I'm a 39 year old married male and I have some college experience at traditional colleges, although I have very few credits and no degree. I am fortunate enough to live in a town with two colleges and two community colleges. I had attended one of the big colleges right out of high school and was unprepared for it. I flunked out. Years later I decided to try one of the community colleges and I enjoyed it. I only had enough time and money for one class per semester, and I did that for two years. I achieved an A in every class I took. I ended up getting married, we had a kid, bought a house, and then there was no time or money for community college.

Then in the summer I began to think about going back to school again. I wanted to go back to the community college I had attended years before, but now with a wife who has an incompatible work schedule and a young child, I wasn't convinced that I could make it to traditional classes regularly. Several weeks ago I came home for lunch and I was surfing the web when I saw the UoP advertisements everywhere. I saw they had a small online questionnaire if you were interested in getting more information about UoP. I filled it out and submitted it, thinking that in a couple of weeks I would get some vague literature from them via "snail mail" which I would read and then throw away. Instead, they called me within 2 minutes of me clicking the submit button (which I thought was fishy and even slightly creepy). I didn't have time to talk with them because my lunch hour was almost finished, so I made an appointment to talk to a counselor by phone a day or two later.

The counselor did call me on the phone and I talked with her for over 2 hours. Looking back on the experience, I can see where these "counselors" are actually part counselor, part salesperson. She sold me on the idea of taking courses online through UoP because of the flexible schedule. I am now "enrolled" there.

They start you out in a 3-week orientation class to try to prepare you for the bizarre world of online classes. Going into it, I had no idea how an online classroom dynamic would work, and nearly 3 weeks into this orientation I'm asking myself the same thing. The first week would have been a breeze if I didn't have to try to do the readings and the homework, post the feedback they require (more on that later) and talk to a counselor every stinkin' day about one thing or another. And I think now is a good time to mention this: the UoP is in Arizona, which is 2 hours behind my time zone, and 3 hours behind the east coast's time zone, yet, their counselors' working hours are something like 6:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. ARIZONA TIME! This means that they are not at work when 3/4 of the nation needs to call them! But they do call the students on the phone--A LOT. And I told them when I first talked to them that I am prohibited from talking on my personal phone at work, yet they'd call me every single day during my work hours, sometimes more than once. Of course, they had to call me at work, because by the time I got home from work, they'd also be home from work! Don't you think they'd have someone working past 3:00 in the afternoon to accommodate as many potential students as possible?

Anyway, the first week of the orientation is meant to get you acclimated to the confusing system of links and web pages they have that substitute for a traditional school. You are also required to post at least 2 substantial comments for 4 of the 7 days a week you are in class. So posting something like "I'm just checking in today at class" doesn't count. You have to basically pick two other students' posted comments and reply to them, making a thread. Well, early on it was plain to me that there were about 4 other college-worthy people in this orientation class, and about 30 people who never should have made it out of high school. Trust me, I am all for participating in class if I have something of value to contribute, but this feedback posting system doesn't cut it to me. Plus, they have you in "blocks" of two classes at a time, so you would have to post 16 substantial comments per week! What am I here, the teacher? I don't get to say 16 substantial things to my wife during any given month, how am I supposed to comment 16 times on these undereducated strangers' posts? To me it just encourages the student to make up some bullshit just to make a posting quota. I also don't think they realize just how much time it takes to read through all of those posts to find some tidbit to comment on. I feel that time would be better spent reading or doing homework.

So the first week was stressful, what with the constant calls, the reading and posting and homework due, and the paperwork. Yes, when the counselors call you, part of their mission is to get you acclimated to the UoP's confusing system, which entails walking you through a lot of links and web pages, and to walk you through the obligatory paperwork. I am still trying to recover from this process. It's like trying to learn the rules of the road and how to drive a car, all in about 4 hours. During these calls the counselor kept saying things like, "I know this is a lot of information to take all at once", which it most certainly is. I filled about 3 notebook pages with frantically scribbled notes, and I also printed out about 25 web pages. Basically I wasted a lot of paper and toner. I also had to fax permission slips to them so they could get the transcripts from my earlier college experiences. I don't have a fax machine (or even a phone line), so that was a pain in the neck, and not cheap either. The financial aid online application just about sucked the life out of me. It's incredibly long and you'll need your tax forms from the previous year (have fun!), and after I did everything but give them a semen sample, my student loan lender still "snail mailed" me 2 weeks later saying that they needed more information!

Finally the second week came and it just so happened that I fell victim to two different major technical problems with my home computer simultaneously. By the way, the UoP DOES NOT accept technical problems as an excuse to fail to turn in assignments, which I think is bogus. Let's say you live out in the country or somewhere else remote, and your computer dies on you or your internet service quits for some reason. I guess you have to hop your ass on your tractor ASAP and drive to the nearest place you can think of that has a computer with internet service if you don't want to be penalized. Well, I'm lucky enough to have an old computer that I no longer use, so I made it through my technical difficulties fairly unscathed. The counselors' phone calls to me dropped off significantly the second week, which was kind of nice because I was shifting my already hectic schedule to accommodate them daily so I could still try to do the school work. When they did call me, it was during my work hours, though (see above).

So now I'm in the third week of this 3-week orientation, and I think that all of the little things that I let slide at first are starting to pile up to where I'm convinced this isn't nearly as good as traditional classroom education. The objective this week is to train us to avoid plagiarism. Okay, that's a noble cause, I agree. But it's been well over 20 years since I've had to annotate and cite references for a paper. Is there anyone to explain how to do it? No. Is there anyone to answer my numerous questions immediately? No. Is the UoP library a confusingly-assembled exercise in excess? Yes! Well, too bad, because that's where all the reference citing information is. When I first tried to use the library, I typed in my search words and all I got was a blank screen for several minutes. I tried again, same thing. I tried this for about 30 minutes, then I decided to call tech support. The tech guy was very nice, but he really didn't give me any technical knowledge that I wouldn't have achieved after another 30 minutes of trial and error. So they basically makes you learn (or re-learn) how to cite references by yourself in a very short period of time. In my view, this is something that should be a significant part of an English class, not something you attempt to learn in a day. There are specific circumstances and guidelines regarding reference citation, but I couldn't find them. I could find samples of citation, and there's even a citation generator that will do it for you (how's that for "learning" how to do something?) but I couldn't find information on WHEN or WHY to cite reference. I also couldn't find any information on how to decipher all of the gobbledygook text that follows the title of a reference you'd find in the library, or even what part of all that text was the title of the article and what was the title of the publication so that I could just fill out the damn citation generator and be done with it.

So here I am, spending an hour to type out this criticism of the "university" I am currently "enrolled" in instead of doing the cryptic homework I was assigned. After staring at my computer every single night for hours on end reading my school material, I have to agree with the woman that posted a comment saying that she prefers real books to reading online. I can take a book anywhere, but I can't drag my desktop PC anywhere. The UoP is very proud of their library, but I will say that being a lifelong library-goer, I'd actually rather go to a nice quiet library, away from the distractions of home, and do school work. To me you just can't replace the human interaction between students and teacher with links and search engines.

So yeah, I'm enrolled at the UoP as I type these final words, but if you contact me a week from now I doubt I'll be able to make the same claim.