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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?"
The concern with virii in PDF documents is valid, if a bit overblown.
The 'Peachy'
virus/trojan is one example.
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
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.
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
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.
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?!
And this class is part of a CS degree?
In the past there have been virus's that have been transmitted by pdf files such as the peachy virus. If the professor is not completely familiar with her univerisities virus scanning software it wouldn't be totally unreasonable to limit submitted files to certain formats.
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).
Actually, most places this is just for pre-college education (at least in the US). College profs need not be credentialled... in fact at least one CS prof I had in the past didn't even have a degree....
I agree. Although teacher feedback is important, teachers' effort and participation in your education is almost unnecessary. Use your professor and the college as a way to get the credit and get the recognition you deserve. Engage in a dialogue the books you read and the assignments you have: let them be your "teachers."
There are 2 big misconceptions that students have: 1) By paying their tuition and fees they have somehow earned an A on their transcript and 2) The instructor has all the answers and is the Source Of Truth that can light their way by simply talking to them.
When I was in school, I went to the lectures and I read the assignments and I worked the problems. I could have skipped the lectures, but they kept me disciplined and paced my progress through the text and pointed out the important bits.
Having said all that, everyone has their own learning styles. Maybe on-line doesn't fit into the poster's learning style, and the poster just can't get into it. If that is the case, the idea to go back to a standard school is probably a good idea.
--
Annotateit at Annotateit.com
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.
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..."
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
I also experimented with the University of Phoenix. I was disappointed with the poor feedback that I received from the professor. The assignments due in the final week made up over 50% of the course grade, and I received no feedback whatsoever on the assignment. While I am happy with the grade that I received, for the $1,266 that I paid for the course, I simply expected more.
What really bothered me is that the school has billed my credit card for over $3,000 in billing mistakes. While they have refunded all this money, I have spent more time on the phone with them then I care to think about.
At the moment I am looking for other options.
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.
In the end, you wind up with a paper that is poorly written, has no logical flow, etc etc.
Welcome to the business world. And I'm not even trying to be clever, this kind of collaborative work is more and more common these days. 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. In fact most "collaborative" software people are raving about these days is about consolidating a cacaphony of sound bites from different people into a cohesive document. I'm not certain it works, although that's certainly what Open Source is about (and literally the entire purpose of CVS) so maybe I'm wrong. I still subscribe to the belief that a single brilliant chef can make a better meal than 20 working together. In fact, it makes me want to coin a phrase...
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.
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'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)?
Traditional classroom: Instructor works through some problems during class, talks about theory, etc. Assigns homework. You turn it in. Little to no conversation with your fellow students on these assignments, as it's considered to be cheating.
I'm not sure what college you went to but this wasn't the case at either of the 2 colleges I attended (CWRU and a tiny liberal arts school in the middle of nowhere).
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.
On another note, UoP is shooting itself in the foot by having an age requirement.
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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.
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- The only real contact you have with the administration is via your academic and financial advisors, who are prone to disappearing randomly and being replaced months later by someone new. When they are around, the quality of their work is less than desirable, if indeed they respond at all.
- The instructors aren't accountable to anyone, and some are plain awful. In a class about management, of all things, I got in a polite debate about the quality of Microsoft software with a fellow classmate, and got my weekly grade knocked down a couple of letters because my pro-MS instructor didn't appreciate my attitude. My official complaint got buried.
- The servers are indeed slow and unreliable, as others have mentioned. Wednesday nights are the end of the grading week, when everyone is trying to turn in weekly assignments, and the servers buckle under the load. I've stayed up for three extra hours on some weeks trying to get my paper in on time. The technical staff has resorted to mass emailings asking us to turn off the option to check for new newsgroups to reduce the load.
- The curriculum is close to useless and oddly misdirected at times. One class is in IT Management, in which we proved our grasp of the subject by using MS Project to compare possible locations for a company conference. WTF?
- As long as we're discussing wastes of money, Phoenix has this nice little racket where the texts sold for class are custom printings that are better for students because they provide superior relevance and value. I know this because each one comes with a card sandwiched in the pages that tells me this. These are the same texts that refer to the "beta Windows 2000" and discuss organizational strategies from the eighties as current events.
I know how much I'm going to value my degree when I get it. I also know how much I'm going to value it when I see it on any resume that comes across my desk.Case in point: my wife is doubling up courses at her own expense to graduate earlier. Her advisor, who scheduled her classes for her, saw this as an error and yanked her out of all her remaining classes pending a rescheduling...and now she can't get back into them because of the demand.
This kind of arbitrary power is par for course. Instructors have confusing and conflicting grading standards that they don't necessarily hold to, and with five week-long grading periods per class, there simply isn't time to get an appeal going that would go anywhere. Hell, UoP guidelines require the instructor to release a student from the grading process when said student withdraws from a class. Some instructors don't if they feel insulted that the student withdrew due to incompetent teaching, leaving the transcript with an F that doesn't count toward the GPA but does show up on reports.
My major is in IT, with a specialization in Networks and Telecommunications. The classes that make it so are Intro to UNIX, Intro to NT, Advanced NT, and Web Server Management. Again, WTF? NT? And the classes barely scratch the surface. There's no meat to them at all. For one of the weekly Discussion Questions that is intended to engender lively debate and conversation that will enrich the lives and enlighten the minds of all those who participate, my wife's class was asked what their favorite SQL function was. Here I lay out a third WTF? Are we back in second grade?
I had an argument...with the person here at the university that teaches OS design. I wonder when I'll learn --Linus
80/20 principle anyone?
the general gist:
20 percent of what companies and individuals do generates over 80 percent of their positive results...
see the book for more...
this works for me.
This is by and far one of the best examples of online education I have heard of. Part of my financial aid package includes Federal Work Study, which landed my a (quite fun) job in my schools Virtual Learning Center. My school actually takes a very different approach to distance education, and I get to play with all the nifty gadgets :D
Using a collaboration platform called Centra, three robotic video cameras, and pressure sensative chalk boards (amongst other things), we are able to have students sitting in front of their computers attending a "traditional" style classroom. Each student has their own camera and microphone, and must have a line capable of supporting such transfer rates.
The prof is in a regular classroom, with no students, and writes on the chalkboard if need be, shows powerpoint slides...does anything and everything you would expect a normal professor to do. Any pressure detected on the chalkboard is drawn on the distance learners screen, and erased with a special eraser. The projectors all have video out ports which is also relayed to the students at home.
The best part comes with student interaction. One of my tasks was to build a series of LED displays, each one displaying the name of a student currently attending the class through their room. If they have a question, the remote student clicks a button on their computer causing the LED display to invert itself, and the prof calls on them as if they were actually in the class. When a remote student is "granted" speaking privileges (via an operator that sits in the classroom) one of two plasma displays shows a video stream of them to the professor, which is also relayed to other online students. A traditional projector screen, located in the front of the classroom, also drops down incase their are students physically located in the classroom; thus allowing both online and "traditional" methods simultaneously.
There are all kinds of other fun toys we have, such as the ability to have two remote students discuss a point, which causes both of the plasma displays or both of the projector screens to drop down. It's really a trip to see everything happening.
However, if things wern't setup so that teachers DIDN'T have to change, I can't imagine it being anywhere near as effective. Infact, if I'm sick and can't go to a class, I just tune in from my dorm.
It's a new deminsion in learning...a weird one at that. Despite the fact that I only get paid 8$/hr, and turn around to fork out 36k/yr for my school, I ever have a damn good time working there!
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.
As higher education turns into giant corporations students are being viewed as numbers in the finance book. Online education is a way to make money, not to sincerely teach students. Soon we'll have big fat pepsi labels on our textbooks- AND WHY NOT?? We got new stadiums to build! In the world of programming where the trends are constantly changing, you would do yourself more good by buying a book on Amazon, reading the forums, trying the tutorials, and just code.