Get Smart: The Pluses and Minuses of E-Learning

How One Student Fared With Online Learning

As an editor in PC World's reviews department, I work with complex Excel formulas that help us compile the rankings you see in our Top 100 charts. Though I work with the program every day, I suspected I could do my job more efficiently if I dug deeper into the program's formulas. To learn this skill, I enrolled in a virtual class at Learn2.com: Excel 2000: Formulas and Functions.

I took the preassessment quiz to determine whether my Excel skill was indeed at the "intermediate" level. Taking the quiz made me feel like I was sitting through the GRE again. I found myself guessing at some (okay--a lot of) answers I didn't know. My score: a humbling 65 percent accurate at the intermediate level. Undaunted, I paid the $20 course fee and began my first class online.

The class consisted of five bite-size lessons, a good fit for my erratic schedule. I could choose to have both text and audio turned on or off. Each lesson carried over and expanded on previous lessons, a standard method that helped me retain what I learned from section to section. First grade: A for lesson plan.

Failure Was Not an Option

Smooth as this sounds, however, the course posed enough frustrations to tempt me to drop out before I finished clicking through my first lesson. After downloading the necessary plug-in to run the course on my PC, I couldn't locate the training files the automated voice told me to view at the start of the lesson. I spent nearly an hour trying to find them. Finally, I called tech support and spoke with a patient fellow who helped me. As it turned out, the system neither alerted me to download the course materials nor directed me to where I might find them. Second grade: D for setup.

Once I began the course, my frustrations ebbed a bit. I took five lessons over several days and enjoyed being able to take each lesson when it fit my schedule. The lessons sometimes went too fast for me to follow, but the Pause button helped provide the extra time I needed. I completed the entire class in about 4 hours--the same amount of time you might expect to spend in a brick-and-mortar school, but with more convenience and at a lower cost. Third grade: B for course delivery.

Lessons Learned

To sum up, I felt a bit like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, wrenched inside technology's grinding gears. On top of the sign-up glitches, I had to weather minor snafus in the course delivery, as when I hit the Stop button and the program reverted to the beginning of the lesson. But, the class taught me to construct formulas more smoothly. If you have a little patience and choose a highly specific subject, a class online is worth the effort. Final grade: B+

Linda Grubbs is a staff editor and Mick Lockey is an associate editor for PC World.