TESC online courses vs guided study

[UptonSinclair]

Any thoughts on the pros and cons of online courses vs guided study?

[sanantone]

Since I'm a misanthrope and prefer to do as little work as possible, I'd choose the guided study courses. Discussion boards are just extra work.

[benjenkinsv95]

Some similar threads have already been started like the ones here.
Online Course Pros:
- More Social (Which can lead to networking and classmates trying to recruit you at their workplace )
- The discussion forums are free points. Do simple replies on time and you get anywhere between 10-25% of your overall grade just from messaging on a forum board...
- Online courses can lead to better understanding of concepts if other students have prior experience with the topic

Online course con:
- If you don't have active classmates it can be impossible to reply to 2 classmates. Some teachers will take away points for this.

[mrs.b]

I took one guided study and several online courses, because after that one GS course, the online format was preferable by a huge margin. For me. YMMV.

Technically (not really), the work volume is identical between the two course types. You'll have papers / formal graded assignments each week in both formats. For the rest of the week...

Online: Discussion boards - for most of the courses I took, there was a "topic" once a week where you would post an answer to the question, then you post a response of some kind to two or more classmates' answers. For the original post, one to two paragraphs was always considered adequate, and for classmate responses, two or so sentences was also plenty. I had one course where it was just one other student and me, so clearly posting to two classmates was not an option. The course mentor gave us full points so long as we had an "exchange" (i.e., we each responded to the other's post, then responded to the classmate's question on our post so we yielded one main answer and two "response" posts to meet the grading metric requirement). It took minimal time to do the discussion board requirements for all classes I took part in. I'd say I spent 10-20 minutes writing my original response, then 5 or so minutes per classmate response. So, all in all, it took me about 30 minutes a week to tackle that class requirement.

Guided Study: Instead of discussion boards, the class I took substituted another paper. So, I had 2 full papers (5+ pages of researched study) due every week. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an even trade of work volume for the discussion boards. I feel like I was pretty speedy in that I could research and write a 5+ page paper in two to four hours, but with two due, it took four to eight hours weekly on just the assignments (not counting the reading required to keep up with the basic course material not covered by those papers that would be on the exams). It was obscene.


While I did not particularly feel the discussion board and classmate interaction added any value to the "classroom" experience or my education, it allowed me to focus my energy and efforts on the "real" paper rather than split my time and effort in half to crank out two papers a week.

Again, though...I only took one GS course and was so gun shy after that, I never tried it again to see if that course was a poorly designed mishap.

[sanantone]

Interesting. So they replace the discussion board assignments with extra papers.

[Ladyplf]

It depends on the course. I am retaking a course as guided study this semester that I first took as online. It was much more challenging as an online course.

When taking an online course you might have written assignments, forum postings, replies, reading assignments, and even videos to watch depending on the course; not to mention exams. That's a lot of work, especially if you are taking several online courses at once.

This semester I'm taking the same course as guided study and it's a breeze. The assignments are due every week instead of every other week but the workload is lighter because there are not as many questions per written assignment as there were online. I read my textbook do my assignments and I'm done. There are no forum postings to worry about mid week, no forum replies to remember, and no worry about what to reply when your classmates all post pretty much the same answer or when the answer has nothing to do with what the assignment asked for.

One good thing about online courses is that you get to interact with other students who may have more insight into a subject than you do. Also you can sometimes gauge the caliber of the other students' work from their discussion postings and then adjust your own work accordingly.

[UptonSinclair]

I appreciate the input from everyone. I have only taken one online course at TESC so things are pretty fresh. The grading was far more lenient than I had imagined, so the course went pretty smooth. Just waiting on the last couple of assignments to get graded. I was contemplating guided study to knock out more credits, but it sounds like I will stick with online classes. I can use all of the easy points as possible. I avoid formal papers whenever possible.