[lit-ideas] Re: Yahoo! News Story - WHY DON'T YOU USE THE LITTLE WENCH? - Yahoo! News
- From: Judith Evans <judithevans001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 21:39:24 +0000 (GMT)
Many of
> our grad and doctoral
> students come from the far reaches of the globe -
> i.e., India, China, Thunder
> Bay - and yet they opt for distance courses any
> chance they get. Can there be a
> cogent explanation for such behavior?
Yes. They've decided improving their English -- to
the point where they can take part in seminar
discussion -- is too much like hard work. (The
student I have in mind, who ended up failing because
she made no attempt to improve her English -- very
odd, that -- was French.) But Indian and Chinese
students are normally really hard working, so another
possibility is that they can help each other out more
easily in distance learning.
Are we not
> failing our students and our
> institutions by permitting students to complete
> their entire graduate degrees
> online?
I would have said so. I'd also have said 'distance
learning' should be confined to those who really need
it/those for whom it is the only feasible method,
e.g., Open University Students here. But when I
taught for the OU, anyway, almost no course was
totally 'distance', students attended non-virtual
seminars every two-four weeks. (I did do some
telephone tutoring by conference call, as a pilot, for
students who could not attend seminars.) Then, almost
all students also attended Summer School, I think
that's been stopped now.
Do students ask their virtual profs for
> letters of reference at the end
> of the course?
I've just realised the Open University students didn't
ask me for references; their Staff Tutor (basically a
full-time regional OU employee who may have done some
teaching but was mainly an advisor) presumably handled
that. And I would have found it difficult, in a way
that I wouldn't for non-virtual ones.
Judy Evans, Cardiff, UK
--- wokshevs@xxxxxx wrote:
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