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Don't Forget to Write...
It used to be that you had to stay on campus to take a summer course. No more. Students today can go home, hold down a summer job, travel, whatever they like, all while taking an English writing course online.
Writing Program Director Richard Jenseth has been offering English 290, Expository Writing, online for five years now. "Altogether, well over 100 students have taken the online course," Jenseth says. "They have participated from Florida to Colorado and even India.
"The responses from students have been consistently good," Jenseth says. He explains that they enjoy working on their own time while still earning course credit. "My favorite moment came four years ago, when I was doing research on cultural tourism in Amsterdam, and I ran the last few weeks of the course from a lovely little Internet cafe along one of the canals," he recalls.
The students are assigned work each day, according to Jenseth, and the total time commitment and workload are equivalent to those in other summer courses. "One difference is that there is no one time when all students need to be 'in class'," Jenseth says. "There are strict deadlines, but the writers are free to do the work any time of day they choose.
"We stay in daily touch on a Web-based 'Discussion Board' and students can contact me at any point by e-mail," Jenseth says. With this method of learning, the world truly is St. Lawrence's campus. -Jessica Knapp '03