Western Governors University - M.A. in Science Education (5-9)

Competency Based to ?

By: Anonymous (In Progress) on November 13, 2007

Materials:		Teachers:
Institution:		Support:
Value:		Technology:

Review:

They have two different programs for each class.  One is a lab that requires you to write papers, make posters and do stuff that would not challenge a high school student.  The other is a test, which may require some review.  
For some labs, they require you to enroll into American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) online courses (very good courses), but “enroll” is the key, you don’t have to participate or pass the course, just gather the needed info to complete lab projects that are graded separately in Task Stream.  You get zero credit for completing and passing the more demanding AMNH courses.  
The text books have little to do with the tests or labs.  The labs do very little to help learn the competencies.
The program I joined involved a list of competencies and, learning resources.  With pretests, you would gauge what competencies you knew and which ones you needed to review.  Students were required to get a high pretest score to take the final exam.  I was very successful in this model and thought I was in a good graduate program.
Then the program changed.
They stopped giving students the competencies and now it is confusing on what is required.  They give you a course guide.  The course guide is a jumble of vague test book references and internet links (including Wikipedia!).  The course guide is very amateurish and I wonder if they even checked what they are asking students to do.  I ran into several very vague reference sites and dead links.  They still have the pretest, but stopped giving a report listing what was correct and incorrect, so it does little to prepare for the final exam.
The mentors are friendly enough, but I would question their credentials.  You have one mentor assigned to you for everything.  Mentors are not held responsible for providing inaccurate and misleading information to students.