Hi: Can someone please recommend me a decent DL school for bachelor's degree that isn't so expensive and one that would enable me to have financial aid without having to kill myself with taking 4-5 classes per session (I work full time). I have been with Univ of Phoenix for 9 months or so and so far have taken about 6 classes and I really hate it with them. It got really untolerable about 3 classes back but I thought I could do it. I can't anymore. I hate the learning teams thing that they make you do. I have been screwed over by so many team members who don't do their homework and instructors penalizing because they didn't do their share. I am also so burned out by lousy instructors or tyrant types who think they teach at some 6 star college. Bottomline is, I am really tired of Univ of Phoenix and feel so drained and burned out by the system. Most of all, I think I've begun to respect the school less and less with every class I've taken. I have financial aid through Univ of Phoenix and I hope to be able to transfer to another school. Please help me!! Thanks!
Matt, You may want to look at Athabasca university. GAAP accredited and soon to be RA. The classes are inexpensive because you are paying in Canadian dollars (about one-third less). The professors at this institution will treat you like a person and not like a number on an assembly line. A few of my colleagues are Athabasca graduates and they really enjoyed their course work.
I'm sorry you've had such a bad experience with UOP. Are you going to a physical campus? Or are you going to the school online? I have heard there is a big difference between the two. I go to school online online. I still have that same problem with Learning Teams but not quite as badly because as an online student you don't have that face to face interaction....so it's a lot easier to just write someone an email and tell them to do their part (or else!) I have no problem writing an instructor either to tell them someone is not pitching in. It sounds mean but I'm not the only one doing it. However if I was in a physical classroom I wouldn't be able to do that because I wouldn't want to deal with the confrontation. Learning Teams are a pain in the rear though. I really think UOP is better done completely online if possible. However, since you are going for a Bachelors you can still transfer to another school. I think you can transfer up to 60 credits. The good news is that there are a lot of schools out there for getting a Bachelor's degree at a much cheaper price. Have you looked at the website "BA in 4 weeks". From what I have heard going through Excelsior, Thomas Edison or Charter Oak is the easiest, quickest and least expensive route to go for a bachelor's degree.
Before you pay money to Athabasca University, please read the thread Athabasca U. transfers fewest credits.
I'm going to DL. Re: learning teams. This last class I've just had really has been the catalyst and prime example of which I've decided that this is just not the right system for me. I'm in a learning team of 5 people. 4 of them do not know what to do for the assignments. So I ended up having to write the team paper and research on my own for 2 weeks. I then told the instructor that I could no longer do it for it was burning me out to do it all and do my individual assignment. And most of all, it was not right that they were getting a grade from work I have done. His reply was 2 options. 1) Continue doing it on my own for them 2) Ask the team to do it and hope they can do it. So I told him, you're basically asking me to get screwed with a bad grade because I know they don't know what to do. The last class I had was with an instructor who hardly knew how to teach English writing. My high school teacher taught me more! I am not the only one complaining about the learning team situation. I've met several others on the UofP program who hate the learning teams for they always get screwed by people who don't do their work. I'll be damned if I have to pay so much money and have to be a baby-sitter and scapegoat for these people who don't care to do their share.
Sciving teams? I have always been suspicious of what you call 'learning teams', or elsewhere, group projects. Like projects generally, they were an idea dreamed up by a) idealistic faculty (i.e., virgin cynics) or b) lazy faculty who invented a means of dumping teaching/coaching tutorial time and work onto the students. Evidence supporting this was the almost purely UK inclusion of a 'project' in most British MBA programmes. We have had to defend our non-inclusion of a project in our MBA against all kinds of 'experts' who have never run a Business School in many countries who appear to have consulted a few MBA syllabi in prestigious UK universities and assumed that this is a researched pedagogy. It wasn't. Faculty often invent wheeezies to make campus life easier. I cannot explain why UoP has gone for the 'learning team' (sounds more authoritarian than an equitable work ethic) in their courses, other than in an effort to appease 'accreditors' and their (usually unresearched) demands - which is why I prefer ignoring them and the blandishments of their 'marketing agencies' posing as 'accreditation' experts. However, I must find out more about the 'worlds no 1' in 'DL', though from what appears here they do not seem to be a model I would recomend should be emulated by no 2.
re Learning Teams The Industrial Engineering program at Colorado State in some of the engineering (as differentiated from math and statistics) also uses teams for a protion of course (i.e. the projects). the reason given was that often in "the real world" engineering projects are carried out by a team. (Team projects accounted for 20% of the grade.) If the others on the class are motivated it can be interesting. But if others do not do their share the better not complain about the outcome.
My best guess at why they do learning teams is because it somehow fulfills a group work requirement for state accreditation. That is my best guess. I know that at other schools they had residency requirements that fulfilled some group work requirement and I am thinking that the LT situation keeps them from having to do short residencies but I don't know for sure. That is just my guess. At any rate, I completely agree with you on how horrible that is. I wish they would do away with Learning Teams. I am limited on where I can get my degree because of my field so I have to suffer through them. However I can relate. The class I am currently taking was the worst experience yet on a learning team. The beginning of the class I was on a 4 person LT and 2 of the people dropped the class and NO ONE bothered to tell us. The professor didn't even bother to tell us. When you go to school online it is hard to know who has dropped. Anyway, the other person on my team was totally worthless to me and I had to do the whole project myself. Even when I have people who are willing to do the work it still can pose a problem especially if you have people who cannot write and yet insist you leave their portion of the paper in "as is".. In my current LT I just finished editing a paper for the group and one lady kept insisting that we have paragraph indents (which is ALA style NOT APA style) and I had to convince her that I was doing it the right way. It drives me crazy. Anyone who is even thinking about UOP should know about the frustrating LT's ahead of time because they are a giant hassle and if I was in your situation I would run for the hills too and find something else.
Everything you've just mentioned - I've experienced the SAME thing. I have only had 1 team that was any good but that was because the other 2 people really tried and guess what, they both HATED learning teams as well. Did I tell you about the class I was in when one of the members swore she would get her part in and would post in 1/2 hour but never did, even the next day. I just about cussed her out. And on top of that, the instructor said he was going to penalize the team. The learning teams (LT) thing is a joke and everyone I've talked to who've left UofP left because of LT. It drags them down completely. You end up doing homework for deadbeats or lousy students who hardly care to do anything. It takes the entire fun academic experience away when you keep getting screwed by people. The result of which is frustration and stress which totally gets in the way of your doing well. You become an unpaid baby sitter for crappy students. The last instructor I had insisted on being called a "facilitator" and not a teacher/instructor because that's what stupid UofP calls them, "facilitators". He did minimal work and ANYONE could have taught the the way he did. I am definitely running for the hills and want to fire UoP. I want to move on to something better. I don't even mind if I have to do 3-5 extra classes just so that I do NOT ever have to be on some lousy UoP LT. Needless to say, I'm burned out of UoP. I heard that they have to do LTs because they would not get their accreditation otherwise. I wonder if the accreditators ever look at the realistic aspect of LTs. Other schools do have teams but NOT for every dang class and it's not structured the same way either. Let's face it, UoP doesn't care about you. They make you go through the motions of class and you pay tons of money just for a piece of paper.
You are right....those "facilitators" are making easy money especially the online instructors. The classes are almost totally self run. You would think the teacher would chime in every now and then but they don't. I get really frustrated with teachers who don't teach....I also dislike that aspect of UOP. On the other hand, EASY MONEY. I won't lie...as soon as I'm done I'm going to apply to be a "facilitator"......I'm already positive I can do 500 % better job than any of the teachers I've had and for the amount of work you do it's easy money. Maybe if more of us balked about the crappy Learning Teams they'd do something about it.
I can sympathize with you folks. My best friend tells me about his constant frustration with these learning teams. I have been fortunate not to have had to deal with LTs in my MS Taxation program at Golden Gate University. However, I have had to deal with a virtually nonexistent professor. I took a course in which I practically taught myself the subject (well, at least well enough to pass the final exam) Totally frustrating and I was not the only one to complain to the Dean of the School of Taxation. When I called her, she was aware of this gentleman's lack of participation. Just remember: you are paying ALOT of money so you deserve the appropriate attention. I know now to stay clear of any classes that guy is teaching. Good luck to you.
If you're supposed to follow APA style guidelines then I'd have to side with the lady who wanted to use paragraph indents. Unless it's changed, APA style guidelines specify paragraph indentation of five to seven spaces, or 1/2 inch. As for the reasons behind UoP using "learning teams", my guess is that it's financially motivated. I don't know, but I wonder if their accreditor will count time spent in group activities as a substitution for instructor contact. If so, and if they allot equal time to group activities and instructor-led activities, then it would theoretically allow them to pay the instructors half as much for teaching a course. That's just a guess on my part though. I totally understand your frustration with having to deal with this in every course. I had one instructor last Fall who didn't teach a thing. The first few weeks we were expected to go through the entire text and answer assorted questions at the end of each chapter. He posted "slides" that were just figures from the text pasted into a PowerPoint file, but he didn't personally convey any material. The rest of the classroom time for the course was dedicated to group project presentations followed by an individual presentation. I'm not entirely sure that the instructor even knows anything about the subject matter, and unfortunately I suspect that may have been the motivation for taking that approach. Then again, maybe he'd previously taught at UoP and was used to the way that they do things. On the bright side, that was the only course that really disappointed me in my program, and I see that they have a different instructor slated to teach it next Fall. All of my other instructors ranged from good to outstanding, and my only other course that had a major group project actually went very well, as everyone in our group contributed significantly and the instructor covered a great deal of material before the project presentations began. I suppose that I was lucky in that regard.
When you write up a formal lesson plan it is in a format different from how you would write a research paper. When you are doing a formal lesson plan the APA style does not include indents. I was referring to a lesson plan not a research paper.
I just wanted to clarify that I've never taken a course from UoP. The comments I made about my experiences apply to online graduate-level courses in Computer Science, Information Architecture, and Network Security at Capitol College.
Ah, thanks for clarifying that for me. I've never written a lesson plan, so that's not something that I'm familiar with. You had me wondering if maybe there'd been some signficant changes in the APA style guidelines.
UoP doesn't care about the students or the quality of the classes. I've been with them, I know...they're only interested in the money. They don't care that there's hardly any teaching going on. It's OK to do projects in a team every now and then and have you choose your own teammates but it's just not OK to have it as a requirement EVERY class and get stiffed with bad team members. The "facilitators" at UoP just go through the motions and they get paid no matter what. UoP may say that they take the time to find good people but they really don't. One classmate had told me that a colleague in her office had just been hired as an instructor and he/she absolutely did not know what to do or expect. Class at UoP is all about going through the motions of the class itself. There are no connections with anyone or anything. Very cold learning environment. UoP maybe the biggest DL school in the US but trust me, they are far from being the best at it. They may have pioneered the idea of DL but they sure don't know how to make it a notch above others. I am so tired of writing evals about instructors to their evaluators. Makes no difference at all. I told one of such evaluator that I don't think UoP respects its students. It is just interested in taking their money, going through the motions but it really doesn't know how to return their investment with a good education. Going to a class and have it be self-taught and have some crummy instructor dig at you for this or at isn't exactly learning. I also told this evaluator that I told calling their instructors "facilitators" as a cop-out. By doing so, they make the class no more than just a newsgroup posting, unlike a Usenet posting. I think the accreditors should SERIOUSLY look at UoP. What I find hurting as well is UoP doesn't have a good rep. It's a terrible feeling to go to a school that people don't even respect. Sure, the little college down the street may not be good but not that many people know if it's good or bad for it doesn't keep appearing on TV or radio screaming at you to join it.
