WGU Featured in TIME Magazine Article, “Go Western, Young Man”.
STORY: “Let’s not waste anyone’s time or money. You won’t find that phrase emblazoned on a T shirt, but it’s essentially the motto of Western Governors University (WGU), a private online school that has worked hard to prove it is anything but a diploma mill…”
Click here to read the full article.
Avoiding Procrastination
Procrastination. It is the curse of students everywhere, whether online or not. It haunts you for the rest of your life. It takes control of your inner being and transforms you into a creature that you would rather not be. OK….it’s October and I’ve already eaten too much candy corn. But seriously, procrastination can make or break your college experience. Putting off your schoolwork until the deadline is looming can kill you. It makes for sloppy work. It doesn’t allow time for revision or reflection. It usually ends up eating into your “other” time as you try to steamroll the project through at the last minute. The sound you hear in the background is my wife laughing out loud right now. She is wondering why I, of all people, am talking about not procrastinating. I’ll deal with that issue later.
Why do we put things off? Often times it is because we are overwhelmed. It might be that we are overwhelmed with the task at hand. It might be that everything ELSE in our life is so frantic that we can’t figure out how to work in one more thing. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step… yeah, so does falling off a mountain. How do you begin? Once again, it all comes down to organization. Henry has provided some excellent organization advice in several of his postings. I really enjoyed this one about setting goals. You have to find what works for you, though. I’ve already shared with you my problem with using things like Franklin Day Planners. (I’m hoping that if I keep mentioning their name that they might send me some freebies and an instruction booklet that will get me fired up.) What DOES work for me? I’ve got a couple of things that I can share with you.
So here is one of my favorite organizational things to do. (As if someone could actually HAVE a favorite organizational thing) Online learning, by its very nature, involves lots of writing. I have taken online courses from a couple of different universities and they have been fairly consistent with their written assessments (as good instruction should be). They have almost across the board given you the rubric by which the writing is scored. WGU provides Task Aids, as well. To help keep me on track, one of the first things that I do is to create a template for the project. I use the rubric to set up headings and subheadings. Then, and here is my favorite part, I use the Reviewing feature in Microsoft Word to make Comments to myself. (OpenOffice3, a freeware version of an Office Suite that is actually quite good, calls them Notes). Here is an article from TechLearning that shows more about doing this. As I go through the coursework or readings, I add additional notes to myself. When I am ready to actually start writing the darned thing, most of my work is already done. It is, of course, the “actually start writing” part where MY procrastination kicks in. But I at least have my template ready to go!
Information overload can also keep you from moving forward. My school district provides an abundance of resource materials for me as a teacher. A plethora of plans. A cornucopia of curriculum materials. Too much almost. Having been out of the general classroom for almost 10 years, things have changed. It is difficult to even know where to begin looking for the material that I need as I wade through my many options. I find myself freezing up sometimes. The same thing can apply to your online education materials. You’ve got the whole WWW thing going for you along with any required texts. I have found that, for me, it makes it easier to NOT have all of my materials for the quarter/semester/term/course piled up around me in one place. It is rare that I need them all for any given project. I pull out just the ones that I need and then put them back when I am done. (Alright…I PLAN on putting them all back when I am done…but I’ll do it later.)
And finally, my most important suggestion on how to avoid procrastination. When everything else is not working there is one more plan. I’ m still working on the details of how it will work. I’ll get back to you on it. Next month. Maybe.
What is a Blog?
I am an Elementary School teacher. I have worked with all different grade levels. We have covered the water cycle, the food chain, and the rock cycle. We talk about how kindness begets kindness. “What goes around comes around.” Life, it seems, operates in a circular pattern. A good blog, in my experience, should operate the same way. It functions best as a cycle. Return back to where you started. Like the water cycle and the food chain, it is essential for growth.
Let’s look at this blog as an example. The first part of a blog being cycle comes from responding to posts. If you just go to a blog and read passively, there is no give and take. No opposing thoughts or additions to the thoughts that were posted. If it never goes anywhere, it becomes stagnant. Once it stagnates, there is no longer a reason to return. On the other hand, if you respond to posts, conversations begin. Other viewpoints are presented. New resources are shared. In an active blog, subscribing to an RSS feed or email updates can keep you in touch with the changes that occur as they occur. This is a very essential part of your job, as the reader and visitor. On that note, take a moment now to scan through the postings here and respond to at least one of them. I’ll wait.
Oh…are you back already? Thanks for doing that. Your job doesn’t end there, though. Watch for responses to YOUR posting and respond to those, as well. You will watch the wealth of information grow exponentially on a Blog when readers are active.
So why HAVEN’T you responded before? Maybe the post just didn’t seem to apply to you. Maybe you came in search of specific information and that particular posting was not it. That’s OK. We can’t be all things to all people, but we can try to meet as many needs as we can. Although I AM an Elementary School teacher and a father of four, my mind reading abilities are severely weakened by the narrow bandwidth of the Internet. My feelings will not be hurt if you reply to a posting of mine by saying, “Although this was probably useful to someone, it wasn’t me. I REALLY needed to find out more about…..” (OK….don’t everyone rush out and start posting that response to all of my postings! That WILL hurt my feelings.) Go ahead..reply to someone’s posting on this Blog. I’m just going to rearrange my desk until you get back. Hey…glad to have you back. Thanks for taking the time to make this a great place to be.
Another great way to get the most out of this Blog (or any Blog) is to check out the links that they have share with you. Sometimes we try to put them into the postings. Other times we will add them to the Blogroll located on the right hand side of this Blog.) Take a moment to read through some of the links over there. I have always particularly enjoyed Lifehacker. It has been a source of technology links and ideas for several years for me. Check out ELearner.Com News Blog. You will find all kinds of links within the articles, or postings. You will also find additional links on their menu on the left for additional Blogs. And now you are off and running. One link leads to another to another to another. It reminds me of the children’s story books that allowed you to choose the direction that you would like to go. In that way, you and I could both go the Elearner site and end up in an entirely different place. How wonderful it would be for you to come back and tell me where YOU went. Share with me something wonderful that YOU found that I might have missed by going off in my own direction.
And so, I am going to share a link with you. TOP 100 Education Blogs It is a link to a page of links. It covers a wide range of topics that deal with online education. I don’t have the time (and my wife would kill me if I took it) to go off and explore ALL of them. Go find something useful. Bring it back here and share it with me. Keep the cycle going!
Online Degrees vs. Traditional Degrees: No Significant Difference
Study after study has consistently come to the same conclusion that there is no significant difference in outcomes between learning in a traditional classroom and learning online. (However, there are some who raise valid points about how we ask the question, but they address technology and the role it plays, not the outcomes.)
As shocking as it may sound, very few college professors outside the school of education have taken any course in the history, theory, or psychology of education, much less have any expertise in the latest and greatest tools and techniques. They are hired on the basis of their experise in their chosen discipline, and generally are tenured on the merits of their ongoing research and productivity (publications). That system seems to be working quite well, although I’ll grant you that many of them could use a few pointers about preparing the course syllabus, lecture notes and other course materials, and public speaking - like projecting from the diaphragm and speaking to the audience not the blackboard. Their content makes up for all these deficiencies, and aren’t irelevant or very important in distance learning.
In the traditional model, professors can develop a new course single-handedly over the span of a semester or two; most of the work will be in defining the course syllabus - the textbook, sequence of topics, readings and assignments, with the actual lecture impromptu with only an outline and possibly lecture notes as a handout that can be done/updated as a last minute preparation in a hour or two (often by TA’s, not the professor); fine tuning and improvement are iterative for the life of the course - which may very well be years or decades.
For that to happen in the online model as a multimedia production, in the absence of pre-existing materials, you really need a team of experts, a lot of time, and a lot of money; you have to anticipate problems over every last jot and tittle, and get it right the first time or it quickly becomes a blackhole for all your ’spare’ time and probably every member of the development team; mistakes are deadly, changes very time consuming and costly. Effectively co-ordinating all that just hasn’t become the norm. Happily, most of the material can very effectively be presented in a text-based format, and even a rank amateur can produce streaming audio and video of an updated ‘live’ lecture.
Properly done, you can teach anything to anyone anywhere at any time through distance learning. That’s demonstrable fact. But where this comes off the hinges and starts to fall apart is in presuming that the lessons alone are all anyone needs - completely neglecting the value of unscripted interaction between the student and professor and less formally among students. While this is not central to getting an education, and technically it is feasible to go through college and graduate school without ever asking a question in class or sections, why would anyone really want to?
Online Education is Making the Grade with Employers
Online degrees are no longer causing red flags on resumes for employers. In fact, many attributes of the online learner are what employers seek. They want lifelong learners, self-motivated workers, and critical thinkers—all of which apply to online learners.
In a new, free white paper titled “Online Degrees Make the Grade: Employer Acceptance Now Common“, researcher George Lorenzo, publisher of Educational Pathways, reveals that online education now receives wide support among businesses. “As corporations continue to see an increase in job candidates who have earned their degrees online,” writes Lorenzo, “the word has spread among executives, human resource professionals and hiring managers that online higher education graduates are focused employees with strong work ethics.”
To view the complete white paper free of charge, click here.
