Excelsior courses are a mixed bag

[zisberkind]

I started taking courses at Excelsior and brought in decades worth of credits. i ended up needing 10 classes which i should hopefully finished after summer. Working full-time and a busy home life with my kids I figured eight week courses was perfect. I'd do one course every eight weeks. 

i loved the IND class. I learned so much and increased my confidence as a returning student especially with writing papers.

Since then I'm finding it a mixed bag. 

I took a course in tech writing with a teacher who seemed to not know how to communicate clearly and anything he wrote me either as answers to questions made no sense and did not help me at all. I couldn't wait to finish the course. I did learn about an important research topic but that had zero to do with the content of the course only that we had to write a science paper about some topic so I picked a topic that I wanted to learn. 

I then had this wonderful intro to personal communication courese (comm 210) and the teacher was good and the class was designed well aside from one problem: nobody in my group wanted to actually have constructive communication and whenever I brought stuff up nobody responded and it made for a very frustrating experience. One person decidedto be the leader and post but she did it before everyone was ready and also didn't post correct information all the time. That said I learned a lot because the assignments were designed well and the textbook was excellent. 

So i'd like to say that I'm learning a lot in Comm 324 but because the class is designed badly, the teacher basically as bad as the tech writing one where he does not respond to any questions I have this class and a textbook that uses a lot of awkward and unwieldly language I can't wait to finish this class. 

So the real reason I'm posting is if I were younger and doing this again I would not take courses through Excelsior. They don't include the instructor information so you can't even check who the instructor is while registering to do see if there's research about them. So by design you never know if you're going to get a great class or a really frusrating one. 

That sad I am getting my degree soon, but I wanted to enjoy the experience. if the school spent as much on resources with other classes that they spent on the ones everyone takes and they worked harder on ensuring the instructors were competent this would be a much better school.