UoP: The Saga Continues

On the downhill side of ACC 547 (Taxation), the second course in my MSA program at the University of Phoenix, I find myself less enthused about the program.

The technological problems, which I've already written about, I can excuse. The choice of textbooks, however, is another issue entirely. In the absence of an instructor and his or her lectures, the user-friendliness of a textbook is paramount. The primary assigned textbook, Prentice Hall's Federal Taxation 2007 Comprehensive, is ill-suited to self-directed study. For starters, the book has nine authors. Nine! That is not conducive to editorial flow. Secondly, it is actually a combination of two textbooks, the individual and corporate editions. Page numbers are not continuous. Instead, they are designated by a construct of section, chapter, and chapter page, such as "Individuals 9-43", indicating the individuals section of the ninth chapter, forty-third page.

To add insult to injury, Federal Taxation is the only textbook for this course that is not accessible as HTML in addition to a PDF. This is enormously frustrating, due to the superior searchability of the HTML texts and the added benefit of being able to copy and paste, both to quote material for posts to the classroom forum, and to copy problems over to DOC or XLS files for at-a-glance reference while working on assignments.

As with the other textbooks, forget about reading them offline: you can't. Every time you open the file, you must submit the password (which can be done automatically after the first time) to the UoP servers before you can get access to the document. Every time.

So what about the design of the course? The course facilitator is tied to the syllabus, regardless of his or her personal talent. The raw syllabus, which can be modified only within strict limitations by the instructor, informs the instructor/facilitator that "You cannot change the course topics, objectives, or any of the Week One assignments."

So, if the course is poorly designed to begin with, the facilitator can do little about it.

The facilitator for this course, on the other hand, has been outstanding. He has made frequent contributions to feed the discussions and develop the understanding of the students in his care. He has also dedicated a substantial portion of his free time to watching the discussion boards to aid with homework questions posted to the Chat portion of the forum and answering them in a timely manner - often within minutes of the original post.

The MSA program is a relative newcomer to the UoP, so I rather imagine (and I certainly hope) that student commentary will prompt the University to modify the course for future students. ACC 547 is a perfect example of how different subjects warrant different time frames for proper coverage of the subject matter. COM 530, for example, probably benefits little from six weeks versus four weeks for coverage. The wasted two weeks would be better spent on further study of taxation.

Furthermore, the assignments, as of yet, have not included filling out an actual reproduction of a tax form. Not one! Instead, the assignments have consisted primarily of poorly explained story problems, the tackling of which generally requires the creation of a spreadsheet. Instead of separating the Individual and Corporate portions of the course, the reading is mixed, so that both sides of taxation must be studied at the same time. The reasoning for this approach, I suppose, is that while you are studying capital gains for individuals, you may as well study capital gains for corporations. After all, they are related.

The logic of this approach breaks down under practice, however. I'll stick to my earlier observations about the MSA program being no cakewalk, certainly; but an overwhelming workload is a bit much. While my own perspective has been impaired by the addition of obligations above and beyond school, work, and family (and even, occasionally, eating and sleeping, when I am so fortunate as to have time), other students have expressed despair at the sheer volume of the work.

In short: taxation is, well - taxing.