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altivoSo, Gary is enrolled for an online course this summer. Or we think he is. The university keeps waffling about whether there are enough students enrolled for the class to run. They said there would be no class meetings on campus, yet he has been told to attend an opening session tomorrow night, on campus. He had another class that was largely online already, but that involved just receiving and turning in assignments and doing tests online. He still had live lecture sessions. We assumed that this would be similar but with readings of some sort instead of lectures.
Wrong. Apparently they expect to deliver lectures by streaming video. This week he is advised that he needs a DSL connection. Don't have that, can't get that. Not available where we live, period. He wanted to sign up for Hughes satellite internet (eeww!) but it turns out that they say no streaming video. WildBlue says the same thing. Apparently the lectures are in fact recorded and can be viewed repeatedly, but they say you can't download them. This seems absurd to me, but whatever. If they were downloadable, he could manage. Either we'd get them (slowly) overnight and play them back the next day, or he could download them at one of the local libraries. He's all depressed and figures he'll have to drop the course. It will be ironic, I think, if he drops and that means they don't have enough students to hold the class at all.
Note: This course was not listed in the class schedule and was only advertised by word of mouth among the instructors. It was not available on regular registration and he had to go through the department secretary to enroll. I think there's something entirely fishy about it, but in any case, it's no wonder they didn't get enough enrollees.
On the whole, I'm very unimpressed with the technical competence of either faculty or IT admin at both colleges he has been attending. These people all seem to be trained monkeys pushing buttons, with no conception of what's behind the curtain or the cost in bandwidth or resources. No wonder I've started to feel that recent graduates of US colleges are resemble trained monkeys more than they do rational, educated people. The faculty can't even describe the technical requirements for the course in any but the vaguest terms. Questions like "how much bandwidth is really required" or "how much disk storage and RAM is needed in the student computer" get blank stares and handwaving. They really have no idea. I can't even go buy him a wireless laptop to take to the public library and do his coursework, because they are so vague on the requirements that I can't be sure of getting what he would need. It would represent a major squeeze in our budget anyway, but I'd risk it if I had at least some notion of what they really are doing.
Wrong. Apparently they expect to deliver lectures by streaming video. This week he is advised that he needs a DSL connection. Don't have that, can't get that. Not available where we live, period. He wanted to sign up for Hughes satellite internet (eeww!) but it turns out that they say no streaming video. WildBlue says the same thing. Apparently the lectures are in fact recorded and can be viewed repeatedly, but they say you can't download them. This seems absurd to me, but whatever. If they were downloadable, he could manage. Either we'd get them (slowly) overnight and play them back the next day, or he could download them at one of the local libraries. He's all depressed and figures he'll have to drop the course. It will be ironic, I think, if he drops and that means they don't have enough students to hold the class at all.
Note: This course was not listed in the class schedule and was only advertised by word of mouth among the instructors. It was not available on regular registration and he had to go through the department secretary to enroll. I think there's something entirely fishy about it, but in any case, it's no wonder they didn't get enough enrollees.
On the whole, I'm very unimpressed with the technical competence of either faculty or IT admin at both colleges he has been attending. These people all seem to be trained monkeys pushing buttons, with no conception of what's behind the curtain or the cost in bandwidth or resources. No wonder I've started to feel that recent graduates of US colleges are resemble trained monkeys more than they do rational, educated people. The faculty can't even describe the technical requirements for the course in any but the vaguest terms. Questions like "how much bandwidth is really required" or "how much disk storage and RAM is needed in the student computer" get blank stares and handwaving. They really have no idea. I can't even go buy him a wireless laptop to take to the public library and do his coursework, because they are so vague on the requirements that I can't be sure of getting what he would need. It would represent a major squeeze in our budget anyway, but I'd risk it if I had at least some notion of what they really are doing.
