I may be whining, a bit, here, but I have to say it.
I decided to go to college. Being the way I am, I thought an online college would be just the thing. Turns out I was wrong.
The school I chose - or rather, the school that chose me - was Axia Online, a part of Pheonix University Online, I think. When I signed up, they told me it would be pretty easy and there would be no problems. Oh, as the truckers like to say, "Oh, how they LIE!"
Turns out the school is setup as a correspondence school with the internet as the communications medium and the student expected to take on more of the work behind their academic materials.
You see, with a correspondence school, you recieve a course syllabus, and you send them your assigned tasks in the mail in the order they tell you to, by the date they want them. You check them off your list as you go, and it's a piece of cake. All the while, they send you little booklets to read and stuff like that.
It works okay for correspondence school, it should work well with the internet, right?
WRONG!
The reading materials, scattered among different files, create a sense of fragmentation which is very confusing, and should be consolidated in to one file.
They failed to recognize the short comings of proprietary file formats. The biggest shortcoming? They're ***proprietary***, meaning only the programs that create them can read them. Failing to see this problem, they send the files out thinking "Well, everyone can read these!" And they can not.
A friend of mine, Damian, likened it to being handed textbooks in Finnish, and when you asked for English versions, being told "Find someone who speak Finnish."
When I approached the University about these problems, they told me to download readers that required a new operating system. The new operating system, which we don't have, requires new hardware, which isn't installed yet, because that hardware requires additional hardware to work correctly. When they asked when the hardware would be upgraded, I said April. They asked when the operating system would be upgraded, I said May. They said "Okay, so you just have to keep rewriting the
college materials until May."
I shouldn't have to rewrite the college materials.
They don't keep up their forums. Most forums *I've* seen, if you tried to post a topic connected to a thread outside that thread, you may get away with it once. Twice, even. But eventually, a moderator will appear and tell you not to do it again.
Everyone in the University forums make a regular habit of this, and that's a big no-no, because it makes the forums much harder to read.
The school I chose - or rather, the school that chose me - was Axia Online, a part of Pheonix University Online, I think. When I signed up, they told me it would be pretty easy and there would be no problems. Oh, as the truckers like to say, "Oh, how they LIE!"
Turns out the school is setup as a correspondence school with the internet as the communications medium and the student expected to take on more of the work behind their academic materials.
You see, with a correspondence school, you recieve a course syllabus, and you send them your assigned tasks in the mail in the order they tell you to, by the date they want them. You check them off your list as you go, and it's a piece of cake. All the while, they send you little booklets to read and stuff like that.
It works okay for correspondence school, it should work well with the internet, right?
WRONG!
The reading materials, scattered among different files, create a sense of fragmentation which is very confusing, and should be consolidated in to one file.
They failed to recognize the short comings of proprietary file formats. The biggest shortcoming? They're ***proprietary***, meaning only the programs that create them can read them. Failing to see this problem, they send the files out thinking "Well, everyone can read these!" And they can not.
A friend of mine, Damian, likened it to being handed textbooks in Finnish, and when you asked for English versions, being told "Find someone who speak Finnish."
When I approached the University about these problems, they told me to download readers that required a new operating system. The new operating system, which we don't have, requires new hardware, which isn't installed yet, because that hardware requires additional hardware to work correctly. When they asked when the hardware would be upgraded, I said April. They asked when the operating system would be upgraded, I said May. They said "Okay, so you just have to keep rewriting the
college materials until May."
I shouldn't have to rewrite the college materials.
They don't keep up their forums. Most forums *I've* seen, if you tried to post a topic connected to a thread outside that thread, you may get away with it once. Twice, even. But eventually, a moderator will appear and tell you not to do it again.
Everyone in the University forums make a regular habit of this, and that's a big no-no, because it makes the forums much harder to read.
The issue of the messy forums? "Deal with it. Most of these people know ***nothing*** of internet ettiquette, so you have to excuse them!"
My question? Where are the moderators? Why aren't they telling people, "Hey, it's only polite to keep posts in their associated threads?"
It appears there aren't any.
All and all, I find I'm spending more time trying to make the files readable than I am doing school work. I am spending more sorting out what's where in the forums than I am writing to them. The results are predictable. I'm falling way behind in my class work and I'm spending more and more time avoiding class.
What's more, we don't have a printer, so a lot of files that I'm expected to print, I can't, and extracting the information from them is tedious, at best. This machine is unfinished, a combination of old and new, and so a printer isn't likely to be in the picture for at least six to eight months, if we ever get one.
Inkjet printers make bad machines for this kind of work, due to their high operating costs. Dot matrix printers have a much lower operating cost, but cost more initially. Due to the high initial cost of the dot matrix printer, it is unlikely we'll ever get one, and the hight operating cost of an inkjet makes it unlikely we'll ever get one of
those, either.
Maybe the University will get it's head out of it's you-know-where and do something about it.
Or perhaps they feel they have way too many students who don't have these problems and so they can ignore one student having them. Either way, I'll know soon enough, because I've posted a scathing critique of the way the school is setup in both class rooms - where everyone will see them.
Love & Friendship & Blessed Be!
Lynn Erika Kilroy





