I’ve written a few blog posts about the University of Phoenix here, here, here, and here. Most of those posts simply tie in some time management concept to my experiences at the school, so this time I thought I would write about some of the actual content and experiences in the University of Phoenix’s FLexNet program. FLexNet is the best and worst of both the online and on ground curriculum. I honestly have no interest in driving 40 miles to Wayne, Pennsylvania on a Wednesday night every week for 2 years. If you’ve every tried to fight your way through Philadelphia on an afternoon, you can sympathize with me. The Schuylkill Expressway was not designed for half of the traffic that flows along it, but aside from that, I would get home late at night and I need to be at work early, so really the on ground curriculum isn’t for me.
I’m not so sure about the online curriculum either. A friend of mine worked as a hiring manager, and his advice to me (he is a UOP graduate) is to avoid getting a degree that says “online”. Some hiring managers are old school and when they see an online degree they see a degree mill, no matter how hard you have actually worked for the degree.
Enter FLexNet, a worthy compromise between the two. FLexNet is a good program because it allows you to meet the instructor and your fellow students in person twice a class, yet allows the actual course work to be done through the convenience of an online environment, and your degree does not have “online” stamped on it. I’ve been in this program since September of 2005, and I am really happy with it, except for a few minor challenges.
As a school founded for working adults, the University of Phoenix is based around a curriculum designed to make adults better at their current jobs. As I am in their IT program, it is assumed that I already work in IT in some capacity, which is true. Occasionally there are students attempting to change fields, but to be honest, the UOP is not the place to do that.
As a part of their attempt to educate adult students in a real life work environment, UOP likes to make students work in learning teams of between three and six students. During an introductory class, students read through what is called the “Learning Team Toolkit” with several articles and chapters focusing on working in teams. Each class, in addition to individual assignments, students are required to spend at least five hours a week working on a learning team assignment. The assignment typically covers the span of the class and involves a final paper and presentation before the rest of the class. Instructors differ in that some require progress to be submitted each week for a grade while others only want the completed project turned in at the end of the class.
Learning team assignments can cause frustration, and in some classes I’ve wished for a more sociopathic model of learning. I’ve had members of my learning team who can’t seem to start unless we have an in person meeting. Because most of our teams have members who span south Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, meeting in person is highly impractical. I always refuse to meet in person because I need my time for other things than driving into center city Philly, paying bridge tolls and parking, buying coffee, and having a rather unproductive talk. The next idea floated is a teleconference, but to be honest, those don’t always work out well either. Most students are on different schedules. If I’m going to do a telecon, I prefer to do it around 7 PM but not on Wednesday because I have church and some nights my wife needs me to go shopping with her so that isn’t even practical. Some people can’t do it then and want to do it at 9 PM, when I’m not available because I’m trying to get my kids to sleep and my brain shuts down around 9 anyway because I get up at 5 AM every morning. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said “We’re information technology students, so why don’t we actually use some form of information technology for our meetings?” I actually prefer to work in the class newsgroup, which I’ve mentioned in other posts is based on Outlook Express. I’ve tried other solutions such as Thunderbird, but to be honest, as must as I hate Outlook Express, I can’t find a Windows newsgroup client that will do what I want so I suffer with OE.
OK, now that I’ve gotten the explanation and the negatives out of the way, let me explain what the learning team assignments are. Each class is five weeks long, as the learning team is given a project to complete based on the subject matter of the class. In some cases, a learning team is able to create their own company. In other cases, the company is given to them. For two classes, we actually did create our own company. In our “Project Planning and Implementation” class, we created a company that sold disaster insurance to mobile home owners. We created a Microsoft Project file to consolidate four independent insurance salespeople into one company with a data center. In the next class, we took the same company and created a project based on an IT upgrade.
In a following class, the instructor gave us a project to upgrade the IT infrastructure for a small local hardware store. One of my team members arranged an interview with the owner of a small, local hardware store and we based a lot of the project, including our time line, off of what he told us. The instructor actually took points off because he said the four months for an inventory was unrealistic, even though that’s exactly what the owner of the hardware store told us!
For other classes, the university maintains a series of virtual organizations and projects are assigned based on them. This is where it gets to be really fun, because if you look past the academics, we’re actually playing consultants and I try to have fun with the project. I’ve had team members who get caught up in academic matters and seem to think the paper is supposed to be a summary of the textbook, but that isn’t the case at all! The paper and presentation are supposed to be actual and realistic proposals to a company. I do the best I can to have fun, and if information isn’t directly given to us, I make it up. During the presentation, if I’m asked a question about why we suggested that something be done a certain way, I say that the board of directors told us that’s how they wanted it, or the help desk asked for that feature. We’re also often free to assume that we have an unlimited budget so we can suggest brand new desktops for everybody while we’re developing a network plan.
One of the frustrations I’ve had with other team members is the desire to summarize irrelevant information. Some people want to spend 4 slides talking about the history of the company during the presentation, when the presentation should be designed as a briefing to be given to the company itself. I’m sure the CIO has better things to do than listen to a contractor begin a bid proposal with “This company was founded in 1984 by so and so, and grew to a …” I’m sure the people we’re presenting to know that!
It’s interesting to see what other teams get from the same assignment. In our last class, the learning team project was to design a Network Operating System (NOS) upgrade for a manufacturing firm. Our individual assignments had to do with setting up the domains and user groups them, as the class was called “Windows Networking”. We evaluated the situation and of course recommended that the company go with Windows Server 2003 (No, really? The whole class was based on it). We also recommended Windows XP Professional to be installed on all of the desktops. While giving our presentation, one of the other teams asked us why we didn’t go with Windows Vista. I took that question, and said that because application and driver support is very spotty for Vista, and because XP is well proven and supported, we recommend XP. The other team in their presentation recommended Vista. I can’t say I agree with their recommendation, but that’s what these projects are for, to force us to look at this material in a practical manner. To be honest, if I were giving this proposal to a real company, unless they specifically asked for Windows Vista, I would still recommend Windows XP for the exact same reasons.
In my current class, Web Programming I, our team assignment is to put a shopping cart on a YouTube-like site. That should be interesting.
Labels: U of Phoenix
Forget Everything You Learned In School?
For those of you who went to college directly after high school, how many of you graduated and got your first job only to hear the words "Forget everything they taught you in college"? To be honest, hearing that would tick me off immensely. After working very hard for more than two years and racking up somewhere near $25-30k in student loans, I would not be happy to hear that the entire time was mostly a waste and the concepts I just spent time and money learning are only theoretical and won't do me any good in the "real world".
The University of Phoenix is far from perfect, but one thing I do like about the school is that instructors are required to have a minimum of a Master's degree and must be leaders in their fields. I spent my entire time in the FlexNet program, in which a student attends the first and last class session at the campus and the weeks in between are conducted online through a newsgroup. I'm currently taking my final class onground at the Buck's County campus. I'm finding that the on ground program is much more demanding than FlexNet. I don't mean demanding academically, but more demanding on time. Since I go to class directly from work, I stay at work until time to leave. That means putting in more than a ten hour day at work, then driving to Buck's County, PA for four hours, then get home around 11 PM when I normally leave the house at 6 AM.
Because instructors must be highly educated and experienced, I've had some really good people to learn from. One instructor had risen all the way to Vice President at a telecommunications company. Another instructor was an IT manager in a very large corporation. My current instructor is a microbiologist who has had a highly successful business career.
The material that I've learned in my classes is much more than theoretical. I truly have learned material to help me in my current job and to give me perspective on how we conduct business. I was hired into my current job after providing onsite support to engineers for development testing of the very large scale program that I work on. (I purposely leave my employer and industry vague when I have to mention work on this blog.) One of my responsibilities in this position is to represent our customer during a hardware acceptance test. I act as an observer and sign off after analyzing data with my counterpart in another organization. I then produce a report. When I first started in this position, I was trained as an observer on the last shipment of the previous platform. Because this was an established platform, the hardware acceptance test took about 40 minutes to complete and sign off. We had a few "glitches" to adjudicate, but for the most part the test went off without a hitch. After that, the platform changed. The hardware changed, and the program had to change to accommodate the hardware and newer features. The next three acceptance tests I observed took more than five hours to complete. Talk about being late for lunch! Because of my background in developmental testing support, I murmured that the program was bad and needs a lot more work however; officially I did my duties with the sign-off and report.
After beginning the IT program at the University of Phoenix, I learned about concepts such as the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC). To be honest, I had not up to that point differentiated between hardware and software testing. I assumed that the software did not work therefore the entire system had a problem (part of the reason for Microsoft's reputation
) . That was not so. Because the platform changed, the hardware had done its job but the program had not been developed enough yet to be mature. I talked with some members of my organization and learned that indeed, the software being used to certify the hardware was only guaranteed for that test. Because this is such a large program, the hardware is shipped first and the software is installed later.
I now have a new appreciation for the hardware acceptance test that I observe. I got a chance last year to assist the engineers who conducted the development testing, and that was a lot of fun and very interesting. I learned a lot from that experience and now having worked both hardware and software testing I have a new appreciation for how programs like this (large scale programs) go together. I tried to get a position in the development test group, but at the time it fell through. I'm needed in my position, and while development test would have appreciated my help, nobody would provide funding for me to have an extra computer to keep in that office, and I could not get VPN access to the network that they have to use.
I am pleased at least in this regard with the University of Phoenix: I will not be told "forget everything you learned in school."
Labels: Hardware, Software, U of Phoenix