Who You Calling A Jesse?

In part one I talked about the general format and in part two I looked at the technology used during my graduate education experience through distance education. In this part I look at the time I put into it and overall benefits with this style of education.

Time put in matches or exceeds a full-time Msc program

On average I would say that 16 hours a week went into any given course. With eight weeks a course, eight courses, around 1024 hours was spent just on course work. My dissertation required an additional 175 or so dedicated hours I believe (probably the same spent thinking/dreaming about it). That, rounded up to account a little for the conservative time estimate, is around 160 work days which, for the sake of argument, could be considered a normal years worth of dedicated time required in a typical UK Msc program. I completed that in two and a half years. I also worked (35+ hours a week) at a busy job and tried to have a life.

No matter how you look at that it is a crazy amount of time to dedicate to an ‘additional’ something (and I was paying to do it!!!). At first it was a novelty but around the third course in a row (~18 weeks in) I found the time commitment required to get decent marks started to put a strain on everything else in my life. I had to learn how to shape my evenings and weekends to allow for uninterrupted time otherwise assignments would drag out and my grades would suffer.

The pace was intense. If you ever get more than a week behind in a course (the instructors usually allowed that given life circumstances) the catching up became impossible. With the way the program is set up you can’t drop the course after 10 days without having to pay for the make up either. As it ends up, before you get 1/4 of the way in you are locked in (not entirely unusual practice in higher ed).

“Why did I do this to myself and why the f*#k was I paying to do that to myself?” That really hit me around course number four when an arrogant instructor that gave no feedback and was impossible to get a hold of nearly had me dropping out. Laureate (the people managing the program) did nothing to help other than to offer sympathy as well (again no different than any higher education experience I have had). I had to suck it up, focus, and get my stuff done in a way I had not experienced before.

Higher education is about more than specific knowledge gains

Looking back, when things hit that low I believe I gained the most from the experience. Sure I can hammer out 500-750 words with references in half a day, I know more about different internet based technology than I did before, and I found out that I just should never code because I was successfully completing my Java coding assignments but still have no idea how they actually worked. Like with my undergrad, I learned how to research and present it with confidence that I actually do know what I am talking about. But unlike my undergrad, I had to suck it up while sucking up a whole lot more at work and in life then I ever had too in my early 20’s.

I still need to focus to achieve that quality where confidence is well placed but I can call on that focus in much more productive bursts than ever before. I think that I am much more skilled at time/task management, learned how to harness my insane bursts of productivity, and had a good time on the journey.

What would you get out of distance education?

• Expanding your learning skills through formal academic experience is beneficial regardless of level and location.
• It requires a purpose: do not pursue graduate level education unless you really want to… it gets boring, frustrating, and you feel dumb. Then you finish.
• If you can’t afford it today but want to do it, do it. Worst thing that will happen is that you have to drop out… but at least you tried.

I do want to continue on and do research on web technology and how people interact with it. However, I don’t know where I could do that. Three years ago I would have never considered it though, it’s kinda cool my need to learn new things has come back… after a bit of rest this summer I am looking forward to getting into all kinds of crazy things again ;)

Not sure if this makes sense to anyone but me… just needed to get my thoughts out there. My next post on this should be my dissertation which was on ‘Microformats’ and assessing potential for their application on your home page.

In part one I talked about the general format of my graduate education experience through distance education. This part will talk about the technology that was used to conduct the course.

The software that ‘did it all’ from running the courses to interacting with fellow students was from managed by Embanet, FirstClass, and is from OpenText. My first impression of it was along the lines of disbelief. It seemed like a really bad newsgroup manager with a clunky interface and slow beyond belief. After a few settings changes and things got better. Once I learned about some of the more useful features like ‘unsend’ messages I was less annoyed by it. It has a clunky UI but it works. Just this spring the program switched to blackboard, not sure what I think about that but I am glad I didn’t have to make the switch.

How we used the software was very similar to a newsgroup with a managed space for shared files. The courses had their own ‘group’ that was broken down to sub-groups that were based on each week. All assignments, group work, and correspondence with the instructor was done in that style. A shared folder for each week that was essentially just another newsgroup that gave only posting access is where assignments were handed in. The software did allow for live chats with classmates, audio chats, and a really useful set of collaboration features.

However, there was nothing in the software that I could not do in MSN, facebook, a newsgroup, blog, forum, etc. I am pretty sure the experience would have been better if they had a process that utilized tools that are more flexible than the software they gave us. I am not sure how you can manage distance education without a centralized ‘kitchen sink’ system to control access to content though. With on campus courses where students use online tools to compliment lab and/or classroom experiences I don’t know why you force students to use ‘kitchen sink’ software like blackboard if only to enforce control on access to content. Sadly if students try to do something in an environment they find useful academics can re-act in bizarre ways.

My grades, course information, and handbook was all handled in a web based solution that was just a .NET application with some simple tables displaying information. An odd management of documents had HTML files located on the web app but anything that was in Word documents or other templates was found over in the embanet software.

In courses themselves any software used was generally Open Source and/or platform independant. I only had one course that was VB.NET focused and it was XML Web Applications that focused largely on SOAP and XSLT, no the irony still isn’t lost. The IT Project Management course required MS Project but supplied a licence for it but not much for this OS X user. Thankfully I had an Intel Mac with Boot Camp so I managed the course.

Part three will talk about the time requirements and what I see as the benefits of this style of graduate education.

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.

In August of 2005 I was bored and frustrated. I decided to check out graduate education options even though my undergrad experience pretty much sucked. After looking around I decided to try out the University of Liverpool’s Masters of Information Technology. At the time it was a relatively new program and I was hesitant to take a Msc via distance learning. Plus I couldn’t afford it and work wasn’t going to pay.

Ignoring all that, I went ahead and applied. Since then I have hit highs and lows—distance education is a lot of work and takes a lot more discipline than I thought I had to get things done. But now, 2.5 years later I have just made my final submission for my dissertation. I hated it and I loved it… I certainly had the best education experience I have yet to have in my life and would do it again.

Once the paper is graded I will post more about that. I did it on Microformats ;) Nothing too exciting, just looking at how they could be applied… in 91 pages with appendices!

It is interview time here at Waterloo. It happens once every four months, thousands of students and employers enter a dating game for talent and experience. Waterloo is a bit unique having a building dedicated to the process (just happens to be where my office is) and a frequency of three times a year for the process to run. Large companies like Google, RIM and Microsoft are hear hiring large numbers of students but so are local startups like AideRSS and Semacode along with all sorts of companies from different fields and different sizes. Posters on the walls with all the different information sessions show all the opportunities for students.

Why do the companies come here? Waterloo has the talent and I would argue there is far more and better talent than Stanford (update: Larry disagrees or does he?). Our students go to the Valley or Seattle or Boston or Ottawa and all points in-between to work for big names and get started on their carriers while they are working on their undergrad (or grad) degrees. A lot them stay local (Google and RIM are in Waterloo, along with a lot of other interesting employers) and even more would like to stay local for a term or two if a great job can be found.

For local web/tech startups this is a great opportunity. If you developing an idea and you need someone that can code and wants to contribute, for around 10K you can get a junior student for four months to do that. Senior students are more but you get higher quality and more experience. Just to prove a startup concept though, a junior co-op student is inexpensive and hugely beneficial.

The project I am working on depends on the quality of Waterloo Co-ops. We are building a new system to run the job/dating game and have a great bunch of students to do that. They code, they ask questions, they learn, they are excited, and they build really cool things from your ideas. Over the years I have worked with a number of different students and all of them made me look good—which is what you want when you hire someone, right? ;)

There is a side benefit to local startups hiring students I think as well. If you keep the students here, keep them engaged, and get them excited about trying out their ideas you help the local community build resources. I think it’s one part of the puzzle that may help Waterloo’s stealthy startup scene become even more open and exciting.

If you are wondering how to hire a co-op, contact CECS and they will have you set up in no time.

In what I think is a good example for large institution web teams, the BBC has gone and offered an update to their home page. It is very Web two point oh with some widgets and gradients, big images, and larger text so its easier to read in this web world of increasingly high resolutions. They have some cool design elements like a classic looking clock, customization, and all the other bits you would expect on a site… except advertisements. The rationale for the design is offered in a blog post.

Issues to note about the BBC in my mind are:

• It is publicly funded and the public can take an ownership view on its web presence
• They have a large team but an even larger web presence
• Their primary audience is hugely diverse and crosses generations, from pre-teens to WWII vets

What I like:

• Their blog post explains what they thinking with regards to the big changes and invites conversation
• They point out there will be continuous changes (the web is not a static medium)
• It is a big change on look not content so they try to undersell it a little as a ‘lick of paint’ not a ‘redo’

Love it or hate it, its a pretty cool public process given all things.

Next week (December 4th) sees two pretty exciting campus conferences happening. The first is WatITis – a one day conference for IT staff at the University of Waterloo. Would you believe there are just over 300 IT staff at Waterloo working in dozens of different departments? This will be the first year I am not presenting (current job’s stuff isn’t presentation ready yet) and I am not sure I will have time to attend… but it is a really good event.

The following day is the Power of IDEAS conference. This one is open to anyone for a really low price (below $100 for off campus folks, free to on campus people) and focusing on inclusive learning strategies, usability, and accessibility. Derek Featherstone did the keynote for the first one in the summer of 2006, this year he returns for the closing keynote. I will be presenting on building usable web applications and will offer a glimpse of what I am doing in the lower level of the TC as well as some reflection on other higher education home pages and other applications I have worked on over the years.

Keep an eye on the Power of IDEAS conference. Lead by the Office for Persons with Disabilities office, it will only grow (this year there are over 90 people from off campus registered, last year we had around 20). I think it is just great that a conference dedicated to promoting accessibility and usability.

In what is probably the silliest post I have seen on 37Signals blog, they ask Is formal education important? The response?

“We’re more interested in someone’s experience, real work, and point of view than we are with their diploma, degree, or GPA. Formal education is probably last on our list of qualities we feel make someone qualified to work at 37signals.”

They aren’t saying a formal education doesn’t count but they do under state the value of higher education. I think it’s a common misunderstanding that higher education is about specific skills training. But I suppose higher education means different things to different people.

To me it’s about thinking outside of your comfort zone, meeting different people with radically different beliefs/values/etc, and gaining strategies/techniques that enable effective life long learning. Is it for everyone? No. You can certainly gain a similar value through work experience. But that takes some luck.

Update: What I do want to point out is that if you are up for a job against some one with the similar personality, same experience, skill, and passion and they have a degree and you don’t… guess who will likely get the job?