Colloquium...

As part of a requirement for a PhD, the school I attend requires you to participate in 3 colloquia that are held in different places in the U.S. This time it was held in Arizona. It was a intellectual nightmare....Now, a little background:

My university is an accredited online institution based in Minneapolis, MN. Not many people think that "online" is a way to earn a PhD, but I have done more work in my 3 years here than in my Masters program (which was an in-class situation). This being the case, ANYONE, and i mean anyone can sign-up to take courses and get a PhD (or atleast this is my opinion after the week in Arizona). One thing that put me at ease was that, regardless of the number of people in the PhD program, the end result is what matters. Many of the learners I became friends with quickly noticed the lack of intelligence, or I should say, lack of effort many of these learners put in to the program.

The Colloquium is set up like this:
One week in Arizona with a number of 1.5 hour seminars (from 9-6) broekn into different tracks, depending on where you are in the process. I am in Track 2...one more and I am finally a doctor. The seminars are meant to supplement what you have learned in your courses and to help you apply it to developing a dissertation topic. What I found was that of the hundreds of people that attended, less then 1/2 attended the workshops - could it be beacuse there is no check in and check out procedure except to check in on day 1 and check out on the last day?

What makes me laugh is, as a teacher, I hear complaints about students not "doing what they should", are we any different? Given the opportunity will teacher (or adults in general) do the same thing? It boggles the mind.

So, I went to my seminars and even sat in them even if it was not something that I would benefit from, but did attend the "Conversations with the Dean" seminar to give my six cents! (I spoke 3 times with suggestions). For me, it was not a complete waste of time...I was able to narrow down my dissertation topic and network with three facult members that would be helpful in my writing of the document.

I can't speak for the others, but I know that the end result of this will be to see how many of the learners that are at the Colloquia will ACTUALLY earn a PhD...by my guess, very few.