A Time of Magic

One of the problems in choosing an online university these days isn’t that the number of them is small but because the choice has grown enormously in recent years.

The big plus point in that is that instead of a small number of so-so universities there are some of the major players (still overly expensive) and a serious number of sensible universities like Western Governors. Although not widely known, that’s a situation that seems sure to change with their move into national promotion of their online accredited programmes. That little word “accredited” is quite significant too as many of the early online universities didn’t have that status which in practical terms made qualifications from them largely worthless.

Changed too is the presentation: these days WGU offers a professional looking website. That shouldn’t need saying but sadly that professional look just ain’t there in a number of the early online offerings. They’re much more complete too with an online MBA offering. The significance of the online MBA is that an awful lot of people who should have an MBA just don’t have the option of taking time out of their life to go on an MBA programme; something that many online universities either forget or just aren’t up to providing.

The problem is that you’ve normally little choice in what books you need to buy.

Out will pop a recommended list of textbooks from your university and basically you need to buy them. Sometimes you can thin out the list a little but in many cases you can’t as you don’t know ahead of time what ones you’ll need and, of course, the library just doesn’t have enough copies of those books to go around. Secondhand? Well, sometimes but in some subjects the new editions are required and you’ll just be wasting money on older second hand ones.

It’s one of those largely hidden costs of courses that can sometimes substantially increase the overall cost of those courses if the lecturer gets a bit carried away with their recommendations: after all, it doesn’t cost them anything and, in some cases, can even make them money though commissions.

We all do, of course, but what if there’s just too much information?

One of the most significant differences I found when I started my current psychology course compared to the language courses that I’d been doing previously was that the much larger number of students involved meant that there was a correspondingly large increase in the information available online. So much in fact that selecting amongst it is almost at the point where it’s a significant problem.

In addition to the information put out by the university, there are notes from several different tutorial groups that were run in previous years, booklets summarizing the content of the course texts, study weekends, several blogs, student notes on the texts and even one set of answers for the assignments. That last is much less useful than you might think but is definitely very helpful to get a feel for what might be expected from the examiners.

I suspect that there are some people who are sinking in the sea of information out there. Even within our own group there are some people who are flipping between the two options in the first assignment thanks to the different ways that the requirements were put across in the two tutorials that have been run to date.

To my mind this is definitely a case of way too much information. It’s all useful to be sure and I’ve gone to tutorials run by two different tutors myself. Cost will dictate that most people will realistically only consider one of the four revision weekends that I’ve came across but the initial blogs on this course will only grow in numbers over the years adding to the confusion of future students I suspect.