to turn it off.
I know that we are starting to do that kind of thing. I haven't wanted
to prepare such courses myself. The only thing I don't know about is
exams and how they are administered. I'm all for distance learning and
I would expect students to learn just as well that way as with ordinary
classroom instruction. We all know that most learning is really
self-instruction. You have to read the material and struggle with it.
Teachers help, but most of the learning happens with the student alone
with the materials (book, papers, homework assignments, videos, slide
shows, etc).
I guess that is the problem with generalizations. It was hardly the
case with every class I took, and while I am sitting here thinking
about it I am trying to put a number on just how many good instructors
I had. The majority of poor instructors and professors I have had were
in technology classes. General education instructors seemed much
better.
I took classes at two different local community colleges I took
classes at ITT Technical Institute, California Lutheran University,
University of Phoenix, and California State University - Channel
Islands. My associates was in Computer Science- Computer Networking,
my bachelors is in Information Technology.
So let me give you some examples:
Programming 1 and 2, instructor on the first night wrote a simple
"Hello World" application in "C", then handed out our assignments and
said go to work. He never again demonstrated any code. Another student
in the class was a developer already and he fielded all student
questions as the instructor was unable to answer questions.
Programming 3 and 4, instruction was in Java, we had two different
instructors and both of them were almost identical. By now I had a
pretty good grasp of programming so I was able to perform the
assignments. It was a good thing as the instructor admitted he could
not get the sample code we were studying to work when he was copying
it out of the book.
I am not going to go through all of them, the list would be too long.
Some additional classes I had that were bad:
Systems Analysis
Database Development 1 and 2
Database Design
Transact SQL
Computer Engineering
Operating Systems Development
User Interface Design
Business Telecommunications 1 and 2
And let's not forget about the Indians. Oh that was a nice lesson in
futility. Have you ever tried to learn Unix, or Web Application
Development from an Indian? Not American Indian. I admit he tried to
teach the class, and once we could understand him, he actually was
pretty knowledgable about the subject, too bad I really only
understood about 1 out of 3 words he spoke.
In many cases where we had poor instructors, our TEQs (thanks for the
clarification) caused a change in instructor for the next class, and
usually the replacement was no better. I was not trying to imply that
they never TRIED to answer questions, it was more of an issue that
they were incapable of answering the questions.
Not all of them were like this I admit, my English, math, science,
art, basic general ed instructors were all very strong and good at
what they did. I had some good technology instructors as well, it
usually turned out that the good technology instructors ended up
teaching so many classes they were burnt out in 6 - 8 months.
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