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!

Is there a template out there for evaluating web page content in order to identify content patterns that would stand the test of academics? Surely there must be. So far I haven’t been able to find one as most of the research on semantics focuses on application based on a given content type you are creating or using. What I am trying to do is research a site, identify patterns, apply Microformats to the patterns, then figure out if there is a need for a new format based on the content.

What would need to identify a pattern in web content? Two years ago in WebPatterns and WebSemantics John Allsopp (the guy who wrote the Microformats book ) posted a great summary of what are patterns and how can you identify them. John mentions the area of web patterns is under-researched and references a great collection of patterns in web sites (that is missing the higher education pattern) but unfortunately for me I don’t think I can use that as key reference.

Interestingly enough, identifying web application patterns is exactly what my team and I have been doing with the new JobMine system. What I need to find out is where this has been before and in what capacity. Documenting UI elements is nothing knew but I think the criteria for the documentation is pretty loose and perhaps there is a need for one.

When I have my research criteria defined I will post it, any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated ;)