Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Why do online educators put bad presentations in their courses?

I am taking yet another online course. My wish is to show potential employers that despite my advanced age I am not brain dead yet and still actively learning. My current online course—no names mentioned to protect the guilty—brings with it something that too many others do:

The presentations are bad

Far too often, the presenter attempts to speak English when English is not their native language. The result is broken, utterances and backwards sentences and logic that, well it isn’t logical and it goes no where. I find myself skimming the topics and searching the web for the definitions and formulas that I need to complete the course.

I don’t blame the presenters. I know a few other languages a little bit, but I would do terrible presentations in those languages, too. The presenters are doing their best, but I ask for more than that. I ask for clarity.

I blame the purveyors of these online courses. They are selling bad presentations for the price of good presentations. You can’t learn of these bad presentations ahead of time and avoid them either. They purveyors are good at hiding these things. My advice to these “educators:”

Hire an actor and have them read a script.

But actors don’t know the subject matter. But the person in the online course has a PhD in the field. But I don’t care about any of that. I want to learn something, and broken English doesn’t help.