Online Schooling

I am three weeks away from earning my Bachelors of Science in Business - Small Business and Entrepreneurship. I have attended a community college (where I earned my associates degree in Musical Theatre) and a top 100 University (only for a semester because it was too big for my liking). When my husband and I decided to start our family I switched to the University of Phoenix Online. I was really excited to be able to do school on my timing, at home (or anywhere really), and to avoid annoying lectures and time wasted when you go to school on campus (like the dead time between classes).

Well, here I am about to graduate and I have a lot of stress to show for it. I definitely have learned some good things that I could not have learned without gaining an education, but I definitely did not learn as much as I could have. Since the learning format is set up as the student reads texts books and searches the Internet to learn (I feel I could have done it on my own without paying so much money) I was not the best student because I only learned what I had to so I could complete assignments in stead of really reading everything. Once in a while I would get a good teacher (most were just facilitators as their title and actions show) and those TEACHERS sometimes taught me stuff in addition to the text books and if it was done simply, pertained to the subjects being learned, and there was not too much outside information I actually learned a lot in those classes. But then there were teachers who threw way too much information at us that I would loose track of the required subjects on the discussion board. I was also overwhelmed by those teachers and did not learn much at all. But all that aside, it is kind of nice to learn at your own pace and focus on the aspects that you would like to know more about...but it was also sometimes hard when you didn't know where to look.

Even though going to school online has been quite a challenge and I did not learn as much as I would have liked, I am grateful to have had the opportunity. I couldn't have got my degree at this point without it. I do feel I earned my degree, but I just wish I could have left with even more knowledge; although, in the business world sometimes you don't really learn anything until you get out there and apply it (I've learn SO MUCH since I started my business). So overall I am happy with my experience and would recommend online schooling to anyone that wants to take charge of their education or wanta to be able to have a flexible schedule.

Rant about Teams (skip if you don't want to "hear" it):
The only thing I would NOT recommend is going to a school that focuses so much on teams. Teams have been the death of me at UoP. Sometimes I feel like I am the only one trying, sometimes everyone wants to be the leader, sometimes we just can't communicate well for various reasons, sometimes there is so much communication that the important stuff gets lost. Right now I am experiencing one of my top 5 worst team experiences EVER! I guess I just had to go out with a bang (and not a good one). Right now I have a teammate that keeps attacking me for doing what I am supposed to. So annoying. She doesn't make sense a lot of the time and then gets mad at me when I take action to get our assignments done. She has already apologized to me for accusing me incorrectly but then goes on to get mad about another matter. I don't know what I did to make her so mad and want to target me, but I am getting fed up! If it wasn't for the fact that our assignment affects my grade I would not care so much, but I am not going to let her poor skills get me a bad grade because she is too stubborn to realize that she is not doing things correctly. Other teammates see it but because I am the first to bring up a problem (not saying it's her but that there is something we need to work on or if I take action and fix the small thing) she get's super mad a me! It seems like she thinks she is in charge and that edits can only be done if she approves them. We have to highly consider her ideas before making a decision (even if we don't like them and state we want to go with someone else's idea) and she acts like she is a pro and we are all infants. If she did not have such poor writing skills I would trust her edits and opinions more, but her work is not very good and is even missing words in a sentence a lot of the time. I am not saying I am perfect (and I probably could have been more considerate of her supposed learning disability and tons of medications if I knew before hand), but that is why we are on a team - so we can work together to catch mistakes and make it better. We are not her team and she is just one person of 6.

Not all teams are like this, but more often than not I have had some sort of trouble and I am so excited to be done with it all soon. If I do decide to get my masters I will not go to UoP just to avoid the teams. I would love to get my degree from them, but I can't take the stress and frustration of these teams any more.

Moral: Find out if the online schools you are looking into make you work on teams or not. If you find a credible school that doesn't do teams, let me know, lol!

Hopefully my honesty (and rant - sorry about that) help someone out. Feel free to comment with any questions about UoP or online schooling in general (or even plain old college).

P.S. I am proud to be a Phoenix, I am just having a bad experience on my last team sadly... My teacher is awesome though! And he has been praising my individual papers, so I guess if nothing else I have improved my writing in APA format! (Don't judge me by my blog posts though...definitely not like how I write my academic papers).

Best wishes as you work toward your goals! You CAN do it!