Well, at last I've finished my "accounting for non-accounting managers" online course (I refuse to give it capital letters, this course has quite enough self-importance as it is). I have to say that I am really glad to have got to the end. This course has followed me through living in three countries, to say nothing of half-way round the world. It has done it's job of giving me real information about accounting I could not have easily found elsewhere, and it's secondary job of warding off insomnia.
As you may have gathered, I have a love-hate relationship with this online course. I could never have found the time or the resources to study this in any other way, and I am really pleased that I could study online. On the other hand, there were times when it was a millstone round my neck; something I could not leave behind no matter how much I wanted to. I grew to endow it with a personality of it's own. It became very similar to one of my childhood teachers, who was very conscientious, and actually very caring, but who believed in strong love - she terrified me much of the time. However, I thrived in her classes, and came out with straight As.
Now I've finished, I find that I'm using the materials as reference. This is really really useful, and one of the benefits of an online course in that the materials are so thorough and I know them so well that it is the easiest thing imaginable to simply check information. So I have double the money's worth.
I went on a visit to a university that is delivering online courses this week, to talk to them about how they manage online and distance learning. They are situated outside the US, but they have some clients from the US who have studied their rather specialised courses. We talked about how they supported their clients, and whether distance made any difference.
They say that as far as they are concerned, for most single subject online courses, distance is no problem. They rely entirely on online and telephone communications for some subjects, and therefore as long as any time differences are factored into specific communications, it does not matter at all where the student and the tutor is. They also said that some 97% of communication is by email, where there is no geographical barrier to communication.
However, there are some online degrees and other higher courses that they will not offer outside a certain geographical area because there is a need to arrange campus visits. In some cases, they have reciprocal agreements with other organisations that can offer the facilities and even the tutoring needed for these on-site tutorials, but in some cases they feel that this is inappropriate, so they will only offer these courses to students who have access to the facilities they need.
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