Models of Education

My doctoral program is a different model of education than my Masters and Bachelors degrees. That is as it should be I suppose, but it still, in some ways, took me by surprise.

Both my classes are segmented into three phases. The homework we do before we arrive in class. the work we do during our hour intensives, and the work that we do after class. This is new to me because it is my first experience with any sort of distance learning. It is a change, but not the most challenging change.

What is challenging about classes is how loosely the material before, during, and after class fit in with one another. For instance, in my most recent class we have reading that we did, and then we develioped discussion questions about the text we read based on what we read. Yet, we did very little with discussing the context of our readings once we got to class.

Then, after class we have a large project. While the project relates the previous class content, it has really been, in both classes, a whole different animal. Expectations are communicated (length, some basic expectations), but there are portions of what we do later than we figure out on our own, and are not necessarily clearly communicated or understood. It is more of an art crafting your paper, expanding on what you have learned, and yet in many ways moving in different directions as well.

No complaints in any of this. Except maybe that I like more clarity than what I am often recieving.