They're brave, if nothing else...
They're brave, if nothing else. I mean, they asked me - an actual human who endured a 2-year commitment to them - to provide public feedback, so, yeah, I guess I'll give them that. Oh, and $6,000. I managed to complete a Diploma of Graphic Design... not through Open Colleges by through my own desperate determination, the support of my peers and the miracle that is Google. So... where do I even start? Let's start with the course itself. An overview of the modules makes it look satisfactory, but once you begin to really engage with the content, you'll realise how truly lamentable it is: irrelevant, superficial and outdated information; repetitive filler pages on WHS and "critical thinking" (irony, anyone?); broken links; inane and unrealistic learning activities; untrustworthy and unscrutinised sources; and, perhaps most disappointing, a dire famine of actual, solid, technical instruction. The only content of any quality were about 60% of the instructional videos and articles they lifted directly from Adobe and Lynda. When this all became apparent to me, I'll admit, I was pretty miffed that I paid $6k just to be linked to the resources included in my $500 Adobe student subscription. But, naive as I was, I told myself, "Yeah, ok, but at least you have trainers and assessors - actual experienced professionals - to teach you." Oh, dear heart, no... Of the 34 assessments I submitted, I received helpful, practical and relevant technical advice on one. And it wasn't like, "here are some really good instructions that will help you improve this" - Lord no! It was, "by the way, you know you can do this, right?". No explanation how; just a cryptic hint - and for that crumb, I was grateful. With the exception of perhaps two or three extremely responsive and supportive staff members (who sadly seemed to only have a minimal student load), the trainers and assessors were about as helpful as my Spanglish-speaking, non-technological abuela would be. Actually, no, that's not fair; my abuela at least wants to help, even when she doesn't know how. These trainers and assessors often ignored messages until they were put on blast on the public discussion board, or were dobbed in to Student Support. They would offer the weak excuse that there were technical difficulties preventing them from seeing the notifications of new messages, but ignored questions about whether this would be fixed (not to mention that, if they were aware of this issue, you would think they would take responsibility enough to take the extra 30 seconds each day to manually check for new messages). On the rare occasion such a trainer/assessor did answer, they'd make formidable political opponents, so strong was there ability to dodge hard questions, not listen to the problem and find non-answers. Combining that with days, weeks or even months of delays between responses, and you can see why it was only sensible to just give up and get on with it the best you could. Then there were the actual assessments and the feedback following them. The assessments were arduous, repetitive, and irrelevant - yes, welcome to online education. Before this, I completed my Bachelor degree online, so I'm under no delusions about the bleak reality of online study and annoying assessments; however, the woes did not end here. The resources provided for these assessments (e.g. logos, mockups, etc.) were often (excuse the jargon) potato quality or just inaccessible, rendering our designs unacceptable for our portfolios because of their inevitable amateur appearance. Further, despite constant and very strong feedback from students, the instructions in the tasks were so unclear and inconsistent that at times they were incomprehensible. So not only were we made to complete inane tasks that would never fill the promise of, "well at least you have something for your portfolio at the end," but we would be reduced to many teary, rage-fueled meltdowns in the process. Did the pain end there? Pressing that submit button and breathing a sigh of relief that at least it was another torturous assessment task complete? Absolutely not! The feedback that would eventually follow (often on the cusp of, or exceeding, the already-extended 10-business-day waiting period), was reliable, sure... in that it always started with the same comment that we had named the assessment files correctly. It seemed to me an odd thing to comment on... until I realised that naming things correctly must actually be a rare skill at Open Colleges, given how often they put the wrong student name on feedback. Beyond this reliable praise, however, feedback was usually vague and unhelpfully finicky, and came with a 50% chance of being a Withheld grade, requiring resubmission. Sometimes it was because the student hadn't read the instructions correctly (fair); sometimes it was because the assessor hadn't read them correctly; often it was because both had tried to read them, but neither had truly understood, so the student, having tried to follow advice from previous students and dust-covered discussion threads, took one understanding while the assessor took a different one. Given that we had to pay for monthly extensions after the first two years and that the course was being taught out (I'll get to that), these delays were beyond infuriating. And the comments provided by these assessors were often as I said, unhelpfully finicky and not constructive, feeling more like feedback for the sake of feedback than actual, thoughtful commentary. Rather than articulating and explaining areas for improvement, so it looked suspiciously like a subjective opinion rather than professional feedback. In the early days, I was pretty vocal about these issues and even asked to be given clear marking criteria or rubrics to guide our work off; but the feedback fell on deaf ears. And then we have the technology: the stage upon which this tragedy was set. Open Colleges uses OpenSpace. It's not the best, but it's not the worst. (See, I can be objective!) It suffers from the usual bugs that are mildly annoying but workable. The problem, however, is that it's a virtual ghost town. Staff, as mentioned earlier, rarely interact on it, so neither do the students. Open Colleges seems to be under the delusion that students will buddy up and connect through it, so they based every assessment on the necessity of connecting with and getting feedback from other students. Thankfully, the students banded together through their common hardship and supported each other on a more usable, external platform without support from Open Colleges; but before finding this shangri-la of beautiful, helpful, supportive people, most of us had to first spend months of despair wandering alone amongst the abandoned discussions, feebly calling our own echoes for help. And finally, the teach-out. It is with great relief that I understand Open Colleges no longer offers the Diploma of Graphic Design. Flawed to the very end, they even failed to clearly communicate to us that the course was on teach-out (however, try calling them and you'll likely spend hours on the phone to hold music before being disconnected because someone apparently gave you the number to a phone line that doesn't exist.) The student populous first became suspicious a year or so ago when someone noticed that the course was no longer on their website, but Open Colleges said nothing of this to us. They assured us we could apply for up to 6 months of paid extensions to complete the course if needed; but then, as we applied, our applications began getting declined, shortened to only 3 months. For most of us, we work, we have families, we have other commitments to juggle, and we had our plans to finish turned upside down by this sudden lack of commitment to the additional 6 months. When we raised the alarm, we were told we would all receive an email explaining the teach out and extensions. We didn't. All we've had to date are private case-by-case responses and one sneaky reply to a panicked student message in the discussion board asking what teach-out means. Unable to even trust that these long-promised extensions will be available to us when we need them, many of us have decided it is safer to scramble out of the quicksand as fast as we possibly can, trying to pull each other out as we go. I entered this course enthusiastic to build my theoretical and technical expertise in Graphic Design and come out feeling like a professional. Then my expectations were brought down to just attaining the piece of paper that says, "I can do some stuff", and I could teach myself the rest. Today, as a new graduate, I am embarrassed to admit where I got my Diploma from, and for as long as I possibly can, plan on only describing my formal education as "trained in Graphic Design" and hope my work will speak enough for itself. I can't speak for any other courses but if they ever do reopen their Diploma of Graphic Design, I cannot emphasise enough how fast and far you should run.