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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?"
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 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).
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 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.
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...
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.