By cormander
So today I have to start class again in order to retain student status; you can only take so long of a break. I’d rather start after my wife has the baby, which should be any day now, but alas I don’t get that choice.
So I login this afternoon to check how this next course is going to look; MATH/212 – Finite Mathematics. Read the syllabus, posted by bio… then thought:
“Hey wait a minute, I need a book for this class?”
This is my 10th class at University of Phoenix Online, and have so far never even had mention of having to have a book. It’s all been online. Turns out, without the book, I can’t do any of the assignments!
“Maybe I can rush delivery one, then”, or so I thought. I call and get transferred over to the book store, and guess what is out of stock? The book for that class. I get the ISBN number and google it; no results. I go to amazon and search it there; no results. I search the book title; no results. So I call my academic adviser and it lands in her voicemail; on vacation.
So at this point I’m starting to freak out a little. I manage to get ahold of another academic adviser and explain the situation. After 20 minutes and a little luck, I get put in a different class. Whew!
So I check in this evening and can see the new course on my dashboard; NTC/360 – Network and Telecommunications Concepts. <sarcasm>Boy, I sure am going to learn a lot in this class.</sarcasm> (not that I would have learned anything in a Math course either).
Oh, and to top it all off; the teacher for this course hasn’t posted a syllabus yet.
*facepalm*
By cormander
Today for my lunch break I decided to attempt to write a program we had to do as our final assignment for CS/201 at BYU-Hawaii back in 2003. It was called “check writer”, written in perl, and had to take any number and convert it into how it would be written on a check.
I recall this program taking me days to write, and was quirky as hell. Well, this afternoon I did it in about 20 minutes:
[corman@localhost ~]$ perl checkwriter.pl 1135700214.99
one billion one hundred thirty five million seven hundred thousand two hundred fourteen dollars and ninety nine cents
Back in college it took me over 400 lines of code and it gave me massive headaches to work on. But today, without even breaking a sweat, 123 lines of perl using no external modules; about a third of the line count is from the word definitions.
So here I am, over 6 years later, still no degree, and I blazed right through the task. Experience is certainly better than academia.
By cormander
I’m into my 6th class of online college and I can’t hold it in anymore. If anything bugs me about online college, it is how everyone agrees with each other. More often than not you’ll see a reply to someone’s discussion question response start with “I agree”, or “I totally agree”. Every now and again there is a “I disagree”, and it’s usually me that’s the one who is posting the disagreement!
Seriously, these classes are full of a bunch of “Yes” people. A big part of each class is the discussion forum, it’s online, and everyone is nice to each other. It doesn’t make any sense. There are no trolls, no arguing, no personal insults, just everyone happily agreeing with each other.
If you ask me, they’re not facilitating a real internet environment.
I’ll admit that I’m happy that there are no personal insults flying around, but people not butting heads at all just isn’t right. Criticism isn’t a negative thing, people.
What’s sad is, I rarely ever get a reply when I disagree with someone, and when I do, it’s usually from the professor.
By cormander
Wow another class flew right on by, CIS/205 Management of Information Systems. How in the world did I not go back to school sooner? I’d seriously have my doctorate by now if I continued this pace of one class at a time over the past couple years. They really do pile up, and I feel that a lot of it has been a waste due to not getting an education (when in reality, I’ve gotten my education, it just didn’t come with a certificate).
Next up, “Business Systems”.
