I have read two or three articles at Hubpages about online classes and they are informative but the ones who wrote the ones I read have apparently not taken online classes. They give you information that they have gathered and it may all be perfectly true but I thought it might be nice to hear from someone who has taken online classes. I have; so I thought I could give an insight of what it is really like.
It is really surprisingly like campus classes. You get to know your teachers and you get to know your classmates. You have discussion forums, you can send emails (you have your college emails for your classes) and in my experience more than once I called teachers. You have good teachers and bad teachers; just the same as in person and the same with classmates. Sometimes the teacher gives groups the opportunity to do projects together and just like in school you have the slackers and the ones who want to take over. I must say though I enjoyed it tremendously.

I had Business Administration and that came with some electives I really enjoyed such as Art and Psychology. Both of these classes allowed for many discussions with classmates and Art really covered so much more than it sounds like. We were taken back in time to another culture of so many centuries ago. Our text was very large and we did not skip over a thing. Psychology was very involved and I learned many things that I may have never known before. This was just from the fellow students! I found out I was pretty naive.

Many of the professors were local but quite a few were from states far across the country! We had some that were pretty lame about getting our assignments out to us on time or even getting our tests up when they were supposed to be and they did not like you calling the administrator so they made it clear to call them if something wasn’t as it should be, when it should be. The problem was that in the many classes that I had about three teachers were really bad often to not get our assignments up in time to study for a test and then they did not answer emails nor did they answer their phones!

One summer I took four classes and being summer meant only having half the time to complete them and this was really tough… and exciting. I kept up and I made straight A’s as I always have but it was not easy. One teacher who was very punctual had a very tough class and you told her in a forum, solutions to your problems and how you came about getting it. This was an accounting class of which I have had many starting in high school and they were tough there too, with just one other girl and me, getting straight A’s.

This was much tougher though and I never thought to have anything to do with math or accounting to be so very hard to get. I kept my grades high but I was never so glad to finish with a class. This was an excellent teacher though, she made sure each student had different problems to come back to her with in this forum and if you didn’t cover it thoroughly letting her know you really understood she was right out there to tell you so. We weren’t in a classroom looking at each other but still we felt we knew each other just as here at Hubpages; and it may have been the hardest class I have ever had. I was corresponding with classmates daily and professors very often. Usually the professors met with us all though in the open forums, some more than others. We did get emails from teachers too though, it was really quite personal for online.

One teacher was ditzy is all I can say to explain her and I had her for about four classes total getting my degree. She was always forgetting to give us our study work for a test coming up and then sometimes we would be in forums saying the test is tomorrow, what will we do and several of us had tried to get in touch with her with no luck, and you know a teacher should not be that irresponsible. She always had a lame excuse though and would set our test up a day but when you have a schedule you try to maintain it can get in the way of other studies but since her classes were easy it never really became a big problem. Too, she let us do all our work with MLA sourcing but many required the APA which was really a lot more work and it was pretty time consuming. I had a teacher help me with that personally which I thought was extremely nice of him. It made learning so much quicker and they make it clear as well as on campus that all online classes too would always avoid plagiarism. That would get you kicked from a class in a heartbeat!

I think maybe many may think online classes would be a breeze and there is the book to get all your answers, but you would find out soon enough when you finish a class you know that book!

In finishing up I would like to tell a kind of… well serious, but funny incident; now that it is over.

There was a young female teacher (all teachers had a picture of themselves where you logged into the class) who was a little hateful and that would seem hard to believe since it is online but believe me she was and she had already said something hateful to me in the forum over something I had said about not getting our assignments when we should from her and she was ignoring questions I asked. I knew she read the forum to see what we had to say about her and I was the only one brave enough to tell the truth.

We got into the weekend with still no work guide covering our testing and everyone was too chicken to call her but me and she would not answer her phone and I couldn’t even leave a message. For whatever reason I have no idea but up from her email came pornography (hard core) to the area we were to be watching for our lesson to come up and well I didn’t have to look at it more than a glance to be horrified and I knew there were high school girls in this class so I went into the forum quickly and doubtful too many young students were lingering there for work to do other than me, and said, "Well she will not answer emails or the phone and with pornography up here for all to see maybe she doesn’t know how much trouble she might get into with under aged girls in this class!"

Wow… you talk about quick, she got that stuff down and called me and emailed me saying how sorry she was and she didn’t know how a thing like that could happen. She took down my remarks and everyone elses so the school wouldn’t see I assume and she was nice for the rest of that class!

So now you can see how real life online classes can be. Who would have guessed it? It was almost as exciting as Hubpages!