At the behest of Stephen, based on an earlier exchange via this website in June, here are my experiences with WGU thus far (1JUN2011-present)
First-I can add some demographic information about me.
male, white, 34, married, 4 kids
Prior service, disabled veteran
Bachelor of Scienc in Information Systems Management, Doane College 2008
Employment-Software Testing/Client Support/Accounting Support, TerraScan Inc.
I attended Hastings College in NE for three years, then transferred to the now defunct Dana College (financial woes finally killed it after 150 years) when I got engaged. I dropped out of Dana in 2000 when my mom was diagnosed with colon cancer, and my wife, son, and I moved back home. Rural SE Nebraska is not a welcoming place if you leave to go to college and then come back and work at a WalMart. After mom stabilized I enlisted into the US Army in the spring of 2001. I was injured in a training accident later that year and Honrably Discharged in 2002. I didn’t pick up school again until 2004.
I find that my perception of effort at WGU is less, though the work itself may be difficult, and this is what will probably catch many students. What I mean is that a particular assignment in a traditional college course might be meted out over days or weeks of instruction, discussion, lab, or some other means of transmission with a final assignment being required. Because there is a tangible time investment involved, the student would be able to conceptualize the amount of work required to get an assignment done, and through instruction, assume that what was lectured on would be the basis for most future assignments. With WGU assignments there is not a concrete passage of time, or a linear chunking of curriculum. I know what my assignments are based on the online tools for each class, and I have the rubrics for each assignment that tell me exactly what is required (the ‘letter’ of the assignment). That does not sum up the the amount of work required, however, which I discover while doing it. For example, a recent assignment had me editing and suggesting improvements to a Service Level Agreement that would allow a fictional company’s merger with two other companies to be provide a documentation of service to their customers. I had the original service level agreement(s) as a basis, and a textbook of Service Level Agreements (E-Business Service Level Agreements, ISBN: 978096416489, by Andrew Hiles).
I read most of the chapters of the book, plus many online service level agreements before I felt I had a handle on what was being asked of me, and I still had to revise and resubmit once. My total submission was about 5 pages, with excerpts of the original SLA, my revisions, my rationale for changes, and my citations and references page. That 5 pages probably took 2-3 weeks spaced out amongst the other subjects I am studying this term (CCENT Cisco test and a Network Security class), and probably a total time of some 15-20 hours of peripheral reading and analyzing other SLA’s from different industries, including my own. (I work for a small independent software company that writes financial and tax/GIS/assessment management tools for county government offices) My perception of the assignment at the start of it usually ends up being incorrect when compared to the amount of time I actually spend. Some people may ‘coast’, others may already know the material. I like to read all of it first, and then decide what is integral to my assignment so I spend more time (and get more learning out of it) than if I was in a regular class that was directing me at every step to learn only what the instructor thought was important.
The fundamental differences that I find between WGU and a traditional campus, or a satellite campus (I have attended both in the last 15 years) is that while you might have self directed work in a traditional class, WGU is almost all self directed. You have a course mentor for each class, a forum exchange, and a WGU overall mentor (nee’ advisor)with whom you can discuss frustrations, non-specific questions, and challenges. When you submit your work to TaskStream, it is evaluated, and either accepted as B level work, or is returned for revision with some guidelines or direction clarifying the rubric. The work that I am putting into this feels like a B to based on my prior experiences, and is certainly not ‘crank out a paper’ type work. My recent submission for my Network Security class required me to write a white paper/support document for internal customers of a support desk detailing the various methods of enabling NAT, port forwarding, and the net result of various router configurations on a clients home or office network, from the POV of the support desk manager. In order to do that, successfully, I had to test multiple configurations of a few of the more popular home office routing solutions (I did it via simulator, some students in the forums build small home networks using Ebay/Craigslist type components) plus define relevant terms and explain some basic networking theory-as an ISP field tech may have little knowledge of that, and would also be presented with various types, makes, and models of routers to work on. My other classes are similarly arranged, and while there may only be 3 or 4 projects per class, none of them are anything I could just sit down and ‘do’ without some major studied preparation.
Administratively, the school has been available to answer my questions, via email or phone regarding student aid disbursement, which were the only real questions that I had for them-not so much because I was worried about my account being paid (students under financial aid are granted a waiver from the normal book-keeping and account payment requirements) but because I needed a new computer so I run some of the routing simulations, and I wanted to keep my assignments and work separate from the home computer environment. I have my weekly contact with my mentor, which serves to help keep me on task, and any concerns or difficulties I have personally or scholastically I convey to her. This weekly contact will taper off after the completion of my first term to something more like a bi-weekly catch up meeting. So long as I complete 66+% of each terms work, I am academically ‘satisfied’ for progress. Since some of the curriculum is vendor test/certification based (CCENT/CCNA/CEH/GIAC 2700) you don’t always know the amount of time to devote to those vs. your regular project based work. I try to balance this by taking my classes so I have 1 cert and then project based work for each 6 month term, that way I have deliverables that I can have evaluated and moved off my plate towards my overall term completion and see progress, rather than living in “I’m studying for a huge test” land where progress is more difficult to gauge.
I hope this helps clear up some misconceptions of WGU as a diploma mill, or an easy out. I’ve attended or graduated from 3 private liberal arts colleges in my life, with the ivy festooned dormitories and the pretentiousness to match, and I work harder at WGU, with as much structure and accountability, as I remember experiencing while attending school in my post HS days. The social isolation makes it more difficult, and if you need your hand held you will likely not do well with this type of curriculum. Since I already have a traditional B.S. degree in Mgt and IT, the WGU route makes sense to me. I don’t need more management classes, pre-requisites, or ‘getting to know you’ coursework, and very little of what WGU provides would fall into that category.
I feel that traditional schools are somewhat burdened with having to teach these basic integration/remedial classes (gen-ed) to students that should already have these basics mastered by the time they attend a post high school University. I am fully for more 1:1 instruction but it needs to be relevant to the major, and to the student’s degree goal. I can’t count the number of times I looked at my traditional schedule during my sophomore or junior year as an undergraduate and wondered why the school was requiring ‘interpersonal communications’ or ‘basic algebra’ for someone that was a Classical Vocal Music performance major. The ‘well roundedness’ aspect of a traditional liberal arts college is laudable, but if they want to continue to remain a force, especially in a down economy, they are going to have to face the reality that students don’t have endless amounts of money and time to devote to scholastic endeavor, and as much as it kills me to say it, school for school’s sake and learning for the love of learning are slowly dying. If nothing else is learned from this, the traditional university structure needs to at least provide a way out for students that want to learn their major material-or they can continue to focus on those that want the traditional liberal arts experience and leave the a la carte’ model to WGU or other schools that can pass accreditation. I don’t feel that there is much of a conflict between the two models other than a struggle between “the way it’s always been done” and the newer mindset of specificity without all the frills. Students from WGU or other distance colleges and online learning environments can be (and probably are) just as ‘well rounded’ as any liberal arts student, we just chose to circumvent the more time consuming model with our tuition dollars.