Classes

I'm taking online classes to get a masters in telecommunications management. My hubby likes to say I'll be 1 of 100 people with that degree, but hey, it's what I need to learn.

Need to learn and want to learn are different things. I need to learn this stuff in order to do my job better and get promoted. I want to learn it because I'm tired of other people explaining things to me all the time.

Still, I noticed the success of taking classes online greatly depends on your natural curiosity for the subject.

I'm enrolled in two classes at the moment. One is really fun. I look forward to the new readings and assignments every Monday. We do our group work in Google Docs, we made avatars of ourselves, we submitted a video blog (or podcast, depending on your preference). It's fun, it's an innovative way to teach, and it gets us to use a variety of online tools.

My other class is the extreme opposite. The prof wants us to respond to discussion questions with sourced material, putting a lot of thought into the discussion before we post. In other words, a complete academic discussion panel.

Sucks the fun out of everything.

It's hard, joyless, and mostly theoretical debate. I hates it, my precious.

So those are the two types of professors. There are also two types of students.

1. The people who respond to discussion questions with personal experiences, thoughts, and a general conversational tone. It's okay to be wrong, just put your ideas out there.

2. The people who search through books and journal articles, copy entire paragraphs from them, put it in quotes, then source the material in proper APA format.

The latter is like talking to a textbook. I also hates that, my precious. Seriously, would it kill these people to lighten up? So what if you get the wrong answer. You tried. At least it's your original thought, not your best effort to Google.

I noticed the two types of students don't mix. The conversational people talk amongst themselves. The academic copy/pasters like to copy/paste differing articles at each other. 

The difference is, in one class the conversational people are favored by the prof. In the other, they are considered "anecdotal" whose opinions are not equal to a published author.

One class enhances natural curiosity; the other squashes it.