Covering the business of education and training

Remember that "it's" means "it is." The possessive of the pronoun "it" is merely "its." (Usually taught in freshman English).

Do students really learn in an online environment?

Last summer I completed five years of teaching as an adjunct faculty member at a for-profit university that has some 47 campuses throughout southeastern states. My specialty was business administration, and in the final two years of my teaching experience I focused on courses for advanced undergraduates, particularly those who were nearing graduation.

It was a sobering experience. I was teaching in an online environment, and the majority of my students had been taking online classes since they were freshmen. I was considered a “demanding” professor, but to my thinking that type of instruction was precisely what the students needed before they left the university and tried to apply their business administration skills in the “real world.”

I taught BUS490, which was called Business Policy but was really just a course in strategic planning. I was stunned to discover that most of my advanced undergraduates struggled to get through the course because they did not fully understand income statements, balance sheets, statements of cash flows and descriptive statistics. They should’ve learned these concepts in freshman business and accounting classes.

Eventually I understood that the students had really not learned much through their online classes. They discovered early on that they could pass courses simply by skimming through textbooks and answering multiple-choice questions. All “exams” were open-book, and students often received help from others at exam time.

Because of these problems, this school and others like it are not accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. The “regional accreditation” of the school was meaningless.