Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Life as a Scholar Again

Well as I have mentioned a few times on my blog I am currently (and will be for awhile) doing an online course that is pertaining to my job. This course ended up not being nearly as time consuming or as hard as I had anticipated, which is definitely a good thing!

There is weekly "homework" which includes participating in small group discussions or case studies in a forum, and sometimes one person has to collect everyones thoughts and present it to the rest of the class. Like a presentation but it's all online. This is the plus side to online courses, you don't actually have to talk in front of a class or arrange to get together at someones house for some group project.

The only "downfall" if I may say is that it has almost been a little too easy. For instance, each week there is a quiz. All the quizzes are collectively worth like 10% I think. But you can see the quiz before you actually do it. So you can go through the questions, look up any answers you are not sure of, write them all down and then do the quiz. I have gotten 95-100% on all of the quizzes, cause I mean, how could you not when you can look up the answer? This is the only thing that has worried me slightly because I am wondering how much am I actually retaining.
Also when we are doing the class "discussions" its like an online message board. So you can easily skim through people's comments if they seem repetitive of one another. I feel like I may actually remember more if I was in a real discussion in real time.


Anyways, the work is officially done and now I just have to study. I have a 96% average going into the exam, which doesn't mean much because you must get a 70% on the exam or you fail. And you don't get an actual mark, just a pass/fail so you will never know what your mark was. So I really have to make sure that I study and I will be fine.

The classes are not offered in my town, so to do it in class would mean driving an hour away once a week. Not to mention having to ask for that day off every week or something which is also a hassle. So even though there are a few negative points to online learning I feel for me, this is the best option.

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