Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

I’ve just started my second year at the University of Phoenix, Axia (or junior college) division, so I thought it would be a good time to give my opinion of the school. There is a lot of information out there, and potential misinformation, and I might as well add to it, no?

Bottom line: so far, my experience has been fairly positive. Other bottom line: I don’t think distance learning is for everyone.

Some scattered points:

Education at for-profit schools is expensive, far more expensive than at my local community college.  BUT… because the local community college is so cheap, they have huge waiting lists for almost every class and people are just hoping that someone will drop a class so that they can get in. Also, although they offer some courses online, they do not offer full degrees online and, at this point in time, I am unable to commit to offline classes. So… it is more expensive, which means more debt after I finish school. But at least I am in classes now and not somewhere down the road.

Some of the really negative stuff I’ve read about UOP concerns the enrollment advisors. Apparently there are some less than ethical ones who will say anything to make a commission or something. That was not my experience. My enrollment advisor offered no pressure at all, made sure I understood the costs and encouraged me to limit loans as much as possible and has been, in my experience, an all around good guy.

In addition to the enrollment advisor students also have an academic advisor and a financial advisor. I simply love my academic advisor – he is smart, funny, artistic (his passion, which he will be leaving to follow soon, is costume designing. He sews them himself, so each one is tailored and unique.) Oh, and he’s quite helpful if I have any questions about my classes or future courses and such, too.

Some instructors/facilitators are more involved in the classes than others.  Some classes feel more like reading and discussion groups, with the instructor just giving the questions and sometimes other prompts, but not interacting much with the class and basically using a check-off template to give feedback on work. Other instructors are very “hands-on” and do all of the above, plus interacting with everyone and adding personal comments to the feedback thus, to my mind, creating more of a personal connection with the students. My environmental science teacher was one of those and I loved the class, and even now have more of an interest in (and understanding of) the subject than I did before. So, I prefer the latter approach but I learn well enough with either, and that’s the important part. Luckily, in what promises to be my favorite class (World Literature), the instructor is hands-on, involved, thorough and loves the topic, so yay!

I’ve noticed that the further I progress in the year, the better quality of students there are in my classes. In my first classes there were some students who seemed barely literate. Not that they were stupid or anything – many of them owned their own businesses, or were salespersons, or managers of this or that, and all that (some stay at home moms and such, as well, most of whom seemed to be better writers than the average), but in a medium that depends so much on writing, they just were not at all good at it. However, there is help for that with exercises and stuff in the UOP library, as well as writing (and other) labs for students who need more help in one area or another (I plan to do some of the math labs and exercises before I face Algebra 1 and 2 myself) so not writing well is not a death-knell to getting a degree there. They also have an automated paper checker thing that you can run your academic papers through that checks language, grammar, academic usage, passive voice, and so on (it would rip this post all to pieces because it is so ineptly written, but y’all aren’t grading me, so… ) But it does require that one be self-directed and one of those ubiquitous “self-starters” to reach out to the tools to improve.

So, I don’t know. It’s working for me, for now. I am 50-something years old and had been out of any sort of classes for years, so I think it was a good start for me. I mostly wanted to get used to writing on demand, and that I do – I have to write one or two short essays (no more than 2500 words, and most no more than 1500) weekly and that is good practice for me. Once I graduate from here, though, with a degree in communications (a subject that, I have discovered, bores me silly) I am moving on to, probably, the University of Maryland. They have a online division where I can complete my bachelor’s in English. It looks like a slightly more rigorous program than UOP’s, plus they offer many other electives and also minors and I think it will just be a better fit for me. I talked to an admissions advisor from UMUC today and they cheerfully accept University of Phoenix transfer credits (another thing I was worried about after reading this or that online) because it is a regionally accredited school, so there is no problem there.

Anyway, my opinion, for what it’s worth.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 4:50 pm and is filed under journal, learning stuff, stuff, University of Phoenix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.