A friend of mine running for a seat on the state senate asked me if I had any suggestions to relieve the pressure on our prison system. One solution, I thought, was easy: legalize marijuana. I have little desire to finance the housing, clothing and feeding of someone that was caught with a Ziploc baggie of the more heretical variety of hemp.
In keeping with my brilliant ideas for social change, I realized that this policy would have far-reaching effects for the economy as well. Our agriculture would be boosted, and the economy would be further affected in more ways than one: arable land would be put into production for the growth of marijuana; Mary Jane lounges would be opened by entrepreneuers, where bad poetry could be read for patrons inclined to be appreciative; manufacturing would be stimulated as bongs and other peripheral goods were created and sold.
Why, imagine the effect on snack sales alone!
The possibilities go on and on. The benefits of this simple bit of legislation defy the imagination; I leave you, my loyal reader(s), to fill in the blanks in order to appreciate the application of my staggering intellect to our social problems.
I'll fix everything - just sit back, light up, and relax.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
UoP: Group Assignments
If there is anything the intellectual upper crust can agree with, it is the futility of the group assignment. The more talented and productive students tend to carry the rest of the group on their shoulders. The slackers benefit vicariously from the performance of the better students.
Some instructors defend group projects by insisting that students will have to work in a group environment when they leave school. There is some merit to this observation. However, in a work environment, it is possible for unproductive employees to be fired. No such luck with a fellow student. Students pay tuition - the last thing a school wants is for anybody to leave, regardless of performance.
More importantly, a job candidate is hired on his or her performance, not his or her group's performance in some inane class in college.
To make the matter worse, some projects are ill-suited to the group format. Take a tax return. Finally, now that the class is almost over, a tax return has been included in an assignment. Unfortunately, it is a group assignment, and the tax return is only one of several assignments for the week. As you might imagine, this is not something that can be broken into practical modules and disseminated amongst the group members; certain things must be done in sequence. If the return were broken down so that each student was responsible for a portion, the student responsible for the last bit would have to wait for everyone to get theirs done first. Not a good situation.
Of course, it also helps if everybody got everything correct.
At the University of Phoenix online, the situation is made all the worse by the lack of a virtual facility for students to "meet." My group skipped the forums and worked collaboratively from Google docs for our week two project, and that worked out okay - apart from the workload. UoP went down, so one student couldn't be reached, another had never even logged into class, and yet another had health problems, so she couldn't participate anyway.
Did I mention that the software the facilitators use requires each student to be assigned to a group? So if you have students assigned to your group that have never, or only rarely, logged on, then you'll be doing their work as well.
This is the situation yet again in ACC 547, Taxation. One more week, and I'm done, but this is another big red mark in my book against the MSA program offered by UoP. I don't expect any other class to be riddled with the problems this one has had, but I will be sure to update any potential students out there as I go along.
An online class, especially one in accounting, is especially ill-suited for group work. Why this pig-headedness in sticking to a mix of group and individual work persists, I'll never know. COM 530 may involve some group work, and it may even be justified. We'll see. But none of the other classes, judging from their content, suggest that group work is appropriate to the learning method. This guarantees nothing, of course.
COM 530 is my next class. I'll start some doing some communicating before the class even starts by writing at length about my displeasure when I review the Taxation class. Students at the master's level have almost certainly already had some work experience under their belts, so for a school that advertises with the slogan "Educate me on my terms" to use group assignments in the learning format is ludicrous. UoP caters to mature adults, not teenagers. We don't need to be coddled.
In one respect, group assignments even detract from one's education. When problems are split up, one has to wonder what isn't being learned as a consequence. Classes with group projects need to be restructured so gaps aren't being created in each student's education.
In the meantime, I can do little more than complain. I may have to share the workload, but in the end, I don't have to share my degree certificate.
So keep your grubby hands off!
Some instructors defend group projects by insisting that students will have to work in a group environment when they leave school. There is some merit to this observation. However, in a work environment, it is possible for unproductive employees to be fired. No such luck with a fellow student. Students pay tuition - the last thing a school wants is for anybody to leave, regardless of performance.
More importantly, a job candidate is hired on his or her performance, not his or her group's performance in some inane class in college.
To make the matter worse, some projects are ill-suited to the group format. Take a tax return. Finally, now that the class is almost over, a tax return has been included in an assignment. Unfortunately, it is a group assignment, and the tax return is only one of several assignments for the week. As you might imagine, this is not something that can be broken into practical modules and disseminated amongst the group members; certain things must be done in sequence. If the return were broken down so that each student was responsible for a portion, the student responsible for the last bit would have to wait for everyone to get theirs done first. Not a good situation.
Of course, it also helps if everybody got everything correct.
At the University of Phoenix online, the situation is made all the worse by the lack of a virtual facility for students to "meet." My group skipped the forums and worked collaboratively from Google docs for our week two project, and that worked out okay - apart from the workload. UoP went down, so one student couldn't be reached, another had never even logged into class, and yet another had health problems, so she couldn't participate anyway.
Did I mention that the software the facilitators use requires each student to be assigned to a group? So if you have students assigned to your group that have never, or only rarely, logged on, then you'll be doing their work as well.
This is the situation yet again in ACC 547, Taxation. One more week, and I'm done, but this is another big red mark in my book against the MSA program offered by UoP. I don't expect any other class to be riddled with the problems this one has had, but I will be sure to update any potential students out there as I go along.
An online class, especially one in accounting, is especially ill-suited for group work. Why this pig-headedness in sticking to a mix of group and individual work persists, I'll never know. COM 530 may involve some group work, and it may even be justified. We'll see. But none of the other classes, judging from their content, suggest that group work is appropriate to the learning method. This guarantees nothing, of course.
COM 530 is my next class. I'll start some doing some communicating before the class even starts by writing at length about my displeasure when I review the Taxation class. Students at the master's level have almost certainly already had some work experience under their belts, so for a school that advertises with the slogan "Educate me on my terms" to use group assignments in the learning format is ludicrous. UoP caters to mature adults, not teenagers. We don't need to be coddled.
In one respect, group assignments even detract from one's education. When problems are split up, one has to wonder what isn't being learned as a consequence. Classes with group projects need to be restructured so gaps aren't being created in each student's education.
In the meantime, I can do little more than complain. I may have to share the workload, but in the end, I don't have to share my degree certificate.
So keep your grubby hands off!
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Technological Success
A great deal of my brilliance has been lost to you, my loyal reader(s), due to an annoying feature of the Dell laptop touchpad: if I brushed my palm or thumb against the pad while typing, the scroll and select features were instantly enabled, causing entire paragraphs to disappear and my cursor to appear somewhere earlier in my text.
True to my procrastinating nature, I neglected to undertake a search for the cause of this annoying feature for some time. Endowed with some rare free moments this morning, I undertook to find my little laptop gremlin. Thanks to some helpful folks at Askville.com, I learned why I was having this problem, and how to fix it. A quick scroll to the taskbar, a click of the touchpad icon, and a unchecked box later, my problem was solved.
I now have to use my left mouse key on my touchpad to click, but that is a small price to pay. Retraining my hands has required only a few minutes of frustration. Normally, I don't even use the touchpad, but I make the occasional exception for travel and lawn chair surfing on nice days.
Today I stand much relieved. As I imagine so do you, my dear and loyal reader(s).
Despair not, ye who enter here!
True to my procrastinating nature, I neglected to undertake a search for the cause of this annoying feature for some time. Endowed with some rare free moments this morning, I undertook to find my little laptop gremlin. Thanks to some helpful folks at Askville.com, I learned why I was having this problem, and how to fix it. A quick scroll to the taskbar, a click of the touchpad icon, and a unchecked box later, my problem was solved.
I now have to use my left mouse key on my touchpad to click, but that is a small price to pay. Retraining my hands has required only a few minutes of frustration. Normally, I don't even use the touchpad, but I make the occasional exception for travel and lawn chair surfing on nice days.
Today I stand much relieved. As I imagine so do you, my dear and loyal reader(s).
Despair not, ye who enter here!
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