product they're providing. Time to take your money elsewhere.
Anyway...long-winded post, but the point is that complaining anywhere but the appropriate channels at your school is not really going to help your situation. It's like complaining to your family about a difficult co-worker and gossiping about him behind his back but never confronting him or his manager directly about your issues. It might help blow off steam. You might get a lot of sympathy. But you're never going to help improve your situation without giving the feedback to the right people.
I suppose you can learn calculus dry from a text without any instructor to give you background.
But you won't have much of a context to put it in, or understand how calculus relates to the rest of the math topics, or what calculus is used for.
I think it would be sort of like trying to become a Buddist monk by reading Tricycle without talking to any instructors.
You could do it, but there would be something missing.
Then again, if you think calculus is just one of those things you learn in school and then never use, then maybe you can learn enough from just the textbook.
My wife is studying to become a CGA. I've been extremely impressed by how this works. It's completely correspondence/online based. She does her assignments and submits them via a web page. The web site contains lots of reference material and online forums for the students. If she has questions, her "prof" answers pretty quickly. In fact she accidentally submitted an early draft of an assignment once, and they contacted her the next day to ask if she'd had a problem because it didn't look finished. It helps that there aren't really any lectures - the nearest they've come is an organised chat room. The only real contact she has with them is for exams and if she wants to take revision classes before the exams. It's all based a couple of thousand kilometres away in Alberta, AFIAK. It takes a lot of hard work (25 hours or more per week per course on top of a full time job), and she says the exams a way harder than anything she took at university.
I have taken 2 courses (one 100-level, one 400-level) with a teacher that also had online versions of the classes. While her classes were a breeze (in the class and out I imagine), it seemed to me she put conciderable effort into the online aspect. All our class quizes were online, and homeworks/labs were submitted online. Lecture notes were posted online. Lots of people didn't even go to class, even though they lived on/near campus.
... like ACT/SAT) tests, because the teacher admitted they didnt want to spend the time grading it themselves.
You need to keep in mind that these profs aren't paid *solely* for teaching an online course, probably. Most teachers, even classroom-based teachers, are paid to spend 50% of time with students, and 50% doing research. So logically online teaching cuts into the classroom time, and I imagine if they do it the same way mine did, the effort overlaps quite a bit so you end up with teaching time division something like:
Solely for in class: 10-15%
Used to benefit both groups: 20-30%
Solely for on-line: 10-15%
Also, teacher slacking is definitelly not for online classes only. I have taken so many scantron (multiple choice - graded buy a machine
That's all I have to say about that.
no comment
I'm taking Ph.D. classes at the University of Idaho Engineering Outreach. They send you DVD's of the live class, and you follow 1-2 weeks later. The 800 number to the instructor and email to the class and instructor work well.
I've heard good things about Univ of Pheonix, but last I checked, they don't offer Ph.D.s in Computer Science.
What I don't like about U of Idaho is how fast the papers come back to you graded. (Sometimes a month or so, depends on the instructor.) At first I was upset about it, and now I just figure that is how distance learning at the school works.
I've got only 18 hrs worth of Ph.D. work. It would be better to work off a local university, but if you don't have the option, this isn't bad too. The classes are entertaining and educational.
I've also heard it is a good idea to make sure that the instructors haven't graduated from the university they teach at. Inbreeding is a bad thing.
Gee, sounds like regular F2F college to me.
First, stay away from online-only colleges. They're the laughing stocks of every industry. You'd do well to get out a box of Crayolas and color your own diploma, rather than pay for one from them.
;))
Look for actual brick-and-mortar places that are well respected. Then, look specifically into their online offerings.
I took a few online courses from the community college where I got my associate's degree from. Yeah, community college, ya slack jawed losers. Offered a hell of a lot more education wise than the four (+1 coop) year 'university' I was wasting tens of thousands on for my first year and a half. At least at the community college, I didn't have professors whining at me that they didn't teach us how to increment variables in java by 1 via ++ yet, so I couldn't use it.
Err, right, rant mode off.
Anyhow, the online courses weren't easy. Not by any measure. Surprise, I actually *learned* in the online courses. The workload seemed a bit heavier, and in my opinion, more in-depth than many of the 'normal' classes I took. They were also a lot more fun - though I suspect this is because I didn't feel as if I was wasting my time sitting through boring lectures as the clueless asked questions to which the answers I could recite in my sleep.
(Not that there's anything wrong with that, I mean, they're paying too, they should be asking questions, even if I find them simple.
I never encountered a professor who couldn't be reached either online or on campus for questions or discussion about material.
And now, if you read anything in this post, read the following. After wasting the aforementioned tens of thousands of dollars on a 'top of the line' school, only to find that I would've received a much better education by browsing the damned O'Reilly website.. I'll tell you something that guidance counsellors never tell you.
When looking at a college, ignore all literature they give you. Smile and nod at the professors you talk to, but let it go in one ear, and out the other.
Contact students. Talk to them. Find out what *they* think of the college; find out what they're doing in their courses. Try to talk to a whole range, from freshman to senior, even try to talk to a few alumni if you can.
The student body will tend to be less interested in spreading good PR and attempting to sucker you out of your money than any official of the college will be. You might get exaggerations about how bad a place is from some of them, but that's a hell of a lot better than having some campus drone exaggerate on how great the college is.
... would be for each student to write the entire paper, then meet together for the equivalent of a "code review", then take the best ideas and phrasing from all the papers to create a finished effort.
Noe.
I have been a college Physics and Astronomy teacher for 10 years. I decided to look into the online schools as way of expanding my teaching coverage.
The entire process of "teaching" in that environment is only suitable for subjects that allow lots of "round table" style discussion. A liturature class where the plot motives are hashed out online in a forum would be a good example.
Math and science is next to impossible.
I would argue that the instructors are working in an unsuitable environment more than I would argue that the instructors are slack. It is a system that encourages a very hands off approach.
I would also argue that the degree obtained from those online schools is exactly what was purchased, a piece of paper. It has no academic merit. Like many private, for profit "schools", they exist to make money, not educated graduates. The one I was with even had incentives like those of a dot-com (stock options!).
In short, if you want an education that will move you ahead in life, go to the best traditional school in your interest area that you can get in.
If you want an impressive piece of paper that verifies you (or your parents) paid enough classes to qualify for a graduation ticket, go to a big name traditional private school.
If you want to wast several years online to "earn" a "diploma" doing the barest minimum for a big bucket of cash, go to an online school. It won't advance your career unless you dig ditches or hang off the back of a garbage truck (an completely horrid job that I am very gratefull that those people do. I always thank them when I'm out and the truck shows up.)
The only thing I miss is the "what didja get" discussions after tests and homeworks are handed back and the other interactions with other students. Other than that, the experience is identical to my traditional undergrad education and much more convenient.
This space intentionally left blank.
it's not that most literature is subjective, but more the fact that the literature professors give and then attempt to analize with those horribly obscure themes is just bad literature. In good literature, you don't have to have someone tell you what it means to understand it. The reason why most people don't understand this, is becuase there is so little good literature and they have never had a chance to read it. The trash they assign at schools is more about job security than learning. You will always have a job if you make up the answers and say they are the only right ones.
Shouldn't professors be required to be a little more techno savvy before they give a course like this?
Are any CS professors really techno savvy?
Now, before I get jumped, I'm a teacher. You have to understand that most professors are either current in their field or are good teachers. Those that are current probably aren't going to be tapped for what is already a dysfunctional classroom environment. That leaves those that are good teachers. They know the theory, but aren't necessarily up to the cutting edge.
You aren't going to school to really learn, judging by what you've written. You're going to earn piece of paper confirming what you and your boss have known for the past 10 years: you know your CS.
This isn't to say that you shouldn't always expect more from educators, but you need to keep your goals in mind.
We have been doing online courses for about 4 years now.(Yes I have left the name of the company out)
We were using Voice Over I.P and a neat little tool called Placeware. (Now owned my Microsoft)
We taught a variety of subjects from MCSE certification. Which we had students all over the U.S. take the course. I have to admit it was not quite a success. We had a pilot program with a troubled inner city school teaching MS office. Our instructor was in California and the school was located in D.C.
We currently work with Two University's which offer technology in the classroom courses to teach teachers how to integrate using technology in the classrooms.
We have had mixed reviews from students, some love the convenience of sitting at home and never having to drive to the University, to "I won't take another online class again".
We had an interesting response from one student from the D.C school who described to us that it made him more responsible to get the work done on time.
It all depends on the instructor and the technology platform they use and how creative and engaging he or she makes the online class.
I have seen university's who offer nothing but online chat and forums to email correspondence only.
Now as far as providing a quality education that remains to be seen. I think the only company/University who can answer that would be the University of Phoenix. We have had 2 or 3 online courses that augment student's classes but we have not offered a complete online degree program as of yet.
Yes. At most institutions I've had contact with, distance/online education is done as a cost-cutting measure. It is forced by administrators with little regard for proper implementation or academic soundness. The implementation is done by instructors who aren't necessarily sure it's a good idea in the first place and don't have the resources to do it right.
It sure is cheap to do, though. No buildings to maintain; pay the instructors a fraction of a regular course and charge the students the same (plus a "resources fee" in some cases).
I am currently taking courses at U. of Phoenix. I find that I enjoy the "online" style course much better than a regular classroom. Mainly, becuase of the lack of tests...quite frankly, I don't need the stress of studing for an exam. Most of the course is written assignments, and discussion.
;)
The bad part of the this is that the teacher makes or breaks the class. If the teacher doesn't encourge discussion, then it's very hard to keep it going.
My biggest problem isn't a "logistical" problem, such as the teacher. It is a technical problem. U. of Phoenix system is constantly going down. So it's a pain the night an assignment is due and their system goes down. My wife also does distance Ed. with golden gate university, and she has the same problem AND their system only works with Internet Explorer...and we use Mac. (Note: This is NOT an invitation for a Mac vs. PC vs. MSFT flame war
All and all, I think that the online learning enviroment is VERY dependant on the instructor. Now, what do you do when the instructor is bad...I don't really know. In my experence you can usually tell in the first day or so if they are good or bad...and if they are bad...I just drop the course.
Just my $0.02...or $0.02357 if you're at a gas station
I had one course that had no textbook, but extensive lectures; I ended up reading over 500 pages of "optional" reading, but I did get an A. However, the teacher was very silent, I don't think there was any interaction whatsoever. Some of the stuff the course taught was seriously outdated already; I felt totally ripped off, as did the other students.
I had another course that had minimal lecture material, and extensive textbook reading. Many of the review questions required internet research, and could not be answered from the material learned in the textbook or the lectures. Many students who wanted a "quick" credit out of it complained about the review questions, but I was not in such a hurry - I loved it, and it had a written final, not a "supervised" final, which was wonderful. The course was from a real university, so no fees or any additional work were required to get college credit for it, it was totally online, and I posted the final in HTML in a password protected directory. Courses like that are hard to find. In this course, the teacher was excellent, and I definitely felt that there was a real presence there. Even though the course was an extension from a dot-edu, fully accredited university, the teacher worked in the telecommunications industry and was doing this part time. This particular setup worked out really great for me.
The way I see it, if there is a final involved, and I have to go somewhere to take it, and pay someone to administer it to me, I would be looking at CLEP tests and DANTES tests and Industry Certificiations, GRE subject exams, etc... for undergraduate credit. Master's Degrees are probably a slightly different situation.
I would say that if it comes from a dot-edu, a real university that will give you a transcript for free once you finish the course, go for it. I am avoiding anything else (for myself, personally) at this point in time. Look carefully at some of those certification test prep centers that give you college credit - it's often given out at college credit prices. It's almost possible to get an entire undergraduate degree for the amount of money you'll drop on a couple professional industry certification classes + the amount of money you'll pay to get the college credit for it. Better to make a note of how many credits it's worth and get in with a school that takes portfolio (prior learning assessement) credit, and just get a portfolio credit for what you have learned.
My wife is getting her MS in Psycology (Industrial/Organizational) from Capella and she seems pretty happy with it (about 7 courses into it). The courses are about $1500 each (not including textbooks). She gets two assignments each week which are always writing a short point paper on that weeks topic. She is also required to comment on other students' posted work. So far she says the instructors are hit and miss. Some are really interactive, others are somewhat distant. Email me if you want more specific info.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
I've had good online classes and bad ones. I can honestly say I never learned a great deal from either type. Online classes are best used for classes you dont want to go to or have no interest in. If you want to learn, go to class.
"The good side is it allows folks with full time jobs to get degrees. It also allows folks to get specialized degrees that may only be available at a handful of institutions."
Well there goes my SmallTalk degree.
BTW do these courses combine different teaching methods? i.e. CBT.
The average college grad uses 5-10% of what they learned in college in their career.
I had one professor drill that into my head. He came from the "real world" of manufacturing processing (it was a mechanical engineering course).
He was 100% correct.
So, what the hell are some of you whining about? A degree is nothing more than a piece of paper proving to your employers that you can be taught things.
The most important thing college can teach you is problem solving methodology.
I took a course through KIT Learning and it matched the description exactly. A lot of 'busy' work with very little learning and virtually no instructor input.
What you just described is all I got from a traditional University, especially from the "tenured" Professors. It's no different.
Evidently, the whole point of college is to demonstrate you can successfully work the system and follow-through with what you started.
Lectures are recorded, so that you can watch them via RealPlayer; all of the online courses have pretty active BBS discussions; the professors and TAs generally make themselves available via e-mail; and most of the courses can be taken for credit or simply audited.
As with any experience in higher education, the quality of the professors varies; some are very responsive and active, while others don't exert themselves very much. However, if you do a little research and check out the websites for the courses as part of your research, it's possible to figure out which classes are worth the time.
Harvard Extension School: Division of Continuing Education
Some of the stuff in the story looks like this is some kind of half assed scam.
Somebody somewhere is acting as gatekeeper to your qualification who likely as not knows less about the subject than you do.
Here is my opinion. :-)
.Net quickly enough or Java, is through certification programs, I feel sorry for you.
I find a computer science degree exceptionally useful, for the following reasons, IF they meet the criteria:
You attend a University that contains the equipment and staff that will provide you with things you can't get in the private sector, that interest you.
This could be a wide variety of things...for me it was cutting edge research into the areas of vector processing/parallel compiler design.
To that extent I attended UW-Madison, which recieved a grant for 10 Million, in 1991 for a Thinking Machines 128 Processor machine.
I realized that there, I could get access to equipment and more importantly, Doctor James Larus, who had a large amount of work that he published on the topic that I could gain access too. I had a field day for 5 years.
But like you, left to start a company. Now I am back at the UW, 12 years later, finishing what I started.
So, my view on a Computer Science degree, and why you pay for it, is because you gain access to people and pieces of technology that you can't get in the private sector.
That is why I went to UW-Madison, that is why I returned. However, this is not always the case. Most colleges have very little in the areas of cutting edge equipment and "second rate" PhD's, that don't publish much or are not the leaders in thier fields. They are what I call teaching PhD's.
There are TONS of Universities that fit that description. They are still good, but just not AS good. Try and avoid these, but if you can't get into a good program, make the best of it.
Universities, also provide instruction into "foundations in science". What I mean by this is, although the tech you might learn might go out of style, Calculas never will go out of style. You learn calculas, deductive reasoning, and the rigours of the scientific method and research.
In the end, learning how to teach yourself very difficult abstractions and science, analytical thinking, will provide you with the means to avoid what I call "tech scams". The biggest one, is so called certifications in product families companies charge people for being paper experts.
These items Universities teach, don't go "obsolete". Calculas will be taught with the same fundamentals 500 years from now, for example...
Now more on the scams, once you get out of college....
However, I hold just the opposite view on Certifications. (CNE, MCSE, JCP...etc)
Certifications, don't provide any value whatsoever in my opinion. All they teach is extremely short term knowledge, about usually product families with lifetimes, say no more than 6 months or less on the market.
The Cisco, Microsoft, and related Java technology certification programs amount to memorizing product features.
I don't need to pay 10K and sit in a room with an instructor to figure out technology products. I use my own brain, Barnes and Noble's and some independant study after purchasing the product to become knowledgeable.
If they only way you can learn
Much better, in my opinion than some of the instructors who teach the class, I am actually using the product or technology to solve the problem, myself.
I can usually do it FAR FASTER, than purchasing a certification program too. I also feel much more confident. As well, I am not stuck someplace in a motel room for a week away from work either.
So, finally, with my requirements, I would say you are not getting a good deal, minimally, your basically getting a certification level type of knowledge just for a piece of paper.
If you really wanted to though, doesn't sound like your getting much, so I hope your not paying much.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I've never taught an online course before, but from talking to a lot of my colleagues (and my wife, who's a teacher), reality seems to be exactly the opposite of what you're saying: it's typically much more work for the professor to teach a course online. Look, teaching a traditional lecture course is an easy gig, if you don't care about doing a good job. You have a set of canned lectures that you deliver every semester. You drone on and on, pausing to ask for questions, but never pausing for long enough that anyone will really go ahead and ask one. If you want to, you can also engineer things so that you don't have a lot of grading to do: don't grade homework, don't require papers, make all the tests scantron, etc.
Teaching online is a huge amount of work the first time you do it, because you have to create a cr--load of stuff on the web.
At my school, people seem to have had very mixed luck teaching things online. A lot of them report that they end up getting all the worst students in the online sections, because the students perceive it as an easy way to take care of the course -- you don't even need to show up for lecture? -- kewl! It also tends to be more reading- and writing-intensive, which is a problem for a lot of students at less selective schools, who are operating at a remedial level in English, or who may not be native English speakers.
Find free books.
I am currently working on a masters in aero at ODU, and my biggest gripe is that the students are complete lumps in the classroom. It seems like they just come in to take notes, don't understand anything, and then try to figure it out on there own later. Yeah, I know this is how the majority of universities are.
I guess I'm spoiled from going to small schools in the past-I miss students actually interacting with the teacher in class. Then again, I slept through most of my classes in HS and college.
Let's face it, the only way you learn anything these days is on your own. Most teachers are just there to provide structure and material, with the institution proving "credit." Rarely, you'll get a class where the teacher that actually teaches you something, or classmates who aren't vegetables. (And good luck retaining any of it.) So you're not missing out. It's all just for a piece of paper so you can get a job where you'll learn what you need to by doing.
----
PudriK
I graduated about a year ago after completing my entire MBA online. I found that much like regular classes, there were good professors and bad professors. Having the opportunity to complete my degree online at the university where I got my undergraduate degree, I was able to see how both good and bad classroom professors handled themselves.
The main problem is that teaching online takes more effort than it takes for regular classes. If you have a bad instructor who can barely put in the effort to show up for their classes, they will do horribly online, possibly even worse than they will do in a classroom. Emails will go unanswered. Assignments will be posted and graded irregularly. There will be few online lectures, or they will be useless.
The professors that I knew to be good professors enjoyed the challange of teaching online. The professors that were good in the classroom were more organized, used the online technology better, and were more responsive. Overall, they were head and shoulders above the poor professors. They were so much better, in fact, that the only professor I thought of as being in the "gray area" was someone that was a good classroom instructor, but was assigned to teach online at the last minute with minimal training. However, even there, you could see the effort was there.
Overall, I thought the online experiences I had were rewarding and I learned a lot. I would suggest closely checking out a school before enrolling. Also, once you are in, make sure you ask about the good and bad professors that others have had so you can avoid the problem instructors.
In response to the poster's concern about the curriculum not being very up-to-date, you're going to find the same thing at a real university too. Unless it's a professional school or something, they don't bother with current technology. They stress the underlying concepts and theories.
Consider the fact that I just finished a CS degree at a prestigious 4-year college, and more than half of my CS coursework was done on pen and paper.
From the big publishers, like MathPro, PH GradeAssist, Wiley's eGrade, PHIM, and MyMathLab?
I've had some experience as a prof with eGrade and am trying to evaluate the other gradebook/assessment options out there.
Which do you reckon are the most stable?
I took a year of online French as part of my Sophomore highschool year. It was offered through the Michigan Virtual High School system, which seems to rely heavily on Blackboard software (which I've always heard is horrible). Further, the Michigan Virtual High School contracts out their classes to companies like ApexVS, from who I am took the course.
The main problem with learning a language online is that there is no interaction. The hour I had the class, I was alone in a computer lab with one of the few computers with speakers and a microphone in our school. I'd have to listen to RealPlayer recordings and then usually had to find the same spot and play them back again. When it's a 20 minute file and RealPlayer's bar for location in the sound track is only 4 inches wide, it's hard to find that point that you want to listen to. I had no one telling me "This is how you say 'formidable'. It's not pronounced like in English; it is pronounced as if 'dable' and 'table' rhymed in this accent, this way in an accent from Paris..." etc. I had no comprehension of how to listen to French and interpret it.
I get get really good at finding where I was in a RealPlayer file, and complaining to the people running the service. For example, I run Linux at home. I also run Mozilla as my browser of choice. At first, neither Mozilla or any Linux-based browser would run the site, they had written code to stop and say "Please use IE only." Well, I complained, and they stated that my school was providing a Windows box with IE and that I should use that (so much for 'home'work).
However, I did find the teacher of the course to be a very friendly, generous man. He could see my frustrations with the course and the way it was laid out, and so we worked out how I could do different things on my own to study.
I came away with a fairly decent understanding of the stories in the book, but that was about it. I can tell you whether the bat is lying against the chair or if the parrot is sitting on the vase. Not much else, though.
So much for online courses. And to think my school spent money on it because they can't find a foreign language teacher.
I took a couple of online courses this last semester.
One was excellent, the prof responded to posted questions the day that they were posted. The prof also put together assignments and quizes that helped the general understanding/comprehension of the subject. Overall I would rate this course equal or better to the ones I sat through. Didn't have to deal with stupid peers in any case.
The other was terrible, the prof took a week or more to respond to questions, which had to be asked via email. And he posted nothing on the website to suplement the material in the book. So basically the tution price for this class was for the mid-term, which I had to drive to campus for. The final was canceled due to... lazy prof?
A good teacher goes a long way no matter what the medium is.
I'm currently a first year computing info systems student with them and I am very pleased with the qaulity . For math courses though I would not recomend them (its kind of hard to explain math over the phone and by faxes) . However there computer classes if you have problems they get back to you within two days (usually a day). They have online discussion (in MOO ; they really dont use MOO to its full potentail but once they get DALE back online that should be sweet) . The cool thing is with athabasca , you feel you know the course, you can challenge the credit and just write one or two challenge exams. Another cool thing about athabasca unversity is it is a canadian accredit university. For me that matters because I hope to transfer my credits to another university eventually .
" I also feel that ALL of the professors are very behind-the-times when it comes to IT. Just today I had a professor tell me she would not allow me to post a PDF file to my portfolio because she was worried about getting a virus when she read it?! "
I work at a large university, and I'd agree that most of the professors are a bit less than savvy when it comes to IT, and nobody really expects them to be. The exception being our CS faculty. If you're taking CS classes and your instructors don't know IT, may be time to shop around.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
So I'm saying the problem you see is probably fairly widespread and definitely real but will take a while to fix. The universities will need to put a priority on the online classes and hire staff that focuses on them. When that happens you will see better content/participation.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
You see, it's not that easy to fire a crapy instructor - damn unions. So what they tend to do is place them (or at least, strongly recomend) that they work for these on-line schools. Simply put, they do less damage.
I actually had a horrible time in an online economics course I was taking for my university. I really hate driving for thirty minutes to get to my classes and I figured I'd knock out some of the easy courses online and work with my "own" schedule.
We had a similiar online forum or web board to discuss with other students and get help from the teacher. The problem was the teacher was supposed to answer any questions and reply to each of your posts, ours never bothered. This wasn't too bad, as some of the students had a better grasp of the subject than others.
The worst problem I encountered, was that our teacher was not computer literate. She had problems opening my RTF, TXT, and PDF files. Claiming they were "too large" for her computer or giving her "virii." These are only little paltry 100K files, and she's griping.
She would assign 0's for these assignments without any dispute because they violated her "on-time" policy. Out of all the worst experience I had with her was with deadlines. When Christmas vacation rolled around, I synced all of the January dates in my PDA and on my wall calendar so I could do them on-time when the break ended. When I came back to turn them in, the datches were mysteriously changed to the last day of the break.
Now assignments are always spaced by almost three days a piece, and these were too before the change. When I tried to contact her about the late assignments, and why the dates were changed (especially why I wasn't notified) she said I should have been checking the calendar during Christmas when they were changed. Sure. An email would have been nice.
Finally she gets feud up of my complaints, and writes my course liasion (the guy who sets you up for the course). The irony is that she forged the date on the email to look as if she sent it a week earlier. Sadly headers proved her horribly wrong and caught in a lie. I showed the liasion and he called the "school." Her claim was that she doesn't make sure her rig's clock is set appropriately. Sure. Her clock magically jumped a week back.
When the course ended, I had failed miserably, I would get the correct answers but 0's for her inability to open (or willingness to do so) my files. I called the school and asked for a refund to which they complied.
Sadly to this day she still spams me with "You are late," emails...
Internet itself is one hell of a school (and provides high quality education).
Spend few months here and you can continue eating that kebab no matter how sick popup jumps up your screen.
Just finished my Ph.D. at an on-line University. As some have said, you get what you put into it. With this particular uni, there were no semesters, but you were given a time limit to finish all the required courses and final paper (dissertation in my case).
Some of the courses were easy, and related to my interests, others made me get out the Calculus and DiffEQ books from 20+ years ago when I went the formal route for my BS/MS.
While its true that there were no formal classes - the professors/tutors were available upon request, and there is an on-line chat capability for others taking the same course.
I busted my butt harder in this program than I had in the two previous ones where I was attending meat-space classes. Of course, this time I was working full-time with a wife and a 4yr old son (at the start).
My biggest complaint is that my employer would not reimburse me because their policy was if a local uni is available, they don't pay for distance learning.
jerry
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
Why do people that criticize other people's grammar/spelling/whatever always fuck it up themselves?
I can't recall how many times I've seen people make fun of other's "grammer".
Just google for "grade inflation" and read a couple of the articles. For your convenience I've listed a couple of articles that I found off the top. There's pretty strong social pressure on professors to "give" the students the grades even though the students may not have earned them. And that lottery money being used for merit based scholarships? A waste of effort. Taxpayers would do better to simply allocate funds to the schools instead of giving it to the kids as a scholarship.
- Grade Inflation: The current fraud
- Fiscal Policy Effects on Grade Inflation
- A call for an end to grade inflation
- HOPE Scholarships Transform the University of Georgia
- Grade inflation becoming problem at Vanderbilt
- Students studying less, receiving higher grades
Even if I didn't teach and witness this kind of behavior individually, it doesn't take much to demonstrate that it happens pretty regularly. The grade inflation phenomenon is at least partly the fault of teachers who cave to social pressure from their students and the students' parents (who have lawyers!). It is also a result of an entitlement attitude. And please, don't ask me "What idiot has an entitlement attitude?" I'll think you think you are entitled to me responding.--
Annotateit at Annotateit.com
I have been through an online class myself, and the experience was not very good.
No, this has got to be a pretty stupid question. The point of college is not to just learn facts and how to problem solve. It is about social interaction, and lab work. Maybe I am just wierd, but I got a whole lot more from my lab classes than I got from classes that were like goto class listen to prof, go home read book, take test.
There is a foreign university that offers a medical degree (and an MD-PhD program) to students everywhere. You can even do your residency on-line.
It saves much time travelling to Elbonia to study in silly classes......
I suggest you read Slashdot
"I am attending an online college for the first time ... and I am starting to get a bad taste in my mouth...."
Ask them to drink plenty of water and avoid curry and garlic beforehand - also, with more experience (usually at the Junior or Senior level) you learn to stop just in time and you don't have to taste it at all!
HSD official obtained Ph.D. from diploma mill
A high-ranking career official in the Homeland Security Department apparently obtained her doctorate from a Wyoming diploma mill.
Laura L. Callahan, now senior director in the office of department CIO Steven Cooper, states on her professional biography that she "holds a Ph.D. in Computer Information Systems from Hamilton University." Callahan, who is also president of the Association for Federal IRM and a member of the CIO Council, is commonly called by the title "Dr."
Callahan's resume says she began her civil service career in 1984. Before joining HSD, she was deputy CIO at the Labor Department.
Hamilton University, according to an Internet search, is located in Evanston, Wyo. It is affiliated with and supported by Faith in the Order of Nature Fellowship Church, also in Evanston. The state of Wyoming does not license Hamilton because it claims a religious exemption. Oregon has identified Hamilton University as a diploma mill unaccredited by any organization recognized by the U.S. Department of Education.
[...]
I will research this because my wife is 8 months pregnant with my son. Offtopic but a good post.
wow...does that mean people can finish there american university degrees oversees?
I'm normally just a lurker, but I've just got to reply to this, my experience was so bad. I'll apologize in advance: look out for unsuppressed flames leaking through.
I took an online CS course through Hudson Valley Community College (near Albany, NY) this past semester to brush up my C and C++ programming skills, and the course used the online course system from SUNY. The system itself has limitations in its capacity for providing an equivalent to a face-to-face lecture and for facilitating real discussion among students and instructors. But the biggest problem was a professor who went way beyond "skating" through the course, and virtually abandoned it.
Some people in this thread have claimed that a professor who puts insufficient effort into an online course is no different than one who does so in a classroom course, but I beg to differ. In a real classroom, you will at least know if the instructor doesn't show up for class. In my course, several times the professor didn't respond to anything posted for a week to ten days (if he responded at all), and at first I actually thought he might have died (or at least been in the hostpital)! What else could explain such behavior, unlike anything I've ever experienced in a classroom?
As an unfortunate side effect when this started to happen, most of the other students dropped the course (or at least stopped participating). If only I had known that this would continue throughout the course, I would have done the same while I still could. The consequence of this was that there was only one other student with whom to "discuss" anything, and she in too far over her head to be of any help.
After much effort I was able to get in touch with the professor by phone, at which time he assured me that things were back to normal and there wouldn't be any more slipping of the course schedule, assignments not handed out, questions not answered, self-tests not posted, etc., but that turned out not to be true. Assignments were not given until after the course syllabus said they were due. The course slipped weeks, then more than a month behind schedule.
I realized that contacting the professor again wouldn't be enough; I e-mailed his department chairman, who said he'd look into it. So the professor cut the missed units right out of the curriculum until it appeared we were back on schedule.
By the end, he had delivered more-or-less-complete materials for only about half of the units in the entire course, including almost nothing relating to C++. And he never once gave any feedback relating to any of the assignments submitted; they may as well have gone into a black hole. The only feedback I got on any of the programming assignments in the entire course was from the compiler.
The result was that I didn't get any more out of the course than if I had simply bought a textbook and done some of the exercises: no real instruction from the professor, no discussion among students, no feedback on any assignments.
I'm still in the process of trying to get my money refunded for this course that essentially didn't even take place, but I don't think my chances are too good now--because I was too persistent and (largely) stuck with it until the end! But in a classroom course, if the professor never showed up for half of the classes, wouldn't you expect to get your money back, or at least get a chance to take the course again at no charge (with a better instructor)?
Don't expect non-online classes to be that much better. I just graduated with my CS degree, and I only had one decent CS professor out of the five that taught there. Much like your professors, mine would simply read PowerPoint slides (stolen from someone else, to boot), assign pseudo-"group projects" to minimize their grading workload, and steal assignments and projects from books verbatim.
My favorite example was when I purposely left several questions unanswered on a final and then proceeded to get a 98% on it. The professor didn't have to return the finals and thus decided that he didn't have to really grade them; he gave everyone in the class a random score from 90-98 on the final.
In the end, you just have to realize that learning is something that you do on your own. School is great for the piece of paper at the end, but any actual knowledge is usually gained on your own time.
i never finished my business degree from the university of rhode island... i believe I need just one course...cant remember the name at the moment but can american civilians take course at a us military base?
A college is a business. There's no such thing as a University that is in it for the education anymore. It's all about money.
This is an excellent cost-savings for them, so of course they implemented it. Less work and more return. That doesn't mean it's ethical.
An education in a lot of fields is rather worthless. You learn how to do things the way "the company" does and you use those skills at later jobs, if they're valid.
I have seen people with Masters degrees go without a job for a year, and people that didn't finish high school constantly employed, or employed within a week.
I don't know when people are going to realize that education does not make or break a person - it's their ability to convince others of their worth that makes the difference.
In summary:
1. School is bullshit. You can learn anything you need to without the help of a school. Anyone who says otherwise is not educated; they are either fooled or helplessly gullible.
2. Colleges are businesses. They are in business to make money, and this is a good way for them to make a buck with minimal marginal expenditure.
3. It's unethical, but this is a business. Business and ethics are antonyms. At least, they should be.
4. It's unfortunate. The world is a screwed-up place. If you want fairness and truth, Computer Science is hardly the degree you want to be shooting for (if you even want to be shooting for one.)
My wife's profession requires a certain number of hours of continuing education credits per year to remain licensed. One option is online courses. To make sure you actually spend time, the questions are on a webpage with a timer! Even if it takes you 10 seconds to read a question and answer it, you must leave the page open for however long - I think it's like 10 minutes each question! So, she'll answer a question, go do some housework, come back in x minutes, answer another, go do something else, etc, etc, etc. It's silly.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Some doctors still advocate circumcision AND think they are right. Remember these are the same doctors who said babies DON'T feel pain. Well the AAP statement said that they DO feel HORRIBLE pain. If they were wrong about something so evident they are most likely wrong about circumcision.
They would say the baby is just "cold" when the neonate would scream during the circumcision. Well doctors, how can the baby FEEL cold when it can't feel pain!? The reason is IT CAN FEEL THE COLD AND THE PAIN.
Incidently, even though pain relief is highly recommended for neonatal circumcisions MOST (70%) STILL do not provide ANY PAIN RELIEF. That is how credible these "doctors" are.
A couple of years ago I took an online course in developing online courses.
My impression was that the Prof worked as harder or harder than in most face-to-face classes. Everytime I submitted an assignment it was returned graded within 24 hrs. Usually if I submitted in the morning it was returned in that afternoon and when I submitted in the afternoon it was returned the next morning. This was even true when I submitted them on weekends. He responded to emails even more quickly usually in less than an hour, frequently in 5-10 minutes.
Since it was a course in developing online courses, we talked about the amount of time it takes for the instructor. It was my Prof's belief that an online course took more of his time than a traditional class. In fact he limited the number in the class after the first time it was given because of this constraint.
The really nice thing about the course was that it provided for a broad range of learning styles. The main lectures were done in RealAudio with HTML "slides". But there were plenty of optional reference materials that a person could browse at the same time: outlines, transcripts, glossaries, etc. That plus the fact that I could instantly "rewind" and review anything I didn't quite follow made it a very good learning experience.
My guess is that you have instructors who barely know the material themselves, didn't develop the course materials themselves, have no educational training and are earning a pitifully low salary. That would be par for the course (no pun intended) in todays educational environment.
Is there a CVS like system for notes/messages/babbling/drooling?
I don't think CVS is a perfect fit, perhaps there is another way.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I'm in their Master's program, and so far I've only had 1 bad professor out of 6. He was so bad that it definitley had nothing to do with the online format. They used to use prometheus, and that was pretty terrible, but they now use ecollege, which is better. Except that it doesn't allow one to edit a post. Very odd. Anyway, I recommend their program. www.ggu.edu.
After the dot com 'boom' settled down a bit, and I was no longer required to work 80 hrs a week, I decided that after ten years of being absent I would go back to school and finish up that elusive CS degree.
OK, Here's a simple observation. Remeber how that dot com 'boom' was going to reinvent the fundamentals of business? Remember how well that worked?
Most of the online university stuff was bleed over from that. A lot of hernest but hopelessly optimistic people tossing around buzz words and convincing themselves that they were inventing a glorious new future. As with the comercial side of things, a few good nuggets emerged. But the vast majority of what was built is crap.
I'm sure there are good, quality online schools out there, but I haven't found one yet. I've gone back to a 'real' school, I'm at NYU now. I wish I had a better story to give, but it's not to be. I feel your pain bruddah.
That's right. When seriously considering any educational institution, on-line or otherwise, first contact the administration directly and ask them if their program is proven to improve self-esteem.
I teach at a Junior College and have encountered a wide range of misconceptions about online classes. The biggest is that it requires less time/attentino by the instructor. Nothing is further from the truth.
Typing out an answer to a question requires a lot more time and effort than if you can say it orrally while visually checking to see if everyone understands it
Additionally, an instructor is much harder pressed to find ways to check students for understanding. In a classroom I can just call someone to the board to work out a subnet problem, or have everyone do it on their own peice of paper independently. Then we go over it and if anyone has questions or didn't get the same answer I can quickly find out why. I have faces I can look at and people I can easily build relationships with to know what they're level of undersatnding is.
This all goes out the window on an Online format. New techniques have to be developed. Instructors who have PHDs and have been teaching for years and years may be able to handle things in a live room based soley on their teaching experience, but are totally lost when they have to rethink the entire process after moving online.
Just Designing an online curriculam is different than simply assigning a book to buy. If you are going to teach a class effectively online, you need to find materials and delivery methods that take advantage of the online format. Most instructors don't realize that.
I havn't personally reviewed any online classes I thought were well done. I've seen some of what we're doing at my school, and am pretty dissapointed. My wife signed up for them. She did fine, and learned, but only because she was motivated to put in a lot of extra personal effort that normally isn't required by students in a classroom (the drop rate was somehting like 60-70+% for that online class)
On the plus side, if you don't read the book, you ain't passing!
For the money being spent, I would rather learn it myself; buy books, use the internet,...etc.
I know a guy who is an instructor at one of
these school. Talk about skating/ faking; he
doesn't know thoroughly the subjects he is asked
to teach but he's a good B-Ser.
I'm currently taking courses via Umass for a BS in IT. I've taken a few courses here before, and had good results. The guy who taught my perl course actually looked at your code submissions, and commented on them. However, his timing was little bit off, and the final project for the class was far more complex than the knoweldge gained so far. (complete web based bb with a huge set of features).
It really is a mixed bag. The funny thing is, it seems the teachers that really put the effort into the online courses are NOT the same ones that teach daytime classes. Of the 6 courses I've taken, I'd rate 2 teachers great, 2 mediocre, and 2 seemed to hardly care. The top 3 were local professionals with fulltime day jobs, and the 3 worst were fulltime professors at the university (2 umass/amherst, 1 umass/lowell. - altho the lowell one seemed to feel bad about not getting enough time in)
I started and dropped out of school to work in the internet boom, and am just now returning via distance/online learning. When I was going days, you'd get about 2-3 50 minute lectures per week. Maybe 1 or 2 quests answered during class, and quite frankly, most of the professors 'posted hours' were joke. Hardly there, or just too many people waiting. Online, at least their lack of interest can be documented and shown to the people who cut their checks.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that its just like day classes. There are good ones and bad ones. I've taken to researching professors at various online websites, and just plain googling them to see if they've kept current or are just waiting for the return of fortran.
Yeah, I had a similar experience with the University of Phoenix, though clearly less pronounced than yours. I think of their radio advertisements and immediately am reminded of the early childhood trauma that was my circumcision...perhaps that's because the University of Phoenix sounds like an unacredited scam run by a bunch of marketroid foreskins.
s/una/nona/
I currently am attending Saint Leo University via their online degree program. I agree with the author that there is many kinks to be worked out but the quality of education largely depends on the professor of a class. My first semester I took 2 classes. One class had an active professor who answered questions, talked in real time once a week with us, and was all around great teacher. The other class had a half-absent professor who seemed to have other things to do than run the class.
In my opinion attending school online has more benefits than taking classes on site. One obvious advantage is being able to do work at your pace and when you have the time. Another advantage isn't so obvious but, in my experience, is definitely helpful. While attending a major university I had nothing but trouble when I needed to get or turn in forms, see a counselor, or talk with someone about financial aid. My online experience is completely different. There are people specifically there to talk to online students about these things and best of all you don't have to wait in a line to talk to them. Worse comes to worse you leave your name and number or send an email and you get a call within an hour.
You had me agreeing with you up intil this point:
1. School is bullshit. You can learn anything you need to without the help of a school. Anyone who says otherwise is not educated; they are either fooled or helplessly gullible.
For some professions, IT and CS being the main ones, yes, school doesn't mean a fucking thing. I hope that's what you were referring to. Some other careers don't lend themselves very well to self-education. Hard sciences, for example. Try getting a job that pays more than $7/hour as a chemist, a physicist, or a biologist without a graduate degree. If you have a BS, you MIGHT get a $13-$15 an hour job as a lab tech.
For that matter, try even teaching yourself chemistry without being a student. Reading books is all well and good, but it's lab experience that makes you marketable. Try buying some chemicals to play with in your garage some time and watch about 15 local, state, and federal agencies insert themselves directly into your rectum.
Try getting a job in upper management without a business degree. Try getting an accounting job (and I don't mean doing taxes at H&R Block) without an Associates at the VERY least. Would you go to a psychiatrist that taught himself out of the self-help section of the bookstore?
I assure you, college education is very important for careers outside of the IT world. It's easy to be blinded by the corporate drudgery and forget that anything else exists. To a degree (no pun) IT is on par with blue collar trades like electrical and plumping work. It's a bit more intricate and changes more frequently, and you sit in a cubicle instead of a shop, but unless you're a hardcore coder, you're deluding yourself if you think you're any better or any smarter than the guy that fixes your toilet. Do you think the janitor at your company makes less money than the guy answering the phone at the help desk or installing Windows on 5000 machines?
Yeah, it's a damn shame that colleges are turning into money whores. There's a reason it's becoming that way though....colleges, even private ones, rely on gifts of money from private donors, alumni, and the government. With the economy in the shitter, no one has any money to give right now, and the schools are suffering. At a state school, your tuition pays about 15% of what it costs to educate you. At a private school, it pays maybe 75%. Of course they get run like a business...businesses need to earn money or at the very least break even...why should a college be any different?
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
If you have ever taken classes from a traditional school, you will see the same thing. You have lazy teachers anywhere you go. I have been very happy with the University of Phoenix (except for the cost) and have had 3 bad teachers in my 16 classes.
gr8matt
It is important to clarify here that it takes more time for you. Other people may have an easier time with emails than with verbal communications.
I was having this exact discussion with a professor who insisted that the college's new requirement to place all material online was possibly as much work as actually coming up with the curriculum in the first place. This was largely because she had limited experience with many of the tools (html, streaming video/audio, etc). I was trying to make her understand that the problem is that the school did not recognize the fact that online teaching and classroom teaching require different skillsets. Overlapping skillsets, to be sure, but I think that many people make the assumption that "teaching skills" are easily tranlatable from one format to the next.
I expect we will see a new breed of instructors soon that are more comfortable with online work than with the classroom. For them, I think it really will require less time per student to provide a good education.
I took a few online classes earlier during freshman year. (Statistics and some other bullshit requirements) Waste of time simply put. Its just a way for students AND professors to get out of doing any difficult work.
But completely online Universities? You miss half of what college is all about. As important as the classroom knowledge that is imparted to you, it isn't the complete picture in an education. You don't get the peer interaction, the bouncing of ideas off fellow students and professors, volenteering in a research lab to put your classroom skills to work, and the self disovery.
I cannot speak for all online instructors, but I spend about 4 hours a night keeping up with one class of 30 students. This time is spent responding to discussion replies, answering e-mail sent directly to me, keeping track of course participation, and grading assignments. This is not to mention the weeks of preparation that goes into setting up a course and refining it for each future version - I have a class starting Monday that I have taught 4 times, and it is taking me nearly a week of work to get it ready for this version.
I send back detailed comments with each assignment, which is extremely time-consuming but well-appreciated. I have heard from students that other instructors (even within this program) do not do this, so I understand the frustration of learners who do not get this important feedback.
As far as interaction online, I have found that participants in my online courses (for the most part) use the added time to compose much more thoughtful replies to discussions than those that might be blurted out in a class discussion. I also have much more interaction with each student than I had with my own instructor in any of my face-to-face Master's classes. Research the school, class, and instructor that you are considering and give learning online a fair shot as a great alternative for people who just can't get to a traditional classroom but really want (or need!) to learn!
try not picking a school that advertises on TV to idiots like you who have no qualifications whatsoever but enough mommy and daddy money to get them into a shitty place like devry or university of phoenix.
I have been attending UoP for close to two years now to finish my degree. Much of the criticism that I have seen posted on this article is correct. The instructors for the most part do not care about educating you, nor do they teach, they merely facilitate (very big generalization, I have had a few good instructors). The group work is silly and many times the groups fall apart and it's a group of one or two completing the assignment rather than a group of four or five. The classes are all cookie cutter, and you can expect one paper a week (usually internet research) discussion questions, and some sort of weekly summary about what you learned for the week.
That said I am not attending the classes to learn anything more than a reinforcement of the concepts that I already know. I feel comfortable in most of the subject matter because it is what I do on a daily basis. I am just getting the fancy definitions now. The money for the classes is quite high, but then again you could argue that the time that I am saving by going full time while not sacrificing much more than a couple of hours a day is worth the expense. There is no way that I could do the same yearly course load in a traditional school. I am adult student that is trying to better my career and provide for my family.
So, my advice is to think about the expectations of what you want to learn and the goals that you have for your education. If you are trying to learn completely new concepts then it may not be best education. However, if your intention is to complete a life goal, or move ahead in your career and you are somewhat comfortable with the subject matter that you are going to be presented then it may be the best decision you can make for the sake of the best use of your time and resources.
Just my take though;)
That largely depends on your prof. I'm on my fifth online course with University of Maryland, and so far I've had excellent help. For example, my last class was C++ Data Structures where at times I felt completely lost. But every time I hit a brick wall I sent an email to the prof and the TA including my code begging for a hint. It sometimes took a couple days, but they always spent the time to look at my code, try to compile, and reply with suggestions. Considering many of our projects included seven or eight header/specification files I'd say that's pretty good.
To top that off, during our final project I had a question about vectors, a topic that wasn't covered in class. He had never dealt much with the topic in great depth, so my question stumped him. He spent a week researching the question and testing sample code, emailing me every day about his progress.
The CS degree I'm completing now is my second degree. My first BA is in English, Religion, and Philosophy at Calvin College (back before online schools even existed). I never had a professor skip out, in fact every single prof knew every name in the class. On a few occasions, they even invited students (as a group) to dinner at their houses! The religion department had a weekly tradition of faculty and students taking a walk around campus with cigars and beer!
Maybe I've just been lucky, but I can count on one hand my experiences with bad profs. In the end, though, a college is supposed to facilitate your education; not hold your hand. They should be available for questions and further explanation, but they don't hand it to you on a silver platter.
What I find works well for group projects (papers, particularly) is to appoint a group "editor". They will actually do the writing. As a group, you all get together and determine the outline and form of the document, and what you want to accomplish. Then, divide up the portions of the outline and assign the specific research to each person - but keeping it lighter on the editor - they'll work harder in the end.
:)
This is what ends up happening tho... The outline ends up being too vague. Each person gets one segment of the outline. They take the outline literally, and come up with a paragraph or two for each item, and send it to the "editor".
The editor than bitches that you didn't explain why x, y, and z, you only said what is x, y, and z. You then grumble about how the outline sucked, because it was only one level deep, and didn't contain sub-bullets for any topics, etc.
Editor then pastes everything together, and the guy that had the "conclusion", basically ends up writing the paper, becuase his conclusion is like 2 pages long, becuase it needs to "summarize the thesis", and tie the evidence together, blah blah blah.
In the end, the paper looks like crap, and nobody learned anything.
Online courses - designed & written in USA - but 'delivered' (no longer 'taught') in Australia.
;-)
;-)
(Can't Australian educators write their -own- courses anymore?)
Imagine being an instructor of online iCarnegie courses Down Under...
All it seems to require to 'deliver' one is to pass it first. (Sound like MLM's, doesn't?
Even while 'delivering' it, you're under the thumb of a US-based 'mentor'...
who can question & even re-grade/overturn any of your assessments... at any turn.
Online courseware is full of typo's, grammar errors & other inidications that it was likely written
by anonymous "B Team" authors, or maybe graduate students, who couldn't get a research grant for a term...?
Online multiple choice quizzes can be taken 5 times each; some repeats simply rearrange the -same- questions of a previous one. (Question-pools seem way too small).
Each course (of say 8 weeks) requires purchase of a costly textbook (eg, 1200 pages long), very few, slim parts of which are ever used.
Subsequent course, on same programming language, requires purchase of another huge, costly text, with similarly -slight- utilisation.
Great for the [school-endorsed] book vendor, but -not- so good for the students' budget, let alone the envrionment...
No use of the programming language creator's excellent, costfree tutorial on the langugage (which is available for download from creator-vendor's site), perhaps to help 'sell' the online ourse as being "good for business" (read: the school's choice of bookshop).
Previous reports of 90% -fail- rates of that term's one-and-only-exam, suggest that 'importing' courseware like this sets local students up for failure, ie rather than insisting that -local- instructors take more responsibility
by writing & -teaching- their own courses, tailored to local students (possibly based on, costfree vendor-supplied tutorials where practical (ie, Sun's latest online Java tutorial).
iCarnegie's online context does -not- comprise
a complete course at all. It simply lists the
"required" (&, ocassionally, the odd 'optional')
-readings- from the course's text, adding bits & pieces around the edges... between the online quizzes, exercises & exams, to which students' submissions can be viewed by iCarnegie's 'mentors' as well as local instructors.
(Do Australian instructors -need- this level
of Big Brother supervision? If not, why pay
iCarnegie for it?!? Design & buy -education-
locally. already!)
By Contrast:
At uni, a course instructor once admitted having never before taught the course
he was then teaching (-not- an online course);
Instead, he told us that he found the task
of teaching a course "fresh" gave him -more-
motivation to prepare for each class meeting.
He seemed to be more of a 'teacher' than
the sleepy, local instructors, who simply
'deliver' portions of iCarnegie's online
courses, after passing the same courses once,
themselves. (Remember Amway's "Use your own
products" pitch?
In the iCarnegie online course framework, there's
-no- room for individual excellence to be rewarded in "standardised" inline courses.
You can't propose to do a more challenging or more relavent project than the trivial ones
that comprise the online exercises...
And you -can't- get credit for prior learning
here either (eg, RPL). That should keep the
school's instructors happy: Everybody has to
take every course, need it or not.
If you (eventually) want to reach the (hopefully) more interesting courses,
that come -after- first-term courses... you must wade through all the boring 'basics' first.
Some instrutors show answers to -each- exam's question-pool question
in the class-session before each exam (to reduce the fail-rates obserced in previous terms?)
Training...? Perhaps... but hardly education!
The way it's being 'delivered' in Australia,
at least, online iCarnegie courses really suck!
The big public (i.e. they have listed stocks) companies are DeVry (c'mon, techies should know this one), Strayer, Corinthian College, Career Education Corp, Education Management Corp, and Apollo Group (owner of UoP) and parent of separately-listed UoP Online.
UoP is the "gold standard" because they only do degree programs. The rest have greater or lesser participation in "diploma" programs, which could be anything from art school to diesel mechanics. (Think Sally Struthers, and I'm not talking about hungry kids.)
Two-thirds of the all the for-profit enrollment goes to these institutions. The rest mostly go to numerous privately-owned for-profit colleges.
The big guys all have online programs to some extent, while the little guys are also developing them thanks to online service providers like microcap EVCI, which used to be a videoconference company but now licenses software and acts a service provider for online education to many colleges, including some of the big ones.
All the big colleges are expanding by buying up the smaller institutions. However, already owning 2/3 of the space, they are now finding it tougher to expand profitably and have started buying things like Caribbean medical schools (Ross U.). Because of the way Title IV federal funding for education works, it is much more favorable to by a branch already in operation that to open a new one. To continue to expand, they have to gain students from the non-profit colleges, namely the community colleges.
At quick glance one can't tell a for-profit from a non-for-profit unless you check it out. And it's not clear that you should care too much--many non-profits are run basically for the benefit of administrators and faculty--that's who gets the economic profit!
The big difference used to be the aggressive recruiting by the for-profits, which has since been disallowed because the institutions would price whatever program (degree or diploma) at the level of the government loans and just sing people up, telling them that they didn't have to front any money. Then the poor bastards would graduate (or more often, not) 18 or 24 months later none the wiser, default on their loans, and the institution would still get paid, because the loans are government guaranteed (besides which, they already collected their money). New York state is now changing the law to at least withhold 1/3 of funds until the student actually graduates; it's a small hardship for students to raise the cash ( a few thousand) but will make a huge difference in eliminating the "no-money-down" type programs that really take advantage of people who believe everything they read in subway advertisements.
As you would expect, the for-profits are quicker to sell what they know people want to buy. And many people want cheap, easy degrees. Particularly in government service, it doesn't matter where you get your degree, as long as it's from an accredited institution, which almost all institutions aside from pure diploma mills (and a number of law schools) are. Like people said, I'm sure you could learn a lot online if you were really excited about the material. But most people aren't paying for the material; they are (or should be) paying for the structure and feedback that they need to help (force) themselves to learn the material, just like hiring a personal trainer.
The online degrees may be a great deal for the first people to get them, before employers get wise to the average level of learning completed. Then the backlash will come.
--
I have written some courses, and been a paid consultant to help a small graduate school put some seminars online. I will try to answer some of the questions from the original post before going on a rant. :)
A few questions come to mind: Is this a quality education?
That depends on what your goals are; if you need to get the paper to get a better job then sure! If you need to really do real work with the knowledge you gained, probably not.
Should the professors be required to show what they have done because they don't have a real classroom to attend?
Professors should be required to meet whatever criteria happens in a physical classroom. Sometimes that is not much, if you feel like the professor is not getting watched, your gripe is with the school, not the professor.
How much effort should a professor put forth for an online class?
A great deal. Making a class online is pretty hard, under estimating how much time, effort, and work it takes is common.
Shouldn't professors be required to be a little more techno savvy before they give a course like this?
Absolutely. Either that, or have someone around who is participating in what is going on who can teach the professors, or simply do the work for them. (Especially for a CS or technical class, the Prof. should have good to excellent computer usage skills, their students probably have them.) I constantly ran into not only technical ignorance, but arrogance about the techonology, like somehow if they could not push a mouse in the right direction it was the fault of the mouse. Not the fact they were inept and in way over their heads.
Note however, that the school also has the responsability to put forth enough effort to make the departments capable of teaching online (i.e. $$$). It is not as easy as getting a server farm, buying an expensive whiz-bang pile of software and a couple of grad students to admin the thing. It takes massive effort to teach the professors, the students, and generate the material correctly.
Shouldn't the schools be reevaluating the 'new teaching style' and making some adjustments?
No. They should be rebuilding the entire method used to transfer information from one brain to another.
Ok, here's my rant.
Every single client I ever worked with doing online classes severely underestimated the amount of work the presenter and the institution would need to put forth to put classes online. Not one came to me with even an INKLING of how much work it takes.
Even a "1 day" or "2 day" seminar takes a man-months to produce. Each point, concept, conclusion, idea, and so on has to be articulated in a scripted way (HTML, PDF, images, video, sound or whatever) and put together in a massive outline.
Most clients had the attitude "well, give it to the tech guy and he'll put it in there" without ever once thinking about the fact that the whole classroom model they are used to using is busted and needs to be planned out, created and put back together.br>
Once the big outline is done, THEN the whole thing has to be crammed into whatever method use to present the stuff. Next the professor has to figure out how to run all the stuff, and on top of dealing with their material in a new way, learn to deal with the interface, the new "24-hour" nature of the item, figure out how to keep the student's attention, run discussions and chat, and so on....
A few of the presenters were not even able to articulate themselves differently than their habititual ramblings in a classroom. They would say things, but couldn't TYPE them in a way that was understandable.
Struggling through this, they bitched the whole time about how much money it was costing. My response was, "well, hire your own full time geek or put up." (not in those exact words)
Web pages, and the companies that sell the "online classroom" services are only a
I think too much time is spent "doing" things, and no time is spent actually learning anything.
This is very true of any Computer Science department.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I've been interested in distance education for a number of years... and while there are a number of excellent schools out there, the number of fraudulent or less-than-wonderful programs is growing exponentially. Surprisingly, U of Phoenix, while certainly the most advertised program, is neither the best value nor provides the best education. Thomas Edison State, Charter Oak State, and Excelsior College (all state affiliated schools, NJ, CT and NY, respectively) generally offer much more cost-effective and high quality programs, and there are dozens of other excellent programs out there. Oh... and not to burst a bubble, but the person who mentioned the "fully accredited" degree that he got based on life experience within a few days of applying unfortunately purchased a bogus degree. There are a *lot* of schools that exist only online, operated out of Mailboxes Etc locations, with fake accreditors they've created to attest to their value. One *can* earn a fully accredited undergraduate degree based on life experience, but it typically takes 3-6 months at the absolute minimum to do all of your exams, portfolio documentation, and other work to document your knowledge. The schools who do it based on a resume and a few papers are a scam, and their degrees aren't recognized by anyone in academia, and are often "time bombs" that explode when an employer figures out that the degree is a fake. If you want to learn more about this field and find out about good programs, the website www.degreeinfo.com also has a very large (60,000 messages, 4,000 members) discussion board where all the dirt on practially every DL program that ever existed can be found with a quick search. The newsgroup alt.education.distance is another pretty good resource, though the signal-to-noise ratio, as with all unmoderated newsgroups, is pretty awful.
Well actually my brother got an on-line degree in circumscision. They showed you pictures of where to cut, and which end to cut, and they had Power Point slides about it and everything.
It cost him $48,00 but he has a good job now at the hospital. He gets 100 skins a week, and a chance to get ahead. Really.
He got his certificate by email, and he printed it on his color printer, and it looks really great up on his wall.
He hardly ever makes many mistakes.
It worked for him.
Shorty
The main problem, as I saw it at the time and see it today, was the quality of the content and the effort put forth by the schools and instructors. Many teachers did see it as a way to claim they were teaching X number of course units/term. Some teachers complained that they worked harder on the online courses than on their other courses (to be fair, some of them did.
We dealt with instructors who poured their heart and soul into it and really put an astounding amount of effort into making sure their student had the best possible online course. We considered those instructors to be a pain in the ass, but at least we respected them).
One of the most astounding things I've ever heard was when my boss had to apologize to a very irate instructor, explaining "You're right, that's our fault. I'm very sorry we didn't make it clear that you need to have a computer to teach online courses." This is a large part of the problem...
That being said, just as in the "real world" there are good instructors and bad ones. Ask around, particularly ask for referals from other students, and do your research!
this is getting old and so are you
blog
a big part of going to school is learning to do new things--getting better at the things you're not already good at. Focussing on the stuff you already do well kind of makes the whole exercise moot.
I think I detect sarcasm here but yes. The University of Maryland has a full campus in Germany as do many other schools.
I had civilians in all my classes but you would have to check on the current rules. The German government was starting to enforce quite a few rules concerning taxes etc when I left a few years ago.
If these people had the time to go to a normal college they would. They can't, it's not an option, so it was pretty useless for you to blather on about just going to one, isn't it?
I took an online class for the spring semester. The class really sucked, it took forever to get an answer from the teacher. You pay $300 to teach yourself. That teacher did almost nothing. He dropped many assignments because he was to lazy to grade them. I had a very bad experience with the online class. It was statistics. They also forced me to use Internet Explorer because the application does not support Mozilla based browsers. It is very hard to read small text at 1600x1200 since you can't zoom with IE.
Maybe the best place for these online classes is as a way to teach the things that you never really wanted to learn in the first place and that you'll likely forget about as soon as you get that diploma.
I'm taking classes at a VERY expensive college in Boston, upwards of $15K a semester (with tuition, books, paying off the expensive Boston dorm/apartment, etc.). In order to take some nice $80 credits, I enrolled at Bunker Hill Community College for some gen eds. My major requires me to take History of Art and another unspecified 3 credit gen ed course. Bunker Hill offers both of these as courses with little time spent on campus. History of Art (Bunker Hill calls it "Art Appreciation") is a web course with assigned reading and tests every couple of weeks. The nonspecified gen ed I chose was "Sociology of Film", which requires you to watch a film on your own time every week and answer some short essays about the film.
The reason I like taking these courses as web courses is because: I really don't care that much. I'm sorry, but I'm a music major. I understand that the whole history of art thing is important, but when I took History of Art 1 last semester, I did nothing but sleep through the classes. The web class allows me to work at my own pace, pick up what I can, and allow lack of sleep or other necessary courses to take precedence if I need to put something ahead of it. The Film course is actually moderately amusing, but again, it keeps me from having to spend an hour on the subway twice a week to go out to Somerville to talk about it. (Like the discussion in that class would be that great. "I ARE TEH SMARTY PANTS CUZ I UNDERSTAND MEANING BEHIND TERMINATOR 2!!!!1")
Now, if I was told that my favorite music classes were going to become web classes only, like the composition classes where I sit around and get feedback on my projects from the teacher and other students, or the project classes where I learn to work with different music software, I would complain. I would in no way take those classes at home. But I think it's safe to say that just about every college student has a class in their schedule that they're being "forced" to take. A web class allows me to work when it's convenient and concentrate on the classes that are more important to me.
Now I just pray some humorless grinch doesn't mod me down as a troll for saying I don't want to learn anything...
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Hehe - sux0rs to you fux0rs - CC ALL THE WAY - 13th grade is the bestest- me fail english? thats unpossible AT CCRI - booya!
I am just finishing up two courses online in the Master's Degree program in astronomy from the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. It is very low tech: 2 power point presentations and some reading every 2 weeks, and a private newsgroup. At a minimum, you are required to post one question and one answer to someone else's question every two weeks. Most of us seem to do a lot more. In both courses the instructors are very involved with the discussion group, clarifying answers, posting questions to be researched, and making comments. Your grade is dependent on the frequency and quality of your postings (plus a 3-4 page essay, a 10-12 page project, and two online tests). You have a separate advisor for the project; they try to match the projects with someone whose specialty is close to what you are researching. This experience has been fantastic...perhaps the enthusiasm of the students (no one here just to get a degree, all out of an interest in astronomy) brings out the best in the instructors.
If you think the whole idea is sketchy.. why not just go to a real school and not a virtual one.
My daughter takes her high school instruction
entirely online. The organization which runs
the school is extremely high calibre, and I would
urge anyone with a child who's skill set and
character are not suited to public schooling to
investigate such an arrangement.
My daughter's school is a bit too affected by the
traditional paradigms of quality education, in my
opinion -- after all, we homeschooled her in her
elementary years precisely because we wanted the
flexibility and control which homeschooling implies,
so that it doesn't take a great deal of teacher
involvement to overflow our preferred boundaries.
But in view of the excellence of the instruction
and the benefits of rigorous deadlines (which
always tended to slide a bit too much when two
busy parents were in charge of managing them),
it's well worthwhile to make the trade-off in our
case.
This particular school is only suitable to a
student with highly involved parents or superhuman
autonomous motivation, and a high level of native
ability, but I think the range of choices out
there today are wide enough to accomodate a
wide variety of life- and learning- styles.
I'm sorry you got a bad apple. Usually, only the
best instructors get the opportunity to teach
classes on a telecommuting basis, with all of the
personal benefits that implies, but anyone can
choose to slack off at any time, so it is
inevitable that some people will have substandard
experiences with distance education.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Raw brains are going to be outsourced to "emerging" countries more and more. The onshore work will increasingly be social-driven. Face-time is a must.
Now I agree that perhaps some of the already-social majors like marketing, communications, etc., could get something out of online courses, but natural techies need to be around people more. It is like vegitables: we don't like 'em, but they are good for us.
Table-ized A.I.
Hi,
There is an alternative outside the United States. Go have a look at the University of South Africa.
Don't let the Africa fool you. It has been around for 130 years and currently has about 500 000 students world-wide. Their postal and assignment system is just amazing considering all the students. Anything else I can mention to show that the only thing 'African' about it is its location and Student Council, would put someone here on a rascist crusade so I'll refrain.
I hope the moderators mod up your post (and a few other posts in this general part of the thread), because you have some worthwhile things you say.
As for the practice of charging what the market will bear, I believe this is a universal practice. The not-for-profits have a lot more sophistication in the way they do this, but the bottom line is, the schools know there is a lot of money available that students can obtain (loans, grants, gifts, etc.), and people will pay almost anything a school asks. If the school is too expensive, the government (from the tax-payers) will pay it. This is the reason that the cost of a college education has risen much faster than the rate of inflation for the last 30 years.
Eight years ago, I took out my first college loan (up to that point, I had always been able to pay my school bill without loans), and I attended 4 semesters. Five years ago, I bought a 3 year-old pickup truck. I paid off the pickup truck last year without any mistakes made by the loan holders. I am still paying off the college loan, and the loan holders dinged my credit report when they screwed up noting my payment. And, would you like to guess which product has earned me more money? Hint: it has never let me down when I needed it.
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)
I'd be seriously leery of degrees from some online universities. The University of Phoenix, for example, is well known as a diploma mill - it exists primarily to give degrees to people who want the degrees to get more money - and who are often paying for the courses through their employers. Since such students don't usually get reimbursed for poor grades, it is in the schools interest to ensure that everyone does well. And people I know who've worked for such places (not just UOP but similar places) admit that the instructors who give good grades are better off than those who give realistic grades.
I checked with some online schools (*cough* Phoenix *cough*) and some of them wanted the same amount of money as a regular college. I mentioned the fact that I don't get use of their facilities, gymnasium, extracurricular, etc and questioned why it was the same price. They didn't have an answer.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a ripoff.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Frankly, I was highly unimpressed with the uni I attended. The classes sucked and were too crouded. Most of the profs "skated by". Ever so often there was a glitter of light from a class or prof. The few true geeks flocked those profs to it like moths to an open flame.
Higher education did three things for me.
1) pay raise when I got done.
2) gave me enough free time to learn what I really needed to learn to make a living.
3) gave me a strong desire NEVER to go back.
A couple years back I thinking of doing the online education. First two places I looked at required the student to run Windows. The search ended.
Looking today at the System Requirements and Support:
To run the University of Phoenix Online Access Software, you will need Windows 95, 98, ME or 2000.
This is just wrong.
yeah, I am taking traffic school for the third time this year. For the many times I have been clocked or have collided with roadside objects, wild animals and pristine rocks, I still have a perfect record and I think its a pretty damn good deal. All you have to do is copy&paste the sections (it gives you four hours to read through them), and then do simple lookups. I feel a safer driver now ;)
Is anyone aware of a good onlince CS or IT degree online? Most I find, odly enough, are Masters programs. I already have one undergraduate degrees (in Management) but have worked in system administration for the last 7 years. I'd like another degree, probably in CS-- IT studies wouldn't be bad, though.
...In that the quality of instruction (and work ethic of the instructors) will vary widely based on the skills of the person in front of the class. Don't base the merits of online classes on the basis of a sample size of 1. After spending 23 years to finish my BS (all in face to face classes, since much of my work predated the WWW), I completed an MS program during the last 4. I did about half of my classes online. The quality of classes was independent of delivery method (f2f vs. online)....the instructor was the sole variable. Online is different than face to face, and your instructors will have different levels of confort with using online tools as instruments of teaching. In the hands of a skilled teacher, online sections give introverts a chance, keep you off the highways and add flexibility to your schedule...don't judge based on a single experience...
I've been working on my BSCS for 2.5 years now, all online. Sometimes the classes suck from a students perspective and sometimes they are right on. Sometimes it depends on the professor. If you get a professor that is actually interested in what he is doing then it doesnt really matter how he presents to material to you. If he is a slaker then, yes, the course is not going to be as informative as it should be. This is my second degree, my first being a five year pharmacy degree. Is there really a difference? Not really. I remember really bad class experiences in my face to face classes also and those negative experiences seemed to occured with the same frequency. Most importantly, I dont think it really matters how you obtain your material or how the tests are set up, it's whether or not you are motivated to learn the material. I have learned a hell of a lot more with my CS degree then I ever did in pharmacy school. Perhaps it is because I am more motivated and less drunk. ;)
-z(p)
Possibly no one will admit it, but a degree based on web-based courses has a serious lack of credibility. Some of the people who attended class to earn their degree are likely to look down on this form of alternative education. I suspect this type degree puts you last in the employment line at many companies.
If you already have a job, and want to fill a square, showing a piece of paper, this may be all well and good. If you're starting a career, this sort of thing can be a black mark against you.
I'm speaking specifically here of web-based courses, not distance education, which is another thing entirely.
I'm taking an online project management class from Hampton Group. I would learn ten times as much, ten times as fast, and for one tenth the price; if I just got a book and read it.
The only thing "on line" about it is that I mail the assignments. I never understand what the instructor wants, I have to guess until the assignment is "good enough."
That these schools make so much, for so little is amazing to me.
This is particularly true of programming, which I am beginning to suspect is never actually taught anywhere, because everyone has theories about programming, but no one has any science. All that exists in the programming world are fads and baseless dogmatic assertions.
May I suggest Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein? If you like the material, The Art of Computer Programming (three volumes) by Knuth is very detailed and very heavy on the math. If one does a thorough read of The Art of Computer Programming and take the time to understand it, I don't see how one could not improve one's programming.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
NO
I teach at the University of Phoenix, undergraduate IT courses. As an instructor, I publish my phone numbers, my IM address, and respond to e-mails within 24 hours, and generally much quicker than that. I don't remember EVER having that type of access to any of my instructors, other than my Master's Advisor. As has already been mentioned, there are good and bad instructors out there, especially since intructors in online environments tend to be paid less than the minimum wage (well, we're professionals!!) However, there are also good and bad students out there. There is a small percentage of students who feel that just because the classes are online, that they deserve an A, whether or not they've earned it or not. There are also a lot of students who feel that they deserve an A because of "life experience," but don't even try to learn anything new. All in all, I enjoy teaching at the University of Phoenix. I learn a lot from my students, and my students learn a lot just from helping out each other in the main classroom and on the group projects.
With the wealth of knowledge available on the Internet, there's really no longer any benefit to going to college except to meet people and get that piece of paper called a degree. And with online schools, you don't even meet people, not face to face at least. You're basically just paying money to learn at a slower pace and get a piece of paper that says you attended all the required classes. I've never tried an online school though.
I hope to leave college with a girlfriend and a piece of paper to show to employers saying that I know what I already knew before attending. I do make sure to take everything new that they have to offer, but most of it is just practicing old skills or taking non-cs classes.
You don't go to colleges to learn anymore. It's more of an initiation ritual you must go through to be allowed into the elite upper middle class, and possibly your last chance to find a decent spouse if you don't have one already. Attending an online college might only help you attain one of those goals. Again, I've never attended an online college so I can't be certain.
I teach online classes (C++ and Databases)at a local community college and therefor see the issues from another side. 1. I spend more time on an online class than lecture classes due to answering piles of emails and writing up literate lecture notes to post as well as other issues. 2. more so than in class, online students need to be persistent with their issues, email til you get the answer you need 3. 'you get back what you put in' applies even more 4. the student must be VERY disciplined about study habits 5. there is no substitute for personal contact 6. take online courses only if you can't take live classes (mainly because of #5) jim
Some posters have expressed that working when you want is liberating. At the same time, it can be overly consuming for a perfectionist.
I have a class that meets 2 hours in person each week; the 3rd hour that we get credit for is done using online group discussions. The nice thing about class is when I'm there, I participate, and when I leave, I'm done - it's out of my mind. But the discussions online never end; I am always replying to something or someone; it never ends. It never closes. It's very stressful. I think about revisions and new things to say all the time. It's overly consuming for me! I would not do this again!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
In the UK we have had the OU (Open University) for quite a long time now. The primary way of teaching there was TV programs and texts (radio/cassettes and now the internet as well), with some element of face-to-face work over the summer. I think its fair to say this has been succesful way to learn for hundreds of thousands [they have 158k undergrads atm] of people, and the relative ranking of the OU in league tables and the like is competitive with many good "real" universities. [Slightly OT, but their internet developments look interesting, they claim 17k email/chat messages a day and a "virtual arena" holding 100k participants, see http://www.open.ac.uk]
So with this example in mind theres certainly no reason why online education, by its very nature, *has* to be bad. If possible though, I would suggest looking for a course with some "face time" invovled, even if its just a fortnight of summer school. I've been involved in tutoring at these and students have told me its make all the difference to them; particularly in terms of motivation and self-confidence (which are Very Important in getting through it obviously)
To be honest its hard to comment further without more detail; certainly you have every right to raise any problems you have with the institution. --sorry if this sounds negative-- but even within the bricks and mortar world profs can be aloof, apparently lazy (at least as regards teaching) and arbritary in their rules about things. And to be even more honest, the fact that college students are in that little world with all its trappings (and are usually quite young) means often they get away with it. Its perhaps possible that distance is just giving you a degree of objectivity? Which of course, in no way means you are wrong to be pissed off about it.Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
A student of mine directed me to this posting,and after reading it, I thought I would respond to it from a teacher's perspective. I always read information about the quality of online teaching because it is still so controversial, but I rarely come across an article from a studentâ(TM)s perspective. I found most of your comments enlightening. Teaching online should be a choice, never a requirement. It is a venue that many teachers are not equipped to use, so naturally students are going to come across a bad experience now and then. But that will happen in the traditional classroom as well. Taking an online class is not for everyone either. I teach online because of the one on one I can give my students. I teach traditional classes as well and I know how much more time I spend with my online students. Simply having warm bodies in a traditional classroom does not make it conducive to learning. It also does not permit all students to ask questions because of the lack of time. I use IM to communicate with students (I do so with my traditional classes as well), so they get more one on one than they would if they depended on discussion board comments and office hours only. I have to add that teaching online is very time consuming, and instructors set limits for their own involvement. They have to because it is very easy to spend hours online communicating with students. It takes hours to comment on discussion board postings, etc. I teach two sections of Composition II online year round. I wish I could teach more, but my school has a cap on hour many online class hours one may teach. But trust me. There is nothing easy about teaching online, but then if you really love teaching, there is nothing easy about teaching period. It is challenging and ever-changing. That is why I put my heart and soul into it. I am so glad online classes are available for those who desire to take their courses that way. I hope your online experience ends better than it started : )
Professor Deb Richey
Owens Community College
Toledo, Ohio
I think there are some classes that just can't effectively be taught online. One glaring example is Public Speaking. My college offers it as an online class. I heard they did taped speeches and such. How am I supposed to perfect my "pretend everyone is in their underware" technique with out a public audience in front of me?
Ha! Not that having a degree will tell anyone that you know anything at all. I work for one of the top College of Educations in the country at the local Uni. While we do have distance ed(mostly WebCT, some HorizonLive - 2 if I remember correctly), it boils down to the prof giving someone else their course materials and asking them to put it online. Then, of course, they have to be shown, repeatedly(!), how to access the course themselves. Distance education can only work when the people that want to teach over this medium learn what it is, how it works and most importantly, what the drawbacks are. Like most people with a less than deep understanding of tech, professors seem to believe that computing is a panacea to all that ails modern education. Pffft.
I was asked to teach an online course at San Jose, for about $2,000. I'm not a professor, and don't have a graduate degree, but my name had been passed along as someone with expertise in the field. From the negotiations it became clear that online studies were seen by the university as a money-making operation, on a par with the continuing-education classes that most schools offer. I ended up passing on the job because of other commitments although it seemed like easy money (just a few hours per week). It certainly seemed like students got a lot less out of the online course.
That said, learning programming, even in a traditional classroom setting, is primarily a student-driven experience. You don't learn how to code setting in a lecture, you learn by practicing on your own.
So, I would not want to take an onloine course in the humanities and certainly not in biology or chemistry, but I would consider it for CS. Sometimes all you need is a little motivation. Having a deadline provides that, and an online course may be end up being little more than the minimal structure you need to learn the stuff on your own.
every stain tells a story
I took an English Comp class as an online course, and the experience has led me to never want to take another online course again.
The first class everyone was required to show up to an actual classroom for introduction, etc. The prof handed out the assignments for the entire semester, with instructions on how to log on and upload the assignments. I did all the assigned work up until the mid term, but I never got any of my work corrected and returned until the day before the midterm. Her excuse was "sorry my home computer has been acting up and I've been busy getting my Masters". Having no feedback was utterly useless. I could have just bought the book and studied on my own. Heck, that's basically what I did [1]. After taking the midterm, and never getting feedback from that, I quit making any effort.
Since English Comp is mostly writing, I thought it would be one thing that would work best as an online class. Obviously the instructor was at fault, but it is a common problem a lot of people face.
[1] Perhaps that explains my incoherrent postings on slashdot.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Withholding Tution Assistance money from students in New York State, while raising tution in the State University of New York system and cutting programs that help low SES students (like the Educational Opportunity Program) constitutes more than "small hardship". In fact, many students will not be able to afford to continue their college education.
Never attended an online course myself although I have considered it. If convenience is a primary concern, you might also look for a traditional program for working adults, which usually meet on weekends for about 4 hours. It's not as bad as it sounds. This is the option I went with and I'm nearing the end of my MBA. The bottom line here is that you shouldn't expect more than you put into your course. Nobody ever says, "If you give me $1, I'll give you $20 in return!" Motivate yourself. Get involved. Be resourceful. Some people are motivated and some are not. Remember: professors are people too.
The quality of ANY 'online' education is directly related to how well the subject material can be adapted to said online environment.
;-)
If the course involves nothing but writing/reading, or writing computer code, then yes; it should be able to adapt fairly well to being taught online.
It would, on the other wing, be extremely difficult (if not impractical) to teach, say, courses in electronics over the 'net. This is simply because really -learning- electronics, chemistry, or any of the other physical sciences requires a hands-on lab environment with specialized equipment.
Until we develop 'holodeck' technology, I don't see how it would be possible to effectively teach such courses online. However, if someone knows of a system that can teach good hands-on electronic assembly skills, or techniques of component-level troubleshooting, I would love to hear about it.
So, in summary; it sounds to me like the course you're taking, although adaptable to an online environment, is indeed suffering from incompetence or laziness at the teaching level. I would not only complain to the school involved, I would also get in touch with your local state board of education, and tell them what's going on. At the very least, they may be able to start some sort of investigation.
Good luck.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
but I kinda missed going to all my lectures, my revision consisted of downloading the lecture slides off the web and skimming them. And my exam is in 5 hours time... I'll let you know after I've finished that :)
the primary advantage of online courses is that they can be completed in a shorter period of time than on-campus courses. I have friends in academia , and am familiar with the bias you describe. Frankly academics are the last group of people that should be speculating on the motivations of people that work for a living.
Meetings: None Of Us Is As Dumb As All Of Us.
http://www.despair.com/meetings.html
> I am sure this is the way to go in the future... Are you sure about that? Here in my College online education NEVER replaces presential education, it is used only to complement it. There are somethings that online education is good at, mind you, but it can't substitute the real experience for a lot of reasons, such as zones of proximal development, education in a social context and don't get me started on cheating in exams.
--
Karma is overrated, whoring is ok.
The jackass was using Office XP on Windows XP to create his online lesson plans, which ended up full of little question marks since he didn't give a shit about people being able to read what he had written, like certain anonymous pussies on Slashdot.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Damn, where are my mod points when I need them. I especially liked how you brought the offtopic post back in line with the original article. Nice job.
The question should be -
Is the quality of online education high or low?
Quality is a word that has to be used with a modifier to make any sense. Poor quality, low quality, high quality, best quality, etc.
What do you mean no parking? If you get in early enough you can snag one of a couple of spots by Tyler Hall. Otherwise just park by Fine Arts or Keaney!! >:)
That is, if you meant the university of Rhode Island. I got my B.S. there in 1998. Trust me, people have been complaining about parking there for an eternity.
so i'm an online student at stanford. it rocks. of couse, they charge $3597 (no joke) per class, so you pay for what you get. not only that, but my MS actually means something (yeah, eat that UOP). i will add that its fucking difficult to get a decent grade when everyone else is on campus and actually does the homework. i hate having to rely only on myself and not meeting cool new people like in undergrad. i highly reccomend NOT taking an online degree, and enrolling in university solely for the support you get from other people. the money from work isn't nearly as important as the people you will meet and make friends with.
I got a traffic violation while on business in Pismo Beach, California. I am from Texas. webtrafficschool.com gave me an excellent learning experience and saved me from the insurance costs of having an unclean driving record.
The course material was informative and relatively enjoyable in comparison to other Defensive Driving classes I have taken. I received excellent value for my $25 payment.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
This gives you a lot of faith in the kind of screening they do at the national weapons labs and at Homeland Security!
But this was not a note taking class. There were plenty of other classes where I had to take my own notes, record the lecture, etc. I just happened to like this prof's teaching style. (He also happened to be the chair of the EE board)
The point of this class was to teach us EE. To use a very bad analogy, its like when you give a PowerPoint presentation at work. Do you distribute the foils before hand, or do you make everyone there take notes as you go over the slides?
While its not like he was a hard @ss about it. I'm sure most people ended up jotting some notes in the class notes every once in a while. I still have mine tho, and I didn't write much in it. Most of the stuff I wrote in it, was afterwards, when I was studying for exams and such.
"I am starting to get a bad taste in my mouth about the amount of effort that some of my professors are putting forward in my courses. I feel like some of them are ?skating? and all I am paying for is a book, a posted syllabus, and a final exam. "
Whos doing the work? your professors, or you?
This reads like "WAAAHHH, it's too much work! I feel duped because I thought I had an easy ride!!"
and nothing more!
I teach at a large East Coast state university. I've done some summer teaching for the school's for-profit adult education program; a "classroom" 200-level course, and then the next summer an online version of the same course. I got paid the same amount both times. Imagine my surprise when I looked at the program's course catalog and saw that the tuition fee for the online version was twice as much as the classroom version. The adult ed program just pocketed the difference.
I agree that the interaction is actually better in some ways -- I require students to respond to one another's discussion posts, and everybody participates, with nobody hiding in the back row, and students in course evaluations said they really appreciated that -- but the tuition costs are a ripoff.
And besides which, I'm pretty doubtful about the benefits of being able to log on to your course at 2 AM. If you're taking online courses in order to be able to work at the same time, that sounds like a good recipe for a really crappy education and too much stress in your life. If you want a good education, please, give it the appropriate time and attention.
If you aren't going into research, a PhD is worth very little; if you are, a PhD from a no-name institution is similarly useless.
But i do know about an online highschool, specificly, Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. Its a public high school (free) that i go to. It uses a realtime "classroom" program with a "whiteboard" for everyone to write on, voice chat, and text chat. The program is called Centra client (or something like that) and is hosted by Nexus Learning. Most of my classes are an hour long, and are quite enjoyable. Ive met some nice people and teachers, and some weird people too. Overall its pretty cool, i only have one more day of school left this year!
Universities don't care how well courses are taught or who teaches them. This goes for bircks-and-mortar as well as ether-and-wire universities.
:-)
Academia is focused on publishing. A lot of articles out there in any field are sheer rubbish. But, quantity not quality counts. When an academic is forced to publish, s/he can't spend too much time in the classroom, even if it's a virtual one. At least with an on-line classroom, it's easier to ignore this attitude.
As for PDF virii, I'd copy the message from your prof to the university's IT department (or whoever gave you the IP numbers/software needed for the course), CC-ing your prof, and ask "what can I do?". Listing any known PDF virii would be an added help
Lots of information about online learning here:
DegreeInfo
Some people have to go to work to pay their bills. Some people can pay their bills without going to work. That's the way the world is. Bills are about money; not about work.
Similarly, when it comes to grasping concepts and developing an understanding of math and science, there are as many different ways of acquiring this knowledge as there are types of students, and the types of learning materials and aids that work best for them. Those with a passion for genius understand that sometimes it is beneficial to bend the educational experience to suit the individual. Sometimes this can be an expensive proposition, but often, having flexibility in how the knowledge is gained, and proven, can save students lots of time and money. More importantly, flexibility in educational settings can allow students, especially gifted students, to plow through the material at their own pace.
If a student knows as much as a student who successfully completes a similar course, at the same class level, that student should, at a minimum, be allowed to prove it.
Having a thorough understanding of your college professor is different from mastery of a particular subject at a particular class level. Having a thorough understanding of yourself, and your strengths and weaknesses as a student is unrelated to the mastery of a particular subject at a particular class level. Not that the teacher is not important. The teacher is very important, and the student needs to have a desire to learn. But the teacher is not the subject of the class, the teacher is not what we are supposed to be studying; the student is not the subject of the class, we are not supposed to be studying the student, we are supposed to be studying the class material.
The concept of equivalency is very important. Do we go to class for the purpose of going to class or do we go to class to learn about a particular subject at a particular level and complexity of knowledge? This applies to online or brick and mortar courses; they have these similarities.
The "Social Life of Information", a book written by researchers at Xerox PARC, has a very good critic of Online Education. I highly recommend it.
well, shewt, when I need a good edumacashin, I just long on ta tha newt, and I get a grate educamushun from them quaker three folks. I mean, thems are aschuling me reel well allwritey. yeehaw!
Wow, must be a tough program if you lost you're now unemployed, divorced and childless. But hey, congrats on the degree!
Congratulations! Your story has given me some hope. Thank you.
I'm three classes short of a degree from a private school. Basically I failed the classes last semsester. My parents don't have any more money for me to go to school and I need a job. But I need a degree for HR to consider me.
Can you provide links to such programs that can offer me a quick degree based on my previous transcript and life experiences - thanks!
Of course, it all depends on the coursework, the prof, and the TA. I have a couple of stories here, bear with me.
My cousin is now attending the same university that I did 10 years ago. He is taking CS, and is considering changing majors. We were just talking this weekend at his brothers wedding, and he was relaying his opinions to me. He talked about one prof, one that I had trouble with initially, and said he is too tough, he is out of touch, etc. After I graduated, I realized that that prof was the best teacher I had. He was tough, but I learned a lot in his classes. I thought it was interesting that my cousin had the same opinion of him. I told him what I thought, but I think he is still going to get out of CS.
My wife got her Masters a couple of years ago (French linguistics) and during that time she was a student teacher. Her experience was NOTHING like what I had with TAs when I tool classes. She taught a minimum of two classes a semester. And when I say taught, I mean fully taught. No prof ever had anything to do with the class. She had to come up with all the lesson plans, collaborate with other student teachers to come up with tests (for the same class levels), teach, grade homework and essays, the whole experience. WHILE she was getting her Master's full time, and working part time. One of her friends was a TA in biology, got more money for his student teaching, and only had to teach one lab. Needless to say, the foreign language department there was a little rougher on the student teachers. (TAs == student teachers, at least there they were)
I called in sick to work one day and went to spend a long weekend with her. I went to one of her 200 level classes, and sat in on it. The students were giving presentations. They were some of the most gawd-awful things I have seen. One guy ran a Pepe Le Pew cartoon, then gave a couple of phrases in French at the end. All the others were less memorable. She was only a couple of years older than these kids, but even she was apalled at their apathy towards school. Of course there were a few that cared, but most didn't. They would bring McDonalds into her classroom, and she would ask them to leave. One guy showed up with 10 minutes LEFT in the class. They were taking cell-phone calls during class. She did her best to keep them in line, but damn, college kids are self centered lazy bastards. I would say about 75% fell into this category, from the two classes I saw.
So after she graduated, she got a job teaching French to 6-8 graders at a private school for gifted kids. They are still kids, and they provide moments of tension too, but it is such a different world. I have seen some of the projects these kids turn in, and they are awesome. One girl did a French anime-style comic book. It was about 10 pages, and it was good - and it was only a homework assignment! Granted, these kids are smart - one kid got a perfect 36 on his ACT as a 5th grader - but the complete 180 between college kids and pre-teens was amazing. Because these kids do care, and do put forth effort, my wife has been able to grow as a teacher too. She is challenged to teach them well. After only one full year teaching at university level, she was getting burned out and struggling to care. She felt that the students just did not care about their classes. When she started, she thought the profs were just lazy, but after seeing what they had to deal with she understood a little better WHY they were so burned out. I can't imagine teaching like that for 20 years.
So there are definitely two sides to this fence, and while the poster of this question may truly want to learn and be one of those good students, there are a lot more out there who have beaten those profs down to where they don't care anymore. The best you can do is give them a reason to care. If you do that, they will warm up to you. They are teachers, after all, so they want to teach you. They certainly aren't doing it for the money.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I'm currently attending AIO (Art Institute Online) and I'm quite happy with it. There are bugs that need to be worked out, but overall it's been a positive experience. The classes are very structured, everything is planned in advance. Our teachers are actually labeled "facilitators" so that's letting you know that their job isn't to "teach" a class but to conduct the class. This involves a lot of self-learning. We have textbooks, we have lectures, we have additional reading on the web and we have assignments. Most weekly assignments include discussion questions, exercises or writing (depending on the class) and posting responses to others work, including critiques. There is a lot of writing, and they expect thoughtful and meaningful posts. I have some teachers who were uninvolved, but for the most part my teachers have been very helpful. They answer questions quickly, respond to each student's work send you weekly grading etc. I've even talked to a few on the phone. The work has been challenging. I've written 15 page term papers and created full-blown Director presentations. The students who come in from the "ground" school often complain, because it's too much for them to handle. All that to say... I don't think I'm being cheated.
I attend the American College of Computer and Information Sciences. It is an online-only university. As such, some of your gripes about unavailability, idleness, they go away. My academic advisor has always been very prompt replying to my questions, and unlike the "general chat" forum you have described, there are actual chat lectures that go on, with time for questions and so forth. I think that ACCIS is particularly excellent in their ability to accomodate my educational needs. When I went to a UC college (never finished there), I paid extraordinary prices for a mumbled, broken-english professor who really just wanted to crawl back to his research lab anyway. On top of that, half the classes were taught by TA's who just graduated last year in the same subjects. At about $100 per credit hour, with a kind transfer ability, I'm in and out for far less. At ACCIS, there's no research going on, no other things to attend to, so the online education is their only business. As far as course complexity, I ranked it on par or better than my curriculum from the University of California. The math classes were more computer-science oriented than what I was used to, but having been in the field of software engineering for about 8 years now, it's far more useful on average, unless you are doing computer graphics (in which case all math is relevant, even the evil stuff).
I took 10 credit hours worth of classes online. It was on LAN and WAN's for my Networking Degree. Anyway, I was pretty neutral about the experience. I did like the "whenever and whereever" aspect, but I found myself spending more time reading the book and not being able to practically apply my materials. Besides, nothing beats being able to talk to an instructor face to face. The message boards weren't very helpful either, and the instruction was vague on the syllabus. I would email the instructor and he wouldn't give me a specific answer. On top of that I get A's on everything the whole year and end up with a B! Apparently my final project didn't cut it, but it was incredibly difficult to know because I couldn't get a straight answer. All in all, Online courses can be beneficial in some ways, but make sure it's on topics that you already have some experience with (like a 202 or 303 type course).
disclaimer: I am a sysadmin at UMUC. I am also a student.
Online education isn't for everyone, and it's not the same as going to college. But like college, there are good and bad faculty. A good college has more good than bad, and strives to improve what they have.
UMUC (www.umuc.edu) has been doing distance education for over 50 years. We also do in-person education, in Maryland, Germany and Japan (we started out catering to the military, and still count many of them as students). We are a university in the U of Maryland system, abd we are non-profit.
Undergrad curriculum is developed by a rather large curriculum development group, not just by faculty, and each class, no matter who the instructor is, uses a standard body of material. Testing material varies, but techjniques and policies don't much, and faculty can supplement with additional material as they see fit.
Graduate faculty have greater latitude with their materials, so there is a little more variability there. However, classes are top notch.
All classes use our in-house developed WebTycho system to deliver the course. We have a walk-through at the website if you want to take it for a spin.
We are not a reasearch university, and as a result we draw many instructors whose primary interest is teaching, rather than those who view it as a burden.
Any university has some sort of feedback system to report your displeasure with your instructor -- do so. You will be doing yourself and others a favor. Perhaps the system used isn't to your liking, perhaps the prof or the class wasn't. You might try online ed one more time with a different prof and subject -- they don't all adapt equally to the medium.
I've attended three different universities and other than the part-time night professors at one of them, I had the same experience at all three. It's all busy work just to get you that piece of paper. You don't seem to learn anything useful.
I think your experience with the professors not putting effort wouldn't be different than at a typical school. Professors at universities are there for the research money and the classes are just a side thing that have to do to keep there job.
I completely agree with you. However, that seems to only make sense for a medium to large project... But for writing a 2 page paper?!!!
I, for one, am damn sick of profs deducting marks for missed classes. I'm a "mature" student (i.e. didn't enrol until I was 26) and work full-time with messed up hours all over the week. Scheduling in 2 or 3 classes a week for an entire year is a great burden on myself and my employer and circumstances or shift schedule means I typically miss a couple of classes each month.
Occassionally I get one of these professors that deduct 1% for each class missed I try and explain to them my circumstances. Out of the 4 or so I've encountered, only ONE has ever said he'd turn a blind eye to my coming in late or missing lectures. Neither the fact I have a family, job, distant home or 4.0 GPA would convince the other profs. I dropped 2 of the other profs' classes and suffered through one.
Like the post I'm responding to, I found almost every one of his lectures a waste of time. Needless to say I gave him one crappy evaluation and when I handed in my final exam told him he'd never see me in another of his undergraduate classes.
> Our company swears by Lotus Notes which means most documents are pored over by huge teams of people, everyone submits a comment or two which must be incorporated, and you end up with something truly collaborative that often doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
This is the same reason why Wikis don't work for technical documentation. It's the "litterbox" model where everyone just drops off their crap. The reader is left to sift through the resulting mess for something useful.
A better model is still the "central maintainer" model, where an accountable person or team reviews changes and tries to incorporate the good ones in a cohesive way. It's scalable if you use hierarchies of reviewers. Most large Open Source projects handle their source code in this manner.
"A lot" is two words.There will be a test after today's lesson.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
From an online course near you:
I ask you... what's -wrong- with
this ordered list:
"Let's now consider the layers of software
that make up a computer system:
- User-Written Scripts or Macros
- User Interface
- Application
- Run-time Library
- Application Program Interface
- Operating System
- Kernel
- Device Drivers
- BIOS
- (Hardware)"
Eg: Kernel is part of the Operating System
No. The sentence parses differently than what
I intended. I meant that my son was 4yrs old
when I started. I'm still married and the kid
is now almost 7yrs old.
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
If you are still there, you should take EE450, it'll come in handy in the job market....
Your posts and along with others point out what I think the original thread author alludes to is the problem is not with University of Phoenix but with the instructor as with many college instructors whether online or brick and mortar.
There is an "inside joke" among the reformers of higher education that basically goes --
Since the late 1980's after Chickering and Gameson published the now classic Seven Best Teaching Principles for Undergraduate Education * after extensive research, there has been a quiet revolution to reform college teaching practices and promote effective teaching practices including eliminating the famous "dancing with the blackboardâ so common in the math and science departments and replace it with pedagogically, effective active learning.
I am finishing an online post-Masters degree (Specialist) in preparation of a doctoral studies both from the University of Missouri and it has been an excellent experience. Of course, it helps that it is offered by the College of Education, a radical departure for me since my previous three degrees are from the Business School. It has taught me a great deal about human learning theory and effective teaching practices on my way to earning a PhD in the sociology of knowledge. I have been teaching college and adult education part-time for almost 20 years and for the most part, I have been doing things right. I just know why now and how to be more effective. As a statistics instructor, I vowed to face my students and talk to them and not the chalkboard the first time I taught in 1984 because I always hated that when I was a student.
My suggestion to anyone including the original thread author is to make sure you complete the student evaluations with specific comments. The best time to improve the course is early in the course. Write the instructor and tell them what you arenâ(TM)t receiving and what you would change. If that doesnâ(TM)t work go to the next level. Instructors do take evaluations seriously but without feedback and specific remarks from students about what to change; they cannot âoetweak the course.â The online classroom really lends itself to provide a rich learning environment but if the students do not tell the instructor he/she is doing a lousy job, how does the instructor know? Since the UofP is in the business to make money, believe me they are going to give your student feedback even more weight then the average institution.
-Regards, Robin
Murphy's Law: There is never enough time to do it right; but there is always time to do it over.
---------
Portfolio: http://www.missouri.edu/~ryh352/portfolio
Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/flatfilsoc/
~ Our Future arrived Yesterday! ~
* NOTES:D evCom/guidebk/teachtip/7princip.htm
Chickering, A.W. and Gamson, Z.F. (1987; Reprint 1991). Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education . http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/Fac
Unfortunately, human learning theory is not that simple. Depending on which learning style theory one selects for categorization, there are 3 -5 different styles of learning. The major point is we all do not all learn in the same way and under the same conditions -- particularly regarding subject matter and learning environment.
In fact, success in graduate school is somewhat dependent on being a solitary (as opposed to a social learner). The traditional lecture format so loved in higher education is the most ineffective way to teach (therefore learn) since it is works best for auditory learner and thus wasted on upwards of 90% or more of the typical college audience. Effective instructors, vary their teaching styles to accomodate diverse learning styles.
Online learning is great for social learners and solitary learners depending on how the class is structured. As matter of fact, one of the strengths of the online environment is the opportunity for social interaction which is important to effective human learning -- it just not need be face to face.
Regards, RobinMurphy's Law: There is never enough time to do it right; but there is always time to do it over.
---------
Portfolio: http://www.missouri.edu/~ryh352/portfolio
Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/flatfilsoc/
~ Our Future arrived Yesterday! ~
I use to hide my car behind the trash dumpsters next to the business adm building while taking account with Prof Martin...alway had to look out the window to make sure my car was there...
Lets re-invent the wheel!
Every time!
Nobody has any valuable experience!
Look, I invented this: O
It is called wheeeeeeel!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your don't want a "certified" university. What you want in the USA is a university that is accredited by a an agency recognized by CHEA. Try the free guidebooks offered online at GetEducated.com. They only list accredited universities and include data on cost (a really wide range!) and residencies. The free guidebooks are a part of GetEducated.com's Best Distance Learning Graduate Schools series. Also they offer FAQS on accredition, diploma mills (TOP 10 SIGNS!, and quality distance degrees. There are quality online degree providers: check http://www.geteducated.com/articles/qualitydistanc edegree.ht
I'm sure the universities got a steep discount tho :) I remember on my windows box, the university had its own "installer", to install the software to read them and such. All the computers in the lab of course already had the stuff installed....
Good info tho...
Networking Class Videos
I did see a video class on linear algebra in the MIT open course ware site. Are there any others available.
-Shivkumarh tml
http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/Homepages/shivkuma/index.
That's a fair comment. It also tells you how bad the problem is that NYS has had to this step.
Maybe it would make more sense if NYS at least kept the old policy with respect to its own state schools (presumably most likely to be serving the public as intended), but it might be against the law. (IANAL.)
--
I think Extensions and online schools have a certain tendency to attract both bad teachers and bad students. Bad teachers tend to be working professionals who teach part time for a few extra bucks. Since they don't have an academic career, they feel free to pull all kinds of crap.
Bad students are people who are doing the "continuing education" bit at their employer's expense. Now, most people who do this take it seriously, but there are a lot who are just going through the motions, and do the minimum amount of work needed to pass the class. For obvious reasons, bad teachers and bad students quickly come to an understanding, and the whole class suffers as a result.
I'm convinced that a lot of "continuing" and online institutions tolerate this -- they just want the tuition. But if your institution has a lot of teachers who really care about what they're doing, you have to assume that the school cares too. Which means you have to make a lot of noise about any bad teachers you encounter. If nothing else, you'll get a tuition refund for the classes you've been wasted. Helps to document everything they do wrong.
I started working towards my Masters in C.S. early last year and after poking around a bit I landed on NCSU's (North Carolina State) online degree program. So far I've only had two professors but both of them have been Phd students and their levels of involvement in the course are quite different.
The online program however, has definitely exceeded my expectations. The courses are real courses, but also offered online. The lectures are all on CD in RealMedia format, a BBS is available for posting questions and all HW are submitted via the web.
Tests are "real" [closed note, closed book, closed internet] tests [in response to someone else's post about tests not being real] (for those who can't attend campus to take the real ones) and require getting a proctor registered with the University.
So far it has been a worthwhile experience. I wouldn't want to get a full Masters via an online degree since I believe that half of a person's education isn't what they learn, but who they meet and interact with along the way, but as a method of finishing off some pre-requisite courses it's great....
-J
I took a single online course offered by my university, and I was completly unsatisfied. It seemed as though the Prof. could have cared less, and emails were returned weekly if at all... It most liley was an isolated situation so I can't label online courses...but it did leave a bad taste in this guys mouth
Info on Stateside & International schools that offer distance education.
I work for a company that does online elearning for universitities and yes what you say is true. But thing that screws you is this, I believe landed schools with names run like universities slow and not quick to change their ways. So tenured prof's don't give a damn and may just be looking to make a buck.
Newer schools that are focuesed online have less of a name, but are geared more towards what this medium can do and needs to be done for the online learner.
I go to Capella and find it to be really a goos experience. I hope you don't think this is advertising, it's word of mouth.
PS I don't work for them, but for a competitor
I am currently teaching my second online art history survey course and I am working my ass off! I spend many more hours a week on my online course than my in-class course because the students are "there" (online) every day. It is as if you were teaching in a classroom and students drifted in 24/7 with assignments, questions, problems, and discussions to carry on. I do see the potential for faculty to "skate" online just as they do in the classroom. However, for the teacher who is interested in learning, the online environment gives an opportunity to develop pedigogical technique in exciting new directions. It also lets you interact with students in a different, but very rewarding way.
Prof.C.