One down!

I got the official score report for my FTCE Educational Media Specialist PK-12 exam in the mail today, and I have officially passed. I knew I passed unofficially as soon as I finished the exam, but it's still nice to have the official confirmation. The scores came a week earlier than expected, so maybe I won't have to wait 6 weeks to get the results of my other test.

School has been keeping me very busy lately. A little too busy. I have a major paper to write this weekend for my University of Phoenix class as well as a reflective writing assignment for my FSU reading instruction class.

Now that I'm past the halfway point for the UoP class, I can say that I would never, ever choose to take another UoP class again unless I was paid a lot of money to do it. The group work has been... less than smooth, and I am not interested in repeating this "learning team" experience. Since UoP puts a lot of emphasis on learning teams, no more UoP for me. I have had some major group work in my FSU courses, and it has always ended up being a positive experience. I can't say the same thing about UoP. I keep telling myself there are only two more projects, and then I'll be done.

To be clear, I have nothing against working in teams. As I said, my group projects at FSU have all been extremely positive experiences. Part of the problem with the UoP learning team experience, at least for the online classes, is that you are given no practical collaborative tools to work with. You are discouraged from using the phone or e-mail and encouraged to do all of your team interactions on a discussion board so that the teacher/facilitator can monitor all interactions. You are not provided any means for real-time interaction - no chat room, no web conferencing, no nothing. When each project's time line is only a week, it's really inefficient to try to hold a conversation and make timely decisions on a discussion board, especially when some team members only log in to check the team board every other day. The bigger part of the problem for me was that I ended up in a learning team that just did not get along and too many team members were unwilling to discuss the issues or make compromises.