Kathryn Blair, a fourth year Arts Co-op student in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program, has really benefited from the flexibility that distance education affords her. “I’m a pretty busy person, so any flexibility I can work into my schedule is great. Being able to take distance education courses has been extremely helpful with my degree. I’m going to go as far as to say they’re an integral part of it.”
An Easy Fit into a Busy Schedule
Distance education has enabled Kathryn to take classes while on a co-op work term without having to worry about scheduling conflicts or any added commute time to and from campus. Last Fall, when Kathryn was on a work term at a downtown Vancouver office, she took two on-campus courses. Kathryn describes the two courses as “very work-intensive, and both involved shuttling back and forth from work downtown to [the UBC Point Grey] campus to get to the three-hour lectures.” For Kathryn, “it was a very exhausting and stressful semester.”
This semester, Kathryn has found her two distance education courses to be less stressful, and has enjoyed “doing things on [her] own time and not having to worry about going to lectures or getting to professors to hand in papers.” In fact, after her experience last Fall, Kathryn thinks that she “would not have opted to take both courses on campus because it’s just too much hassle to move from work to class. Having to take notes on lectures is difficult at the best of times, never mind for three hours straight from 6 to 9pm after a long day of work.”
Distance Learning is Interactive Learning
When comparing her distance education courses to on-campus courses, Kathryn sees quite a few benefits. She notes that “all of the online classes I’ve taken have had discussion portions, which I prefer to lecture classes where you don’t get any interaction with other people.” For Kathryn, online classes provide her with an “opportunity to bounce [her] ideas off others and to see what they think.” She states that this process “makes you evaluate what you think and what you understand much more regularly, and gives you a far better way to judge how well you understand the material before handing in a big project or writing a final exam.”
In her Women’s Studies 224 class, Kathryn got the opportunity to write three group essays. “When I tell people I’ve written group essays they’re usually kind of surprised, and I was definitely surprised to be assigned them,” explains Kathryn. “I learned a lot more about how I work with people and how I can present my ideas so that I come through on the points I think are important while allowing others to make their points as well.”
The experience writing group essays helped Kathryn get her first co-op work placement. “When I was looking for my first work term, I applied for a technical writing job at Business Objects (a business intelligence software company), where I knew I would be writing as part of a team,” explains Kathryn. “I talked about my experiences writing group essays in the Women’s Studies course in my cover letter and noted it on my resume. I was called for an interview, and my interviewers asked about the group essays I’d written. It provided a great way to show how I had improved my writing, teamwork, and interpersonal skills tangibly when I needed to. I also left them one of the group essays I’d written (as well as an essay I’d written on my own for another class). Even though I didn’t have any prior technical writing experience and my major is visual arts, I successfully got the position and my supervisor told me that the essays they’d read showed them that I could write.”
Finishing Your Degree in a Different City
Taking distance education courses has helped Kathryn complete her degree on time. “Distance education is so important for my degree that I’ll be taking the last 6 elective credits I need through distance education next summer, when I plan to be finishing my last co-op term, hopefully in Calgary. Distance education gives me the flexibility to move where I’d like to for my last co-op work term without having to come back and finish two courses, which would push back my graduation another four months,” asserts Kathryn.
Having already taken three distance education courses, Kathryn is looking forward to finishing her degree via distance learning. “I’ve got my eye on some of the Science courses or maybe another literature course. I guess I’ll wait and see what interesting things OLT has cooked up by next March.”
Kathryn is currently taking Film Studies 332 (Studies in Genre or Period: Irish Cinema and Culture) and Geography 350 (Introduction to Urban Geography) during the summer 2008 semester. She has also taken Women’s Studies 224 (Women in Literature).