Snoozing through online classes

This week’s blog topic is to discuss our experience with and expectations of online classes. I have not taken online classes as part of my MBA program, although I have taken an online class with my first job out of college. For a year I was employed by a consulting company where my assignment was to work as a contract employee at my current employer. The consulting company offered a large number of online courses about various topics. These classes were not for degree credits. I took a C++ class. There was no live instructor for this class. I would log on to the website and go through each lesson listening to the recorded voice. There were quizzes at the end of most sections and a final test that needed to be passed in order to receive credit for the class. As for deadlines, there was just a final date that the class needed to be completed by. There were no deadlines for completing each lesson or each quiz. Establishing this would be up to the student if they chose to. Employees were able to extend the final completion deadline if they weren’t going to finish the course in time. I believe you could have two extensions per class.

I liked that I could take the class whenever I wanted. I could go through each lesson as my schedule permitted. At times I have something come up during the week that I have to miss because of my current fixed class schedule so that flexibility was nice. I also liked that I could replay lessons or just rewind back through a few minutes of the lesson if I missed something or wanted to hear it again. On the other hand, the recorded voice sometimes got to be very monotonous and seemed to drone on and on. That, along with the lack of class interaction, made the class boring at times. Sometimes I’d find myself rewinding because I was so bored I had actually fallen asleep. I had trouble completing the course on time and had to ask for an extension twice. Looking back, I should have set my own deadlines. For example, lessons 1-3 had to be completed in the first week, lessons 4-6 in the second week, etc. If I had set my own schedule like this I would’ve been able to complete the class by the initial deadline. Flexibility would still have been maintained since I could have completed each lesson whenever I had the time and not during the same time slot each week.