<p>Hi. I'm not sure which forum topic to post this under, apologies from advance if this is incorrect.</p>
<p>I recently went back to college to earn that bachelor degree, and almost all my classes are online this semester since it was extremely difficult to find available campus classes.</p>
<p>It is flexible as promised, and is nice when you're busy, but I'm wondering if online classes are generally harmful.</p>
<p>The college I go to uses an interface called Moodle, while not attractive or intuitive, it gets the job done. The issue I find is how the professors teach online courses. There is the syllabus which is not complete, assignments mentioned in various places with different requirements, "lectures" they create themselves on a webpage with different fonts and colors like a 90's website, links to resources that may or may not be needed, basically just a huge mess. On top of that, they expect you to participate in discussions throughout the week to simulate classroom participation. Uh? What class is a full week long. Which brings me to my other dislike: having (or forcing) to share personal information with strangers, in writing.</p>
<p>Is this normal with most college online courses? Will I get used to it? How do you cope if your experience is similar to mine?</p>
<p>Would appreciate any feedback or advice, thank you.</p>
<p>It’s pretty normal. I had a few online courses. In one of them, the teacher was a retired “snow bird” (moves to Florida from PA in the winter) who teaches one class per semester for extra cash. She literally posted the schedule of exams (which we had to drive to the school to take) and reading assignments and otherwise would not return e-mails or calls. There were no discussions. You just did your reading and took the test on the scheduled day. </p>
<p>My history class was actually pretty well set-up. There was a message forum where he posted one or a few questions each week and we had to respond to it sometime during the week. </p>
<p>What I didn’t like was the set up for my creative writing course. We had to exchange our Word documents - which means being prone to viruses. I had some silly girl accuse me of sending her a virus. I have a Mac and she had a Dell PC. She implied that I needed to pay to fix her computer - but 1. I have virus scans on my computer and 2. we used different platforms. As it turned out, her computer had the virus already but it just happened to crash when she opened my document. I did not like file sharing with anyone other than the prof (when necessary).</p>
<p>I think the occasional online course is okay and convenient, especially for elective courses, but not the best option for all of your courses or for important ones to your major. I’ve had quite a few profs who really didn’t know how to use computers in class to set up PowerPoints - I can’t imagine how they got through teaching their online courses.</p>