Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Still Kickin'

Just a very short update. I'm in three accelerated classes from now until February 23, then I drop down to two until March 9. I'm either reading or writing papers or in the discussion groups about eight hours a day, seven days a week, and it isn't enough. It seems to be getting easier, or I'm just getting worn down enough to not care as much about the work I turn in. My books for the third class showed up today, the same day I had a paper and two quizzes due at midnight on the material I was supposed to have read. I wrote the paper yesterday by just making stuff up (I am working towards a BS degree after all). Today I did the reading and got the quizzes in under the wire and it looks like I pretty well covered the material in the book with my made-up paper. Which either says something about me or about the class....

I got into a discussion at the blogger meeting yesterday with someone who has something to do with on-line education, and it got me thinking. I've done traditional classrooms, I've done accelerated classes in real life, and now accelerated classes on-line. Not to put too fine a point on it, on-line sucks. This is somewhere between correspondence school and a degree mill. No actual learning need ever take place, just crank through the steps, many of them pointless exercises, write some papers and I get my magic piece of paper that says I'm now a valuable part of society. And all the while dealing with an endless stream of incompetence from the university office. BS degree, indeed.

Anyway, just wanted to drop a note.

2 comments:

TomboCheck said...

I don't know. I did both online and sit-down classes during my stint at Yavapai. I'd say the amount of learning was about the same (which is to say... next to none). In online though you can get it done faster and have more free time. I was a big fan of online! :)

Ric said...

When I started at this university, they had an accelerated program that was the best of both worlds. It was an actual class with actual interaction and you could crank out 2 years in 18 months. This online thing is just a trashed version of that program.

But it is great that I can finish up where I started instead of having to transfer yet again (would have been the fourth time) and lose still more ground. So I shouldn't complain, this is the future, blah, blah, blah. But if this is what passes for higher education, we truly are doomed.