Looking Back at My Capella University Experience as a PhD Student

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(Free-Press-Release.com) March 1, 2009 --

I started Capella University's doctorate program in Organization and Management in January 2003 and graduated with my doctorate in September 2006. Previously, I attended undergraduate and graduate programs at the University of Virginia and the Haas School of Business MBA program at the University of California, Berkeley. Although the University of Virginia Graduate School of Engineering had a distance learning program in the early 1990s, it was little more than using video conferencing technology to connect students at several corporate off-site locations to the primary classroom on campus. For those of us on campus, it was no different than any other class except for the camera operator and occasional question from students not in the room.

Capella was my first experience with online education. At the time I started, my oldest daughter was born and I was working for a company doing technology due diligence that required significant international travel over 25% of the time. Pursuing a doctorate through a traditional in-residence, on-site brick and mortar university was simply not an option.

The Positives:

The Online Library: Capella's online library is excellent. It was possible to complete a doctorate without setting foot in a traditional library. Capella subscribes to a variety of electronic research databases including Science Direct and a large suite of EBSCO Host databases and has an excellent process for checking out books through John Hopkins University. Anytime I needed to check out a book, I submitted an electronic request to Capella's librarian desk at John Hopkins. Capella would ship the books via UPS, often showing up a couple of days later (I was in the one day shipping zone for UPS for packages sent from Baltimore). When I was finished with the books, I sent them back at my cost via UPS.

Financial Aid: Capella's financial aid process was better than those at either the University of Virginia or the University of California, Berkeley. The process was heavily automated and digitized. In addition, their staff and director will work with students for cases where larger expenses are justified but need to be financed. This is particularly important for doctoral students during the dissertation phase as many dissertations require field work, surveys, specialty software, travel, and other resources that an online university is not setup to provide to students.

Independent Study: The online process works best for independent study. You are expected to take the initiative and do the work. There are few lectures and limited hand-holding. For some students like myself, this is a major positive. However, if you are not good at managing your time or studying independently, this could be a major negative.

The Comprehensives and Dissertation Process: Capella does an excellent job managing the comprehensives and dissertation process. This is one place where online education works perfectly.

Flexibility for Adult Learners: By not having to physically attend a class during fixed weekly hours (e.g. 1 PM to 2:30 PM Mondays and Wednesdays), the online format gives greater flexibility at the cost of decreased real-time collaboration. Most (but not all) Capella faculty were flexible and accomodating to disruptions in class schedules caused by travel and foreign deployments.

The Negatives:

Faculty: Faculty quality varies. Some were great. Some were not. Some were very accessible, Some were not. Some gave good constructive feedback. Others did not. To be fair, this is true of all universities. Online universities have few "Rock Star" faculty like Harvard Business Schools' Michael Porter or Berkeley's Mark Rubinstein. All online universities rely heavily on adjunct faculty. One negative is the lack of personal contact with faculty and the inability to have open office hours.

Limitations of Online Learning: The online learning format does have some limitations. Too many of the class room experiences are driven by discussion forum style threads. I would like to see more lecture and presentation content - this is doable but requires a one-time per class syllabus design effort by either the program or the instructor to prepare. This is one place where MIT has excelled in their Open Curriculum. The online format works best for classes where the case study method or active discussion is used or where study can be mostly independent and the online classroom is only used as a collaboration environment to exchange files. The format works poorly for many scientific, mathematical, and engineering topics - Capella's biggest academic weakness was in how they handled quantitative classes -- this is one place where good lecture content walking the students through the quantitative methods and their applications really helps. Finally, the online format is a complete failure for any topic that requires labs or access to physical resources common at many traditional universities - this is why you find few or no online degree programs in most scientific, engineering, and medical fields.

Flexibility for Adult Learners: However, this does have limits and not all online programs have the flexibility to support learners who have to travel internationally as I did during most of the classroom phase of my doctorate or who are in the military and are deployed (especially in Iraq, Afghanistan, or at sea). My only failed course at Capella was a quantitative class taught by an adjunct where I was out of the country in Eastern Europe and former Soviet states for much of the semester and was unable to log in and participate in certain group assignments. This adjuct taught for just this one semester and never gave me a chance to complete the work (actually violating Capella rules). Ultimately, I had to learn the content on my own and was tested on it in depth in my comprehensives exam. American Military University does a much better job handling these kinds of learner disruptions and has a better process for resolving them because roughly 2/3 of their learners are currently serving in the military and are subject to TDY and unit deployments at essentially zero advanced warning. Capella should follow American Military University's lead and implement similar processes.

The Colloquia: Capella needs to restructure their doctoral colloquia. These are week long conferences that doctoral learners must attend three times before their dissertation or comprehensives. I found the seminar content to be marginal - the only use was to actually meet faculty in person. These would work better if they were redone such that you attend one during the coursework phase, one during the comprehensives phase, and one during the dissertation phase of the program. The only consolation prize was that two of the three I attended were local so I did not have to waste money on travel and hotel charges.

Final Takeaway

Just because a program is online, do not assume that it will be easy or require little work. If anything, the format requires extra work because you have so much less handholding than in traditional classes. All accredited online universities must meet accredation standards and are often held to a tougher standard. Academically, you can finish a program with a comparable knowledge base as you would from a traditional program. Unless if you attend a top 10 or 20 program for your given specialty, online universities represent a bargain over the vast majority of traditional programs. For those pursuing doctorates, your dissertation is more important for positioning and marketing yourself than your committee chair or even your school for non-top-10 programs. Their flexibility is their greatest selling point. I have had a positive reaction to my Capella degree and would recommend both the online format and Capella University to prospective learners.

I also have been impressed with American Military University and would recommend them as well - particularly for prospective learners who are serving in the military or who want to work for government agencies - particularly for their Homeland Security and Intelligence Masters programs.

More information can be found online at http://onlinedegreeadvisorblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/looking-back-at-my-capella-university.html

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