RoR: Forum

I am nearing completion of an MBA in Project Management at Florida Tech University Online. One advantage of this format involves its avoidance of the pathological aspects of professors. As a student, other than your name and what you choose to list in your online biography, the professor knows next to nothing about you. Moreover, the course content is basically "canned" and simply administered by the professor. So while the professor can play a role in grading discussion questions and projects and perhaps resolve possible issues with the randomly generated quizzes, overall he has much less power than in a normal classroom. Program advisors who consult with students regularly to keep them on track serve as motivated conflict resolvers in case of disgruntled customers. Students pay commissions!

I like it this way.

Ed, the school also has undergraduate degrees in applied psychology. Click this link to learn more. I just wanted to let you know this.

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 3/12, 6:31am)

Post 1

Friday, March 11, 2011 - 4:27pm

That was funny, Ed.

I had a higher education English instructor who looked exactly like Hitler. Little mustache, comb over, small stature, the whole familiar shebang. Every lesson was some exercise in praising one or more current collectivist policies, so he totally fit the part.

Post 2

Friday, March 11, 2011 - 10:10pm

Thanks, guys.

I had this one class, Philosophy of Psychology (I know you're jealous; I would be too), and the instructor repeated a sentence so much that it very nearly drove me insane (pun intended):

Wittgenstein was the greatest philosopher of the first half of the 20th Century.

I didn't even know who this Franken-, er, Wittgenstein guy was at the time -- so I just took my professor's word for it. After all, he probably said it more than a dozen times (more than once a week!) that quarter, so it just had to be true.

:-)

I can't believe it. Two of my favorite subjects rolled up into one class, and the professor still managed to turn me off from the subject matter.

That's like a crack-addict turning down a cheap score because of how off-putting his drug dealer was! If all drug dealers had the personalities/psychologies of my professors, then that'd fix our drug problem, right there!

:-)

Ed

Post 3

Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - 12:28pm

That's ridiculous. You were majoring in psychology and two professors turned you off of the topic due to their demeanor? I'm glad you're not in the field of psychology now, given the fact that your patients would probably turn you off more! Some of them mutter to themselves, dress terribly, and have irrational emotional outbursts.

Post 4

Saturday, September 29, 2012 - 10:34am

Sarah,

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond.

In my defense, your criticism relies on at least some equivocation between experts in a field of study and the eventual beneficiaries of that particular expertise. If, for instance, I expected the same intellectual and character development from both psychology professors and psychology "patients" -- then I would be turned off by the patients (just like you say I would be). But I'd like to think that I am currently in possession of a certain level of equanimity required to successfully differentiate the experts from the unwell. I'd expect different things from patients who are mentally stuck than I would from people claiming to have so much psychological expertise that they are thus legitimated instructors of it as a science or field of study.

Ed

Post 5

Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - 7:24am