This afternoon a friend called me up and asked if I could meet him for a coffee and take a look at a paper he was writing for his Masters program. This friend is one of the clearest thinking people I know, and he was feeling really spun around by the expectations of his program.
He started off by showing me the rubric provided for the piece of work and I immediately understood why he was feeling lost. It was completely vague, had several typos and no real overall suggestion of what the paper was meant to be about. He had still struggled through and written several thousand words, but felt really unclear.
This rubric, he said, was all they’d been given as guidance for the project. His program is online, and he has never met his professors, but in his interactions on the forum (where they’re expected to be posting comments weekly), he’s found the professors really aggressive and confrontational. He said that at one point someone asked for clarification on a task and was quite brutally shot down. He personally felt like each and every one of his comments was shredded and diminished, and his previous paper, which he’d been just as unclear about, had just gotten a passing grade.
An infrequent nostalgia. From Jennifer Pass on Flickr
Awful, right?
So this is what I wonder… I’m doing my Master’s now as well. Through COETAIL and assorted other qualifying courses. One of the key differences between COETAIL and other non-traditional programs is that I do still have a cohort who I meet with, in person, several times per course. I think this has been immensely valuable as a community-building element of the program, but additionally I think it has allowed for a much more varied range of learning experiences. No doubt this blog has still been the backbone of my work, but it still exists in a specific learning community.
I think the balance of in-person and online interactions serves other purposes as well. For one, I wonder whether my friend would have had such a sense of being lost in a program if he’d met his peers. And I wonder if his profs would have addressed everyone so aggressively if they were also expected to be meeting them in person.
Oh essay writing, how do I miss thee... Photo by Miranda Simpson, from Flickr
What knocked me down as well was the consideration that he was being expected to write essays. Formal, traditional essays. With specific word counts. Seriously, I’m sure many would argue this, but I just don’t quite see how presenting information in that format makes too much sense at this point. Especially when this essay he was writing was meant to be a reflective personal educational philosophy (from what we could deduce). I try to imagine what it would have been like for me if all of my work for this program had been formal essays and I shudder. I would have spent so much time working on the refined tenor required, that I don’t doubt I would have lost the value and reflective elements that this blog has served so well. A blog post can connect to anything else out there, use varied media and more. More than that, I understand the motive for presenting ideas with balance. But it’s in part the very subjective, personal nature of a blog that makes the ideas resonate for me. The goal is not to make your writing align with everyone else’s. Maybe it’s more of a buffet than a sausage factory. An essay…? Very static. The kind of document written to be read by a really thin slice of the pie. I wonder how long it will last as a dominant format of academic writing.
Anyways, the interaction made me very pleased to be completing this program in the way that I am.
Essays… Word counts… Oh my.