Sundance71

Hi everyone! I've seen this question come up a number of times on the boards, so I thought I would write a little about my online experience. It seems like the majority of people believe you should take anatomy/physiology in a classroom setting and that you are missing things by taking the class(es) online. Since I have experience taking both anatomy/physiology 1 and 2 online and experience taking college classes in a classroom, I wanted to share my thoughts. There was 3 parts to the classes I took:Labs, Discussions, and Tests. The labs: There is 1 and sometimes 2 labs due every week. The labs usually consist of sketches of tissues that you view under your microscope, dissection of your cat, some simple questions and a few more difficult "thought" questions. The labs could be very time consuming depending on the material we were covering. You really had to rely on yourself during the dissection. You have your lab manual and textbook, but there is no lab partner to help you out. That is not a bad thing though. Yes I made mistakes, and there were a few times I cut something I shouldn't have, but it wasn't the end of the world, and I learned a ton. The professor required pictures of you doing all labs for proof that you were doing the work. Discussion boards: We were required to post an initial response to the professor's topic and respond to 3 classmate's posts. All discussions had to include references. It is not as easy as it sounds. It would take me an average of 3-4 hours just to get the discussion question researched and my response written. Tests: If you think that it would be easy to cheat on a test for this online class, think again. The questions are not straightforward. You have to know something about each possible answer in order to narrow it down. You can't just look the answer up. So you say well you could look all of the possible answers up....wrong. 50 minutes/50 questions. You don't have time to look anything up. Maybe you think that it sounds like the sort of test you get in a classroom. Trust me, it is not. Studying became more than just reading and taking notes. I read, took note and then expanded on those notes. I had to ask myself all sorts of questions about the hormone/gland/organ etc and how does it relate to things we had previously studied. What did it not do? They were, by far, the most difficult tests I have ever taken, and I've taken plenty of college classes. That being said, the professor I had was very fair. He didn't curve grades, but he looked at how the class did overall and adjusted your grade. He didn't adjust from a C to an A but he added a few points here and there. There were things that made the online class more difficult. For instance there were no videotaped lectures. That was fine for a lot of the material, but there were certain concepts that were difficult to understand just through reading. For me, the chapter on acid base balance was hard to get. Thank goodness for the internet! There are plenty of lectures on YouTube and the Khan Academy helped too with things like cellular respiration and meiosis. So there are ways of getting around not having lectures. Another thing that was difficult was, as I said above, the tests. In other face-to-face classes you got a sense of what the professor felt was most important and what you would probably be tested on. In the online class you never really knew what was important. You had to be prepared for anything. The only thing I ever figured out, with regards to the tests, was that the first couple of pages in the chapter (where the author gives you a general outline) would never show up on the test, it was just too general. So that was my experience with anatomy/physiology online. Loved my professor. He was very approachable and easy to communicate with. I don't think I received any less of an education than someone in a classroom setting, and since everyone is entitled to an opinion, that's mine. As a side note.....I took the TEAS V a few weeks ago and the questions (with regards to anatomy) seemed so simple I thought they might be a trick questions.