Thoughts on graduate level distance education, part 1
It has been just around a month since I handed in my final paper (on Microformats, might post that soon) to complete the requirements for a Masters of Science, Information Technology from the University of Liverpool. Overall it was a really good experience, better than my undergraduate experience at the University of Waterloo but I am fairly certain that any graduate experience is better than the undergraduate experience at any school. Your mindset is different, at least mine was. Maybe its just my age and lack of anxiety over ‘when I grow up’ (as that will never happen and I embrace that). This experience was entirely different than ‘typical’ higher education as well, the entire experience is delivered through online tools.
The course format
Every course (there are eight of them) is broken into eight, one week sections. A week is broken into an initial reading period (Thursday-Saturday) with at least one discussion question (DQ) that requires just over 600 words of an opinionated response with citations to back up your opinion from at least three or four sources. Those had to be in on Sunday.
I then had until Wednesday to respond to at least two different posts from classmates with a total of about a dozen ‘significant’ contributions expected. On top of that you have an assignment due on Wednesday night.
Grades were handed out for each week and broken down to assignments, participation, and a grade for the initial discussion question responses. At times the grades felt they were arbitrary until you look at the ‘answers’ from the previous week. Usually that was the top answer from someone else in the course. I wasn’t sure were people found the time to create the documents they did.
Class mates
People in your class (around 14 people at most) are from all over the world. I had one course with people from India, Dubai, Kenya, Germany, England, Jamaica, United States, and Canada. It was a diverse group. All IT professionals from different areas of IT, facing different challenges in different parts of the world. That adds tremendous value in my mind as it exposes you to very different problems and solutions than what I would see locally or within my contacts.
Everyone I met was really nice, I only wish I kept in better contact with them.
Instructors
The people running the course really do make the particular valuable or not. For seven out of eight courses I had really good instructors. They engaged the class, challenged each student, and offered insights beyond being simple graders. None of them were University of Liverpool profs though. They were from all over the world with the majority located in the US for the courses I took.
One negative experience was with a particular instructor that was an ‘expert’ in a particular technology and bound to a particular way of utilizing it. In this case it was using Visual Basic to tease out XML services. This instructor was more concerned about the Visual Basic then he was about the architecture of XML based services and applications. Given my lack of Windows (Mac guy here), writing what were essentially ASP with VB Script apps was pretty hard. I got penalized for my ASP programming even though the course was supposed to be about XML service architecture.
That one negative experience was pretty bad and my program manager was of little help. In a distance education setting there isn’t an effective appeal process for marks (or it doesn’t feel like there is) and you can’t exactly go talk to the prof. Email isn’t an ideal way to communicate either when one party is not responsive.
A second negative experience was with an instructor that I already had a good experience with in a previous course. I went on vacation during my final course and had limited access to the internet and time to do my work. He seemed to understand that for one week by heavily penalized me for the second week. That took away my chance at getting a ‘distinction’ on my Msc which really left a sour taste. Again no appeals process.
My next post will cover software used and how the program is managed.
Public beta of Dreamweaver ‘next’
Adobe has made available a public beta of the next version of Dreamweaver. Go give it a try! Scott Fegette has a bit more about the release on his blog.
It is really good to see Adobe do this after they let Photoshop CS3 out in beta last year. The next version of Dreamweaver is a big improvement over CS3 for front end developers although I would like to have seen a bit more for application developers.
StartupCampWaterloo3 on Tuesday June 3rd
We are just a week away from the third StartupCampWaterloo at the Accelerator Centre on North Campus in Waterloo. If you work for, own, or are thinking about having anything to do with a startup in the Waterloo region you should come out and meet other like minded folks. All are welcome.
StartupCampWaterloo is a community run event that gives startups a chance to test their ideas on their peers. Everyone who wants to present is given 60 seconds to get the audience interested in hearing more. The audience then votes and we try to give at least the top five a chance to present and get some feedback from everyone.
If you just want to see what this all about and get some free pizza and chocolate bars, you are welcome to that too 
Please sign up on either the wiki or the facebook event.
Fido offers UMA service
I noticed today that Fido (a Canadian mobile telco that is part of Rogers) is now offering the Nokia 6301 with UMA enabled if you buy their UNO router. The router thing is kinda dumb. Its just a crap average wifi router than might have some software installed to point your session to Fido/Rogers servers? Or maybe its just a wifi router for $80?
Anyway, kinda lame in how this is going out. I have heard Rogers is rolling it out as well. Perhaps it pains them to use Nokia devices to roll this out since Nokia likes to offer unlocked devices in the US for the same price Rogers sells them for with contracts? It is really cool technology and could, in theory, reduce costs all around. But pushing 802.11 routers that are special seems to be a bit odd.
UMA is: “Unlicensed Mobile Access or UMA, is the commercial name of the 3GPP Generic Access Network, or GAN standard. GAN is a telecommunication system which extends mobile services voice, data and IP Multimedia Subsystem/Session Initiation Protocol (IMS/SIP) applications over IP access networks.” Wikipidea.
My daycare observations and experience so far
My past few months have been complicated by issues that every new parent has had to deal with at some point. It all centres around daycare… They aren’t new to more experienced parents but they are new to me, so I post.
A certain local daycare that is on or very near campus finally called us up the other day after two years on the waiting list to say they have an infant spot in September for what will be our 19 month old son. Their recommendation was to stick him in the more expensive spot with cribs, supervision, and day plans, etc. What they don’t know is that our little ‘infant’ can tackle a four year old already. I don’t think he would do well in an institutional style daycare with kids younger than him… but who knows. We won’t find out as he isn’t going.
Currently he is in a home care environment with a an amazing family. He gets to play with all older kids that don’t really care he can’t speak a language they know yet. It is not ideal in that there is no back up if she is ill but in my mind it is a lot better experience. However, finding someone you trust is a lot harder. Finding someone at all in Waterloo is pretty hard.
Then there is paying for it. Generally Waterloo salaries are at a professional level with both parents working (when there are two parents). Even so, the cost is close to a mortgage payment if you find a spot. Do any regional employers help out employees with that? Sure you get some back in taxes but that first year is hard.
Even with daycare, kids get sick (a lot) and you don’t work
Then there is the issue of the bugs these kids share. It doesn’t matter what you do, the moment kids start interacting in groups they start sharing bugs.
The Baby started daycare in January of this year, by the end of the month he had his first cold. Four weeks of coughing later with fevers that would last a day or two then go away for a few days, he clearly had something more going on.
A whole rant on the good and bad service you get out of Ontario’s health care system could fill this void but lets just sum it with: three rounds of antibiotics, a few visits to emerg, and many days off of work later was topped off this weekend with the messiest of all viruses that had two newb parents celebrating solid poo in the nappy.
On a positive note we did get a week and a half away with no medical drama. Funny enough, the baby wasn’t in daycare for 5 days leading up to leaving on that trip… Having to live through virus spreading period of daycare has left me scrambling for time to do anything.
My wife and I are lucky though. We work at the University of Waterloo where generally you can take time to deal with things like a sick baby. What do other people do? Take vacation?
What could be fixed?
Not sure. I have a suspicion that larger employers in town do not do a whole lot to help out the young professional family starting out in the world but I could be wrong. University of Waterloo does nothing to help its staff or faculty get spots in daycare or afford them. It does try to encourage an environment that does give you time to deal with family issues though and that is worth something.
I think the ideal would be to make daycare a taxable benefit from the employer coupled with the ‘family focused’ environment for staff that allows them the time to at least ‘adjust’ working hours so that issues can more easily be dealt with. Burning precious vacation days only punishes young staff by taking away their only opportunity to actually get away. I certainly feel like I get the time but every month I wish I didn’t have to pay so much to have someone watch my kid so I can earn money so I can spend it to fuel the local, provincial, and national economy. Never mind the future tax payer.
“Suck it up, we had it worse” are normal comments I receive if I moan about this. I know the cost and availability is far worse in Toronto as well so I am thankful to be in Waterloo but it still isn’t great here either.
Our ‘plan b’ is to actually go with a live in nanny when the next one arrives. Its far less money than two times daycare costs!