Distance Education

[Toothpaste]

Just out of curiosity, what's distance like (if anyone does it)? Life story. Go.

[Collin Li]

My friend did it and she told me about all the hot guys she saw in first week.

She didn't manage to pick up any. Loser

[Toothpaste]

^Lol

[Ahmad]

My friend did it and she told me about all the hot guys she saw in first week.

She didn't manage to pick up any. Loser

rofl good one =D

[bonghead]

I did distance ed LOTE German through my school with the vsl cos they didnt offer it there. It was kind of annoying because i you have to figure out all the coursework for yourself. You had to make a call to your teacher once a week to practise the oral part of it aswell. It wasnt too bad though except i was fairly average at german so i gave it up in year 12

[JL_91]

i'm doing French with the VSL (through school, like bonghead), and all went very well until this year when i started to get really busy...at one stage I fell about 2 months behind in my work. I've decided not to continue, it's just not worth the trouble. the worst i've ever heard - my neighbour did italian by distance back when he was in high sch and he said that in his oral exam, he discovered that he was meant to do something that he had never been told he had to...so he had to improvise on the spot!  :shock:

[kido_1]

I was thinking about doing Enhancement maths with monash distance education.

I heard its pretty good.

[Capricious]

Overall it depends what kind of learner you are, if you are independent and self motivated you will flourish in distance education as it is entirely up to you what you do and when. However the freedom can be daunting for some and if you always need someone there to guide you along the way then it is probably not something you should consider.

[Trigger_003]

Different. Very different.

I actually consider myself to be a very self-motivated learner, and understand things quickly, but I still struggled with doing English Language by Distance Ed this year. However, things worked against me a bit, it was the first year they did it there, and I otherwise think it could work just fine with a good teacher at the other end.

Probably the biggest problems were:
- not getting the weekly response sheets... I think I ended up with about half of them even though I kept pushing for them
- there are supposed to be forums, chats and things set up but I think that depends on your teacher's motivation... didn't really work out for EL
- complete lack of peer support unless that kind of thing is set up or you have other contacts taking the subject
- some weeks were just stupid in terms of workload... 23 pages of content and extended questions plus an essay was a really bad one
- practice exams... didn't think I was getting any until about a week before the exam when 3 or 4 got sent out to me, by which stage I didn't have the chance to do all of them. In a subject like EL those are practically the only ones available other than VCAA's.

Conversely you can hit the ground running at the start of the year and begin the coursework early, hopefully maintaining that so you can finish it early, leaving more time for exam preparation. It gave me the time to attend linguistics lectures at Monash every Tuesday, which I'm sure no other VCE EL students were doing as regularly (I saw a class come in one week but that was it). That was really interesting and gave extra insight, plus a bit of an early uni experience. The workset books also practically give you a second text; as all your lessons are in written form you can revisit anything at any time.

That's me done.

[karina]

the work piles up, and nobody is there to give u a kik in the butt, i had so much work for latin at one stage i just gave up, i regret it..but i am a fairly independant learner too so its not only the demotivated ones that do poorly

however next year im repeating physics and i would have liked to do it through distance ed as it gives me more freedom and you get notes etc

[binders]

I did latin through distance ed this year, and found it was flexible and interesting. but you're sort of doing it in a vacuum, and you have to find your own sources for background info - books on the aeneid, roman history and culture and so on.
feedback wasn't always as detailed as that which you can get in a classroom, so i had to ask a lot of questions and rephrase them to get a solid answer.
Did anyone else find this?

I was luckier than Trigger, because there are quite a few forums (fora?) for latin on the internet, and many of them handle the same set texts, Caesar, Virgil etc.

[AppleXY]

Lol, I did Distance for Eco (and General Math Advanced Unit 2), its pretty decent. I like it