Can we spread some sanity re: education?


Sunday21
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Guest MormonGator
8 minutes ago, EarlJibbs said:

. Who is going to pay for that haha? So instead, I just do it for fun. I don't have to worry that it will pay the bills. 

 

Yup. I like to draw, but I'm terrible at it and I can virtually guarantee you that no one would ever pay for my drawings. 

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Guest MormonGator
9 minutes ago, LeSellers said:

Has anyone had any experience (or know someone who does) with the Western Governors' University (wgu.edu)?

I have heard good things about it, but no one with personal knowledge.

Lehi

I didn't go to Harvard (UNH class of 07) but I'd be very nervous about online degrees.

Like it or not, many people don't consider them equal to traditional schools. That is NOT what I believe, but it is what many others do. 

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9 minutes ago, MormonGator said:

I didn't go to Harvard (UNH class of 07) but I'd be very nervous about online degrees.

Like it or not, many people don't consider them equal to traditional schools. That is NOT what I believe, but it is what many others do. 

I think WGU is legit. It's also expensive from what I remember. I had some banking friends that went there. The bank I worked for also promoted it, probably because they had money invested in it, maybe. 

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The deputy program manager for a major government contract for CH2M Hill had a business degree from an online school.  But it was one that specifically catered to the working professional who already had a degree.  I believe it was something like Northwestern?

They called me up to see if I was interested.  They wanted the same fee for a 3 credit class as I would pay for a full-time tuition rate at any other school.  I told them no way.  But they tried to justify the cost by saying that my company would pay the lion's share of that tuition.  I hung up on them.

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Guest MormonGator
8 minutes ago, EarlJibbs said:

I think WGU is legit. It's also expensive from what I remember. I had some banking friends that went there. The bank I worked for also promoted it, probably because they had money invested in it, maybe. 

It's good to look at both sides of the case in online education.  Again, I didn't go to the Ivy League, just a regular public university. 

8 minutes ago, EarlJibbs said:

Except I actually think I am good at it haha!

Hey I designed a tattoo for someone once. After they took one look at it, they said, "Oh, that's not what I was looking for." The worst part? I couldn't blame them at all. 

Yeah, I'm not applying to get on Ink Master anytime soon. 

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47 minutes ago, LeSellers said:

Has anyone had any experience (or know someone who does) with the Western Governors' University (wgu.edu)?

I have heard good things about it, but no one with personal knowledge.

Lehi

I have a friend finishing her teaching degree through them, and she can't say enough good. My husband thinks about studying with them now and then, because of the good he's heard, and because they take work experience toward credits. Seems like it's a great school if one of their programs is a good fit for you. (They don't have anything that interests me.)

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9 minutes ago, Eowyn said:

I have a friend finishing her teaching degree through them, and she can't say enough good. My husband thinks about studying with them now and then, because of the good he's heard, and because they take work experience toward credits. Seems like it's a great school if one of their programs is a good fit for you. (They don't have anything that interests me.)

Thanks, Eowyn.

It is intriguing that they charge $6,000/semester, irrespective of the classes you take. That's almost affordable. I  have been telling some of my clients here at the Employment Resource Center about it when they need more education than they currently have, but I tell them to use due diligence before committing to it.

Lehi

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2 hours ago, LeSellers said:

Has anyone had any experience (or know someone who does) with the Western Governors' University (wgu.edu)?

I have heard good things about it, but no one with personal knowledge.

Lehi

Dear Lehi, 

my sister is doing her masters through Western Governers. It is significantly cheaper than many other options. Some problems though. The online class is run by a prof who does not mark the assignments. So the person teaching you is not the person evaluating you. Big problem. Very often the two parties have completely different ways of looking at an assignment. You are assigned someone to mentor you. This person is sympathetic but powerless and sometimes very useful and sometimes very useless.

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13 minutes ago, Sunday21 said:

the person teaching you is not the person evaluating you. Big problem. Very often the two parties have completely different ways of looking at an assignment

No arbiter? No appeal? Hmm, that would be a problem.

Thanks for the insights.

Lehi

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14 minutes ago, LeSellers said:

No arbiter? No appeal? Hmm, that would be a problem.

Thanks for the insights.

Lehi

From what my sister tells me, no arbiter, no appeal and stiff deadlines. In my sister's degree program, there is an impossible project that represents a must do final project. Apparently the other students that she corresponds with fake the project. My sister is a couple of courses away from this capstone project. We are trying to figure out what to do! Very worried!

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I love the idea of WGU and I've looked into it several times. But it really only makes sense if you go full time, because as has been said they charge you a flat rate no matter how many classes you take. This makes no sense to me, since I assume many people who want flexible education would be part-timers, wanting to finish school while still holding down a day job.

The other thing I have heard is that they don't give you regular college credits. So you can't transfer any of your work to another college, and if you don't finish the full program you are out of luck.

If anyone knows better, please correct my understanding.

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12 minutes ago, tesuji said:

I love the idea of WGU and I've looked into it several times. But it really only makes sense if you go full time, because as has been said they charge you a flat rate no matter how many classes you take. This makes no sense to me, since I assume many people who want flexible education would be part-timers, wanting to finish school while still holding down a day job.

The other thing I have heard is that they don't give you regular college credits. So you can't transfer any of your work to another college, and if you don't finish the full program you are out of luck.

If anyone knows better, please correct my understanding.

I don't know about tranfering credits. Almost everyone in my sister's program is part time. Apparently you can write a paper really fast, get comments and then rewrite. My sister can't bring herself to do this.

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Initially at college (BYU) I thought I would pursue teaching as a profession.  At the time BYU offered within the major of Math education to declare a specialty.   After reviewing the options I selected to specialize in exceptional learners (genius).   I was the only student interested in working with the best and brightest – I thought that to be rather odd.   Hundreds selected the option to work with special needs learners; which is political correct speak for those that have various levels of moderate to extreme difficulty learning. 

What I have learned is that there is a really strange love/hate goofy kind of prejudice in our society associated with genius.  Seldom is genius ever even recognized and very often when genius is expected the expectations are accompanied with various levels of envy, distrust, fear and even hatred.   Actually it is my personal belief that everyone has a genius but few have exceptional learning capabilities over a large bandwidth of learning possibilities and those that do are usually considered the “true” geniuses.  In short I believe most learn to hide their abilities for social reasons – often hiding such abilities even from themselves.  Some are so entrenched in hiding their genius that they will become angry if someone tries to stimulate or bring out their secret possibilities.

In education there is another dimension of problems, especially at the college level.  Quite frankly most professors are on somewhat of an ego trip and despise a student that is more “gifted” or obviously smarter than they are.  What few understand is that the #1 most common denominator of genius is that they are mentored – they have a loving and caring friend lifting them towards their potential and capabilities.  If genius is left to its own it will seldom achieve – this is true of any exceptional achiever – be it in music, sports, science or even social interactions.

I have a few questions:

  1. Who do you look to – to encourage you to achieve your full potential?  If you are paying someone to “teach” you and they are not fulfilling this role – why are you wasting your time and money with them?

  2. Who are you encouraging to achieve their full potential?

  3. Do you think that encouraging someone to greater achievement is more apt to result friendly happy discussions about things or appear to be more toward disagreement or even argument?  It is interesting to me that in scripture we are told that G-d will chastise those he loves.

In general we tend to appreciate and even love those we agree with and despite and even hate those that disagree with us.  And yet we will actually only learn or achieve something new from someone that disagrees that our understanding or achievement is good enough or sufficient. 

 

The Traveler

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Well... in my son's school, they have 3 tracks:  Standard, Advanced, and Gifted

This translates to:

Standard   Regular kids

Advanced:  Smart ones

Gifted:  Geniuses

So, there's no such thing as hatred/envy/any-other-negativity to geniuses in that school.  They're simply the kids who are learning algebra and geometry and statistics in one school year while the regular kids are mastering fractions, so they got more homework than the regular kids and may not have time to goof off with video games.

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On April 14, 2016 at 4:15 PM, unixknight said:

This makes me think of the "I am the 99" movement, where every other image showed someone who was complaining because they'd graduated from college with a degree and couldn't find a job, or what job they could find wasn't paying enough for them to pay on the student loans and meet their other expenses all at once.  Of course, that degree was invariably in something that just isn't a marketable skill... and somehow that's the fault of... everybody else.

I think the problem is that for a long time we've been told that College Degree = Lucrative Employment.  That was probably true once, back when college degrees were generally marketable.  Now, what do you do with a degree in Womens' Studies?  Teach Womens' Studies?  Write books about Womens' Studies?  Gonna pay your bills with that?

What really bothers me is that parents and young people here, perhaps not in the us, often assume that if a university offers a degree that you can find a job with that degree. Why do I say this? I keep meeting people who tell me so! People with degrees in forensics and psychology!

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When Husband began studying geology, the job market for it was much better. He graduated three years ago and works in security after failing to find a geology job. He encourages others to consider trade schools.

 

On teaching... going private would be awesome with a culture shift. Right now, your average private school job is tricky. They tend to have nicer school cultures, but they also on average pay half of what public schools pay. We teachers ought to have a major revolution in that area.

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28 minutes ago, Backroads said:

When Husband began studying geology, the job market for it was much better. He graduated three years ago and works in security after failing to find a geology job.

There are jobs in Saudi Arabia for geologists. Many people like living and working there.

Lehi

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My brother is a geologist, and was sure his fate would be in Texas working for an oil company. He ended up landing a great job at the Hanford site in Washington state, but that was after developing a groundbreaking way to do something they needed. Not an easy field to find work in, for sure. 

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5 hours ago, LeSellers said:

There are jobs in Saudi Arabia for geologists. Many people like living and working there.

Lehi

 

5 hours ago, LeSellers said:

There are jobs in Saudi Arabia for geologists. Many people like living and working there.

Lehi

Not much for less than 5 years' experience, though. It's a competitive field right now, like Eoeyn said. 

 

He's going back for further training, but he does enjoy his current field.

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16 hours ago, anatess2 said:

Well... in my son's school, they have 3 tracks:  Standard, Advanced, and Gifted

This translates to:

Standard   Regular kids

Advanced:  Smart ones

Gifted:  Geniuses

So, there's no such thing as hatred/envy/any-other-negativity to geniuses in that school.  They're simply the kids who are learning algebra and geometry and statistics in one school year while the regular kids are mastering fractions, so they got more homework than the regular kids and may not have time to goof off with video games.

Schools here offer classes in three flavors: Regular, Honors, and AP. This translates to:

  • Regular: Some good classes, some bad. Crap shoot. You get what you get. Good luck, Jim.
  • Honors: Double or triple the homework, and the teacher is almost always tyrannical or otherwise awful. Avoid at all costs.
  • AP: Reasonably decent classes, but college-level ideas taught at a high school pace by high school teachers in a high school setting. It's a bastardization that, in my opinion (or at least for my chidlren), gives the worst of both worlds and thus works very poorly. Plus, you do an entire year of the high school class to get the option of testing for one quarter of college credit.

The fourth option is "Running Start", where students can take college courses at the local community college -- actually now a state college -- and gain college credit for classes used toward high school graduation. My children have taken advantage of this, and have found it to be a very good way to go.

(The younger students also have the possibility of going to a STEM school. This was big news a few years back, and people were trampling each other trying to get their children in. I can't see that the STEM kids know significantly more or do any better than the decent students in the regular schools. I think it's just a way for the school district to spend lots of money. Seriously, I really do think that, because it definitely is not for the benefit of the students.)

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In high school I took AP courses because they reportedly has less homework. Now, I enjoyed the classes for what they were and what I learned, but looking back I think they had far too much fuss.

 

I teach elementary school, so I'm quite removed from the various tracks and educational offerings, but my knee-jerk response is scoring the latest trends and buzzwords. Oh, how I hate educational buzzwords.

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On ‎4‎/‎17‎/‎2016 at 8:48 PM, Vort said:

Schools here offer classes in three flavors: Regular, Honors, and AP. This translates to:

  • Regular: Some good classes, some bad. Crap shoot. You get what you get. Good luck, Jim.
  • Honors: Double or triple the homework, and the teacher is almost always tyrannical or otherwise awful. Avoid at all costs.
  • AP: Reasonably decent classes, but college-level ideas taught at a high school pace by high school teachers in a high school setting. It's a bastardization that, in my opinion (or at least for my chidlren), gives the worst of both worlds and thus works very poorly. Plus, you do an entire year of the high school class to get the option of testing for one quarter of college credit.

The fourth option is "Running Start", where students can take college courses at the local community college -- actually now a state college -- and gain college credit for classes used toward high school graduation. My children have taken advantage of this, and have found it to be a very good way to go.

(The younger students also have the possibility of going to a STEM school. This was big news a few years back, and people were trampling each other trying to get their children in. I can't see that the STEM kids know significantly more or do any better than the decent students in the regular schools. I think it's just a way for the school district to spend lots of money. Seriously, I really do think that, because it definitely is not for the benefit of the students.)

They have the Honors and/or AP and/or IB in some high schools here.  My son is in Middle School.  My other son who is in High School have classes in these flavors:  Piano track, Guitar track, Visual Arts track, Drama track, Band track... you get the idea.  The academics classes are one-size fits all but they can choose whether to skip freshman year academics - these are for students that were in the smart or genius classes in Middle School (not all middle schools have these tracks).  Those that skip freshman year academics get college classes in senior year at the local college (choice between the state college or the community college) which would be 2 semesters worth since they get to go for the whole year.  The arts classes are already in cooperation with the state college even in freshman year - the highly talented kids get to perform/exhibit their art at the college hall so the college professors come to the high school to work with the kids to prepare for these performances/exhibits.

The regular high schools here are like your high schools - Crap Shoot, Useless Busy Work, and Pretend College.  So, if you're wanting to take advantage of the tax-funded system you have to position your kid from elementary school so you can get accepted to the good magnet school that has excellent programs.  My Middle Schooler did so well in Elementary School he has his choice of Middle Schools from all the magnet schools in the city.  My High Schooler qualified for the top 2 academic magnets - including their IB programs.  But he chose to go to the arts magnet instead.  My neighborhood school is so bad, my kid's best friend - who is one smart cookie - came home with 2 F's last week.

 

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