New Certificates from University of the People

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by scaredrain, Jun 18, 2021.

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  1. SpoonyNix

    SpoonyNix Active Member

    So anyway, at the undergrad level, my experience has been that peer-grading isn't going to change a grade that much. I've received an "A" and two "A-". The A- grades were the result of my getting hit with way more work in the first couple of weeks than I was expecting, so I skipped an assignment in those courses and that made the difference. There's no easing into a semester, you hit the ground running.

    Profs do receive a stipend of, I believe, a few hundred bucks. Might be over a grand.

    I have had good profs. All have earned masters and have teaching experience. Sometimes 20+ years of it.

    A lot of UoPeople students think they know English well, but they really do not.
     
  2. scaredrain

    scaredrain Member

    Peer assessments at the university really have nothing to do with the instructor pay as the university advertises their positions as volunteer ones, with a guaranteed honorarium and/or stipend. As for peer assessments, those of us who are American faculty members have lobbied for years to get rid of this process as it does not save instructor's time and work, in fact it adds to the workload and it would save time if the instructor's just graded all assignments.

    Instructors from around the world appear to love the peer assessment process as they feel it prepares students for 360 degree workplace evaluations, but as myself and others have pointed out, when it comes to such evaluations in the workplace, would anyone choose a coworker who would write anything less than a glowing report about your work performnace?? I think not!

    But any student can challenge their grade at the university if their feel the peer assessment grade was not fair. I personally review all of my assignments each week and if I see a weird assesment combination, for example one student gave an assignment a 50, while another gave the assignment a 0, I will definitely take a look at the assignment and review it.

    My biggest gripe are students who feel they should get a perfect score each time, simply because they put in effort and time, but still did not get all of the assignment correct. These students take up the most time, with correspondence and review requests.

    As for English at the university, I would say to continue earning the thousands in donations the university gets from the UN and a few other charitable foundations, they have to admit students from 3rd World countries or they lose that funding, so the student's English is mostly very litle, poor, or nonexistent and usually struggle a great deal. I am noticing that more western students are creeping in and I am sure that is to balance the costs of thee university as these students usually do not get scholarships or fee waivers.
     
  3. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Very well, I had thought this because of remarks Shai Reshef has made in interviews, but given yours and Spoony's firsthand observations to the contrary, I'll change my mind.
     
  4. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    I've often thought about University of the People switching to a sort of competency-based model where you take exams like normal but when you're ready, and continue to have papers and discussion posts peer-graded as normal but on a pass-fail basis in a submission queue that is constantly cycling the way Coursera does it. This way, they can break from the rigid weekly schedule format, and with papers graded by P-F most disputes could be overcome by simply resubmitting to the queue and having a different peer grade it. And if they wanted to add an extra layer to QA, they could have failed papers be reviewed by an Instructor before it can be resubmitted to the queue. University of the People already has (or at least at one time had) each student grade a minimum number of classmates per assignment, so in that way they already have a way of cycling per assignment.
     
  5. scaredrain

    scaredrain Member

    This is a great idea, but it would fail at the university for a few reasons:
    ,
    1. Most are opposed to competency based education, you should see some of the threads about it at the university when it is mentioned
    2. The university barely updates its courses, this is one of the numerous complaints from students and faculty. For example the IT courses are somewhat outdated and the assessents need changing badly as students are often caught plagiarizing due to the fact every single assessment is on the internet
    3. The university appears to barely spend any money and they do pay for course development, but it seems that it takes them years to update a course
    4. Students are contiously being dropped or withdrawing from the university. You could have a course of 40 students but within a week its down to half this number
    5. The grade that students get for performing their required peer assessments is quite low in terms of percentage, so some will simply submit their assignment and not peer assess assignments
    6. Administration prefers the current format as they can say that the university is "rigourous" in nature, by having students do so much writing and tedious work each week
     
  6. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    What have they said about it? Any quotes that stand out? Any of it from people who've actually taken classes under that system?

    That's a common issue to many schools.

    Common issue.

    Common issue. But going the route I suggested would make it possible to enroll more students than they're currently able which could mitigate a great deal of that.

    Is that even possible though? Back when I was communicating with them, I was told that every student had to assess other student's assignments and each student was required to assess a minimum number in order to achieve the full credit for that week. I can't remember if it was 3 or 5 but it was something like that. Has that changed?

    But what I'm suggesting wouldn't change that. You'd still be doing the same assignments in the same amounts. As long as you have at least 2 students in each class (and of course there will always be more than that) and the school sets a minimum requirement for the number of peer assessments each student has to complete based on the number of students in the class, the system should flow fine.

    I checked out some Coursera classes that used this system, and while some of the classes had thin enrollments and you'd see papers you already graded get recycled during the week, the fact that they set it so each person just has to grade a minimum number of papers like UoP told me they had it around 2018 or so, everything worked out fine.
     
  7. Maxwell_Smart

    Maxwell_Smart Active Member

    Your idea is a good one, obviously, since it has worked for places like EdX and Coursera and both schools have done really well and satisfied a lot of students. But I see a different problem with this, or at least a possible one. Does University of The People have the tech infrastructure to do this? While the change would seem like a minor thing on the surface, beneath that is the possibility of the need for lots of new code. You have a strong tech background so I know you know that already, but it's worth mentioning.

    It was that way during the time I worked with them. I don't know if it's still that way now, but I don't know how the system would work without it still being that way because students would just submit papers and never assess anything, so I highly doubt anything has changed there.
     
  8. scaredrain

    scaredrain Member

    I should have been a bit more specific. So here goes:
    1. Using competency based learning at University of the People:
    Many faculty in the internal faculty forums and Teams groups are opposed to competency based learning, as are some of the administrators. This is mostly due to the fact they feel that as the majority of their student population are foreigners and really are not great at writing and speaking English, it is the university's duty somewhat to assist the students with English via writing assignments. The other train of thought is that competency based learning is not actually teaching the students anything as it simply just requires the students to memorize facts to pass a course. I am not saying the university will not go this route anytime in the future, just that the majority of faculty prefer the heavily writing intensive curriculum.

    2. Course Updates:
    While it is true that some universities do not update their courses, the university is not known for those many updates. I have been teaching the same course since 2012 with them and it has only been updated twice. So this is what I mean about lack of updates to courses. Students often gripe about how out of date the technology curriculum is and instructors in other courses have griped about how their assesments have not changed in 5+ years.

    3. Lack of Money:
    Once again most universities at least update their textbooks and base their curriculum around textbook updates. I have rarely worked at a university where there were not new textbook adoptions every year or at least every semester in some cases. Since the university is utilizing materials online, some which are updated, there is no real reason they cannot update the materials and the curriculum. The course development department consists of one person who is the director and he has a very little budget, plus he has to find volunteers who will volunteer their time to create and write courses for a small stipend, which is just not often.

    4. Students Withdrawing Or Leaving:
    While this does happen at other universities, I have never seen it happen as frequently at the university. Most course start off with 40 students, by week 4, you may be down to 20 or less, so attrition is large. At other universities where I am an adjunct and even at my full time place of employment, you rarely see 50% attrition. This happens at the university for various reasons, usally because students have found out they did not get a scholarship and cannot afford the assessment and proctoring fees. Often times faculty are told nothing in advance if a student is withdraw. In fact the only way to notice this is if you check your roster and you notice half are gone.

    5. Peer Assessment Grades:
    About 2 years ago the university changed their grading policy so that peer assessments count very low in terms of a student's final grade. In fact they heavily adjusted the computer courses grades because many students were failing the computer courses. The result is that students know that they can do 0 peer assessments and still pass in fact, this is a gripe also with faculty because in some courses, students can in theory skip entire weeks of assignments and still pass the course, due to how certain assignments are weighted and the fact that the student's final grade is rounded up to the nearest whole number.

    6. Administration Prefers Current Format:
    As stated under #1, the administration prefers the writing intensive courses as they feel it assists with teaching the student's English, plus many are against competency based learning. And they also know that in some western entities, the university is not really taken as seriously as they want it to be, hence you see the increased partnerships, the promotion of the organizations they are affiliated with, and the stressing of the affordability. As one faculty member pointed out if they changed the name that alone would give the university even more credibility as many simply do not want to mention the university, due to its current name.
     
  9. Rachel83az

    Rachel83az Well-Known Member

    Competency-based doesn't mean "no papers" and anyone who thinks that is just being silly. UMPI has a competency-based program that is only slightly more expensive than UoPeople and most of the competencies are papers and not multiple-choice exams.

    The university isn't taken seriously for a lot of reasons. Very little of that has to do with how the courses are or are not administered.
     
  10. scaredrain

    scaredrain Member

    I agree with you 100%. I am an evaluator with WGU and there are plenty of papers to assess but at University of the People they only seem to want traditional assessments.
     
  11. Rachel83az

    Rachel83az Well-Known Member

    UoPeople could do papers + the traditional exams they have now and offer competency-based education. They just don't want to. That's their right but it's still very silly.
     
  12. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    Schools with open enrollment/low admission standards have always been known to have high dropout rates. The scenario you described is something I saw several times at different schools as a student.

    I don't understand how that can work out if many students are doing it, and the system is bound to crumble if most did 0 assessments because a ton of papers would go ungraded unless an instructor steps in to pick up the slack. But the fix to that seems pretty obvious: keep the assessment grade carrying the same lowered weight, but still make it mandatory as part of the assignment where the final grade doesn't post until the assessments are completed. I mean, if they're going to have peer-graded papers and have it be a smaller chunk of the final grade, either make that part mandatory in some way or just get rid of it altogether and let instructors do it.
     
  13. SpoonyNix

    SpoonyNix Active Member

    If UoPeople were CBE or like UMPI, I wouldn't do it.
     
  14. Dustin

    Dustin Well-Known Member

    Not to get too far off-track, but what's the story with the CBE at UMPI?
     
  15. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    Fair enough, but I'd like to know how many UoP students are studying in the United States and other locales not considered disadvantaged because those students have to pay the fees and knowing that number would give us a good idea of where the school really is financially. From that information we may have an answer to what you posed, at least in terms of financial capability to make it happen.
     
  16. scaredrain

    scaredrain Member

    Instructors are required to grade assignments that are not peer assessed. This irks instructors who simply would prefer to assess the assignments in the beginning. Often an instructor will get an automated email if there are assignments that were not graded near the end of an assessment period. In addition to this, say a student only had one peer assessor who just marked any grade, those types of assignments have to be reviewed by the instructor as well as this happens quite frequently.
     
    LearningAddict likes this.
  17. scaredrain

    scaredrain Member

    I am not sure how they determine who gets a scholarship or not. I can say I have had students who are in 3rd world countries who have stated they applied for scholarships and were denied and these students drop out as they cannot afford to pay the fees at the university. I have even had students in refugee camps denied scholarships, who have had to drop out. Many of the scholarships have stipulations for example the Simon Biles Scholarship is for students who grew up in foster care, while the GIZ scholarship is for Syrian Refugees based in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, or Iraq. At the same time scholarships are usually only for about 10 exam fees and students have to reapply to get further assistance.
     
    LearningAddict likes this.
  18. skirtlet

    skirtlet Member

    I love the price of U of People.

    However, their academic advisors are useless. I would get more use out of talking to a brick wall than their academic advisors. A simple question took 4 e-mails to an academic advisor asking the same exact question. The advisor told me to look in the handbook. The answer wasn’t in the handbook. I asked a 4th time and finally got an answer.

    I was lucky to get an answer from an academic advisor at all... often there’s no reply at all to simple questions.

    I tried to register for a course and waited a month for approval, which is cool for the price. It’s just frustrating how the school has zero “customer service” and academic advisors are of zero use overall.

    I personally have felt like the peer reviews, if not the discussion boards as well, are a complete waste of time. It’s not an academically engaging environment that spurs discussion and higher thought. It’s checking a box to get some points and doing the bare minimum. I’ve seen and heard of peers grading each other excessively harsh for no reason, which can be frustrating when the work was actually good.

    I’m thankful there’s a cheap college like U o People. And I understand they have limited resources, etc. But there’s always room for improvement anywhere, even at a “tuition-free” college. I would hope they start with getting some competent academic advisors, even if it requires paying them.
     
  19. skirtlet

    skirtlet Member

    I agree. I have seen good assignments/posts get rated terribly for no reason, while garbage work gets a 10/10.

    Some students rate people out of anger, boredom, a lack of English knowledge, having excessively high standards, etc.

    I disdain peer assignment at U o People. Peer reviews, if not the discussion forum also, is a waste of time to me at UoP.
     
    datby98 likes this.
  20. Rachel83az

    Rachel83az Well-Known Member

    Why is that?
     

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