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Western Governors University |
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| Program: Teacher Education |
| Posted on April 18, 2012 by Edward |
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The WGU teacher credential program is a disgrace and is designed by persons
showing incompetence to a degree of criminal fraud and incompetence.
The program consists of four parts
1. The Course of Study - In theory, the course of study is a list of
reading and activities that the student should do before each of the
tasks
2. The Tasks - are a list of papers to write or tasks to do for a course
based on the course of study.
3. The Graders - The tasks are emailed to a person who passes it or send
it back to redo.
4. The Course Mentor - is a person that students in a course can email or
call on the phone to ask questions or help on assignments.
In practice the relationship between these four parts is tenuous at best.
The Task instructions are usually so vague as to open to wide
interpretation and often requires things which are in no way part of the
COS, and the COS contains little that relates to the Tasks.
The graders often demand tasks be redone to include material that is not
in the task instructions or the course of study and fail to adequately
explain the reasons for the redo. Asking aid from the course mentors is
difficult because the same question must be asked three or four times
before a useful answer is given. Most often the course mentor will simply
repeat the task instructions or give a useless answer that does not address
the question.
The impression given is that the course of study was designed by a person
who had never read the task instructions or the reverse is true. The same
can be said of the task graders who seem to never have read the task
instructions or feel free to ignore them.
The course work in general consists 95% of material that has no use in the
classroom or inane theories that have no relation to reality but this is
common among teacher credential programs. Any program has room for
improvement but it is shocking that this total lack of coordination between
the four parts would happen in the first place.
If a contractor were to build a house with a foundation so fundamentally
flawed then he would not only loose his license but be subject to criminal
prosecution. These are not simply mistakes but a program that was designed
from the foundation up, with total incompetence that rises to the level of
morally criminal fraud.
A minimum of common sense would demand that the tasks written based on the
course of study or vice versa and the graders and course mentors completely
review the task instructions and course of study.
Tuition is 3000 dollars a term regardless of how many classes you take and
a term is six months. You can finish as many courses you are able to in
this time period without extra costs. My plan at the start was to just zip
through the courses and get done in a year or a year and a half at most but
my progress was actually very slow because of the very grueling frustrating
flaws in the program.
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| Posted by Tim on May 23, 2012 |
| Did you use the rubrics to outline your tasks? It has been fairly straightforward for me. I've passed 26 classes so far, with only 3 revisions required. |
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| Posted by Trisha on August 16, 2012 |
I have a lot of the same problems. To me, the course mentor is basically the aggravating person who calls me and says "what are your goals." What you said about the tasks is especially true. At first I could conscientiously read he chapters in the textbook, but almost all of what I needed to pass the tasks was in one or two links. The course mentors just basically make you feel stupid by saying things like "you have to closely analyze" for example a video, where there is somone talking over what I am supposed to be hearing and seeing in order to analyze. It gets quite upsetting. It's a new university, but I am disappointed. If you point out something that is wrong, to them you just have a bad attitude. So tell the emperor he has swell threads and forget the truth!
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| Posted by Sarah on September 12, 2012 |
| I am currently enrolled at WGU, and you could not be more wrong. I find that there is tons of support for the students, in any communication form they feel comfortable with. I work full time, so I prefer to email questions, but you can also phone, or attend live chats. The classes are challenging, but if you are disciplined at all you should have no difficulty completing required work. With every task you are given a rubric to follow that tells you exactly what to do. I have taken 38 cu's in 2 terms, submitted many tasks and never had one returned needing corrections. |
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