Group Work Is a Failure With Online College

Group work simply doesn't work with online college and in fact defeats the purpose of going to school online. How do you do effective group work without interacting face to face? You don't. Remember how you got assigned group work in high school and the one smart honors kid did the bulk of the project while the slackers cut class to smoke joints out by the creek? Human nature doesn't change with age or online college. Remember how one person thinks their work is just fabulous and no one else does? Or half the people hate the way the project turns out? None of this changes with an online group project at Boston University.

But what is different is the medium for delivering the project. My group was assigned to argue the pro gay marriage side in a class called "The Moral Self." We were told this was to be done by a Power Point presentation. We were given no choice in the matter. I have never, in a 9-year radio career, ever had to use Power Point. Not once in my professional or academic life have I been forced to use Power Point, or needed to use it. There may have been five minutes of it in CIS-105 back at my community college here in Phoenix, but I can't remember.

So I was probably stupid to volunteer to do the narration in Power Point, but I am an old radio jock. I know audio. Correction -- I know how to do professional audio projects. Power Point is designed as Audio For Dummies. Yet I still needed the help of the Village to get it done. I had to get help from classmates outside my group to figure it out. I wasted my entire day learning Power Point narration.

To add insult to injury, my audio narration took the formerly easily transferable Power Point file to the lengths of MB Hell. That puppy ended up being 113.8 MB. The B.U. server only accepts uploads of 5MB max. E-mail accounts like my .Mac and Yahoo only accept 10MB. So I decide to try to upload it to my iDisk. Don't try this at home, kids, until you zip it. Even after zipping it, it was still 86MB and took 45 minutes to upload to the iDisk.

I had a mental breakdown before noon (eastern) and wrote a nasty post to my entire class about what a waste this class was. I'll spare you, but the class was not just a group work waste, it was an academic waste as well.

At least I'm almost done with this wasteland. (By wasteland, I am referring to my current course. I have 14 more classes to complete to get my B.S.) Perhaps Power Point is the true devil? Or the aspect of group work? I don't know. I'm not looking forward to any other classes with group work. If you've seen traditional brick-and-mortar students come unglued about it, just imagine online students and how we absolutely shit ourselves. We plotz. It's not pretty.