What was your first nontraditional course?

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by Mac Juli, Nov 23, 2020.

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  1. SpoonyNix

    SpoonyNix Active Member

    My 1st college credit course that wasn't butt-in-seat: Technical Writing through Ohio University's snail mail correspondence program, in 2000. Seemed non-traditional at the time, though it was certainly nothing new.
     
  2. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Let's just say that I still think Star Raiders for the Atari 8-bit series was one of the greatest games ever made.

    Anyway, IIRC my first online course was an upper division Information Systems course from Keiser University in 2005, which was free since I was working at the time. I transferred it to Charter Oak.
     
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  3. Mac Juli

    Mac Juli Well-Known Member

    Nope. This modus operandi, if you believe wikipedia, dates back to the 1840s...!
     
  4. Dustin

    Dustin Well-Known Member

    My first non-traditional course was a locksmithing correspondence course. It was the Foley Belsaw course, and the gimmick was that you would receive a key-cutting machine once you were completed the course or paid the full tuition. Although I did teach myself basic lockpicking and cherished the materials I was sent (a disassembled lock with some pins and other basic supplies) I never returned the first booklet and moved onto the next part of the course.

    My next non-traditional course (for me anyway) was an online Women's Studies course at the college I did my diploma and certificate at. It was terribly constructed, with emails auto-generating that had all the wrong dates in them. Then, the syllabus and other pages on the course website had the wrong dates. Finally, the instructor emailed out a third set of dates. I could never tell which was the right one, because she even corrected herself a few times. I dropped out very quickly.

    Then, 2 years later I enrolled in an online Intro to Career Development course at Athabasca. I was overwhelmed by other things going on in my life and never cracked the book open. After 3 months they offered me the option to drop the course with no penalty except a "W" on my transcript. I did...there goes $700.

    Fortunately 2 years after that, I was able to return and complete my degree.
     
    Last edited: Nov 24, 2020
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  5. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    There are some gestures that have remained the same....:rolleyes:
     
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  6. Maniac Craniac

    Maniac Craniac Moderator Staff Member

    YES!!!!!

    I still have the 5200 Star Raiders cartridge (my console busted a long time ago, however). I put absolutely nothing (NOTHING!!!) above River Raid, but Star Raiders is the one that makes me feel I'm living out the fantasy.
     
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  7. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    A long time ago, I read that for years, the most popular occupational course for jail inmates had been locksmithing. Then, a different skill took over first place -- computer programming. Easy to figure that out... :)
     
  8. Dustin

    Dustin Well-Known Member



    I have heard that many prisoners at prisons that shy away from teaching real job skills come out as better criminals. A lot of prisons aren't even allowing real prison libraries. Now you have to pay by the minute or by the page to read from a tablet.
     
  9. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    A prison with paywalls. Now that's real punishment. I thought prison was supposed to be rehabilitative. That isn't. If the released prisoner can't qualify for a real job - then naturally, he's going to survive by crime. I think a lot of people who work in prisons, shouldn't. In fact, some of them should be incarcerated. (And retrained for non-prison work, of course.)
     
  10. Lerner

    Lerner Well-Known Member

    Digital Electronics with Intro to Microprocessors via Open University.
    They shipped to me a small lab, containing variable power supply, oscilloscope, DVM, signal generator, frequency counter, probes and components with breadboards and an 8080
    based Intel microprocessor lab. 11 textbooks and additional lesson guides.
     
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  11. Dustin

    Dustin Well-Known Member

    I had been interested in the OU but it seemed very complicated for someone outside the EU to apply and attend. Sounds like it delivers a comprehensive curriculum though!
     
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  12. Mac Juli

    Mac Juli Well-Known Member

    Oh, you should have taken a look before 2010... The curriculum was even much richer then!!
     
  13. Mac Juli

    Mac Juli Well-Known Member

    Hello!

    I wonder why there are not more liberal arts course "vets" here. I have thought that it would have been much easier to do, say, a course in English Literature in the per-Internet-Era. But well, maybe these people do not surf on degreeinfo nowadays.

    Best regards,
    Mac Juli
     
  14. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    I don't remember such correspondence courses being nearly as available as business and emerging tech. in the pre-Internet era - or I, at least, might have taken some. It was like they told the Scotsman in Heaven: "We're not making porridge for one." :)
     
  15. nosborne48

    nosborne48 Well-Known Member

    Diploma in electronics engineering from CIE in 1981.
     
  16. SpoonyNix

    SpoonyNix Active Member

    My father bought me a taxidermy-by-mail course in the mid-80's. I was very young, and we didn't have a good work area for such a messy process :D

    The course was from Northwestern School of Taxidermy, and I know they were selling those courses at least as far back as 1906.
     
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  17. SpoonyNix

    SpoonyNix Active Member

    Ah, yes, the 400! I remember copying game programs from computer mags back in the 80's. Sometimes they'd intentionally throw in errors and the challenge was to find and fix them before the solutions came out in the next month's issue :D Remember storing programs on audiocassette tapes?
     
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  18. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    Sure! Really well. I had a Timex Sinclair around 1982 that used one - and later a Commodore Vic-20. The one I used on the TS worked exceptionally well - loaded reliably. In fact, after I got a "real" computer ( first a Commodore 64, then an early PC-XT) I put the Timex Sinclair in a closet for 10-12 years. When I pulled it out, it loaded several tapes first time! My son has taught computer subjects in High School for about 20 years. In his early years of teaching, he set up a "computer museum" at school. I was able to give him two TS-1000s, A fully-equipped Commodore Vic-20 with many, many cartridges and a C-64. Oh yeah - and a complete Texas Instruments TI-99/4A I bought at Goodwill. He had to get a couple of Ataris from someone else. The later Ataris (800s?) had super-good hardware. Same Motorola chips as early Macs IIRC. And I remember the GEM OS - sort of like a prehistoric Windows system - but years before Windows. I think Digital research made a GEM OS for early PCs but I never had it.

    Back in the early 80s I was working in a large office - 500+ people. I can remember some progressive managers using Atari 400s at home, connecting 1200-baud or maybe lightning-fast 2400-baud modems and working at home through the night with data from the huge office mainframe computer. Or maybe they just said they were. :)
     
    Last edited: Nov 27, 2020
  19. Johann

    Johann Well-Known Member

    Yep - it's coming back to me now. I'm sure they used the famous 68000 series. Possibly 68030's . Those chips had a long, long useful life span. A wonder of the age.
     
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  20. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Yep, I remember using CLOAD to load games from cassette. I got pretty good at Atari's version of BASIC, although I'll have forgotten nearly all of it by now.
     
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