Winding Down

Tomorrow starts the last week of the two classes I'm taking right now. I laid some good solid ground work for the big project in one class and completed the big project in the other. I feel pretty comfortable right now with how I'm sitting time-wise, which is a bad sign. I'll likely end up here using up my precious supply of words on blog posts instead of working toward the 4-5K words I need to get on paper this week. In any case, by this time next week, I will be starting a two-week period of nothing but sleeping that will only be interrupted long enough for brief naps. You think I jest, but I am completely serious.

I do have to say that whatever it is that I'm doing, it isn't a college education. Most of the text books are about 4th grade level stuff, the assignments are a lot of fluff, and the instructors are, for the most part, complete no-shows, so the whole class turns into a very expensive on-line book club. Nothing I've seen in the last two months in any way justifies the $3,000 price tag. For one thing, the whole on-line structure is antithetical to what I consider to be a college education: the instructor-student and student-student give-and-take of a classroom. Sure there are discussion boards, but the information flow is just way too slow. For example, some of the classes have PLT's or professional learning teams; three or four students working collaboratively on some sort of project. When I was in Cornerstone's ACE program we had these as well, but they involved a weekly 4-hour face-to-face meeting outside of the classroom. The three of us in that group could get more done in one live meeting than both of my five-week on-line PLT's have accomplished combined. If I were an employer (I know, unlikely, but go with me on this) I would not hire anyone with a college degree obtained completely or even mostly on-line unless their other experience made the degree moot. And if I were a parent paying for this crap, I would be pissed to the teeth. On-line education is a scam.