Five Reasons University of Phoenix Online Isn't Worth It

I recently had the need to take an accounting class, but living in a small town couldn't find one here. Someone suggested that I take accounting online from University of Phoenix – it offered the right class, a new section starts every Tuesday, classes last only five weeks, and all you need is reliable internet access. It sounded like a perfect class, one that would fit around my sporadic travel schedule, but still leave me with the knowledge I desired. Sadly, after paying nearly $1700 in fees and tuition for a 3 credit class, I’m realizing that University of Phoenix on-line is not an educational experience worth the money.

1. Discussion Based Classrooms only work if the students are intelligent.

I don’t mean to bash the students, as I’m sure there are plenty of intelligent people taking classes through University of Phoenix, but given that the combination of no admissions requirements and a for-profit University, there are also plenty of less intelligent people. Discussion in my accounting class the first week quickly devolved into a discussion about how abortion is wrong, while the second week included gems about how murderers should be put to death. I don’t understand what either of those has to do with accounting, either. To compliment these, in response to a question the instructor asked that actually had to do with accounting and tax law, several students proceeded to make guesses at an answer, instead of using the internet, which they were sitting in front of, to actually find the correct answer. Given that class discussion is intended as a learning tool, I think the only thing I’m learning is that the students are skewed towards conservative and seem to actively avoid spell check.

2. Team Based Assignments do not work when you don’t know your team.

We participate in class discussions together and have all posted little bios, but I definitely would not count my classmates as friends, not even facebook friends. When assigned to a small team together, since we don’t know each other, there seems to be little to make people feel responsible to the team. Some people turn in sections for team papers which just take large chunks of text from various websites, while others don’t submit their sections until half an hour before the deadline for the entire paper to be edited, run through the plagiarism checker, and submitted. Incomplete sentences and poor grammar are more the rule rather than the exception. I realize that my standards are higher than many of my fellow classmates, but turning in original work, on time, that has been run through Word’s spelling and grammar check seems like a bare minimum for participating in this kind of team. Unfortunately, if you don’t know your teammates, you are probably more likely to violate all three of these because you feel no obligation to your team.

3. Software must be scaled when dealing with large groups of users.

Wikipedia claims that University of Phoenix has 280,000+ students, making it one of the largest university systems in the world. Even if you only count the on-line students, estimated at 120,000, it’s just a lot of students. All on-line classes run on the same schedule, with assignments due Monday evenings. All on-line classes also require that papers be run through a plagiarism checker, a tool which automatically searches for sections of the text on the internet. Although I’m not the most technologically literate person, I can’t imagine that task having a large amount of computing overhead. Still, when I submitted the last team paper to the plagiarism checker, I gave up after 50 minutes of waiting. If I were to try again today, the same check would take less than 2 minutes. If you’re going to require that 120,000 people use an app on your website at the same time, perhaps there should be some more investment in ensuring that it will work for all your users at the same time.

4. Professionalism is not expected of instructors.

Although my instructor asks good discussion questions, she is not above using LOL or other internet colloquialisms in her posts. It may just be me, but it seems that at least the faculty should be a bit more professional; they are getting paid to be in the class, after all. They should probably also stay clear of those aforementioned discussions about murder and abortion, but mine certainly doesn’t.

5. I could get the same knowledge from reading a textbook alone.

I feel like I’m paying a large amount of money to read an accounting textbook every week. There are no lectures, in video, audio or text format. Every week, there is a reading assignment from a textbook, the class discussion, a homework problem or two from the textbook and a group assignment of either a paper or a discussion problem from the book. I’ve already covered how the discussions, despite good intentions, are not effective as learning tools, and team papers about a given website certainly isn’t any more effective than just exploring the website on my own, which leaves the reading and the homework problems, both out of the text, as my learning tools. Maybe I’m paying for the grading, but buying the solution guide off of Amazon seems like a more cost effective solution.

Although some people may find University of Phoenix online a good experience, my own experience has left me wanting. Wanting for good students and a learning environment lacking LOL.