I am back in school. After spending 15 years working in information technology I enrolled in Arizona State’s Online Electrical Engineering program. Well, officially I was accepted as an Engineering Management major, but paperwork to transfer to EE was underway and by the middle of the semester would be official. In addition, I am married and a father of three. Also now I am a stay at home dad. I had been with a company for 9 years, but back in August my position was eliminated due to a merger. With those changes, easing back into school seemed like a wise choice.
I enrolled in FSE 100 – Intro to Engineering and ASU 101 which is a Orientation course for the first session. The second half of the Fall semester was MAT 170 – Precalculus. All classes were delivered through Blackboard although MAT 170 used Pearson’s MyMathLab for assignments, quizzes, instruction and testing.
In my opinion ASU has a pretty good system setup to support students studying online. In addition to academic advisors, each student is paired up with a coach. Over the course of the Fall courses, my coach checked in with me to make sure I knew about the various resources available, discuss any challenges I was facing and next steps. Both the academic advisors and coaches I’ve worked with have been very helpful and friendly.
ASU 101 was a session long orientation course. It covered things like time management, library and career center resources, college ethics, the various Google tools that are available to students. Each week there was a pretty straightforward assignment to submit online. It provided a good introduction to online learning, ASU in general and some tools and resources students can use.
I’ll be writing up more on how FSE 100 and MAT 170 went so check back soon!
Robert J. Graves 