Friday, Nov. 1, 1985
Campus/Area
University Daily Kansan
9
Flexibility is lure of correspondence work
By Theresa Scott Of the Kansan staff
Jeff Taylor, a KU senior last fall, dropped out of school to take a job as a reporter for the Kansas City Times. He was six hours short of graduating. Taylor now plans to complete his bachelor's degree by taking two correspondence courses through the University.
"Correspondence makes sense," Taylor said yesterday. "When you work as a reporter, you can't expect to get out of the newsroom at 6:30 every night. So, it's difficult to go to chases every morning or every night."
"If you work, you can't afford not to take advantage of continuing education. It's flexible, so it's the obvious choice."
The department of continuing education offers about 110 correspondence courses, said Jo Lutz, coordinator of student services.
The courses, which entail assignments completed at home and sent to instructors to be graded, are representative of most schools in the University, including journalism, business, education and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Lutz said.
Members of each department design the courses their departments will offer, she said. The author of the course usually teaches it by mail until he is confident that the assignments are designed properly. When the instructor no longer wants to teach the course, he offers it to another instructor in the department.
ferred are lower-level classes, Lutz said, they run from the 100 to the 600 level and attract a variety of students.
Although most of the courses of-
"there were 1,000 enrollments last year," Lutz said. "They are not just KU students. In fact, most of them are not KU students."
KU is the only one of the seven Board of Regents schools sanctioned by the Kansas Board of Regents to other correspondence courses, she said, so students from other Kansas schools take KU correspondence courses.
Lutz said students at KU and other Regents schools took correspondence courses because they were changing schools and needed prerequisite skills. In some cases, some classes. Others take correspondence courses because they
can't enroll on campus in classes they need, she said.
She said other students, such as Taylor, had jobs, so they earned their last three to six hours of credit by correspondence.
Lutz said Kansas residents and out-of-state residents who weren't college students also took correspondence courses.
Tony Housh, Silver Lake sophomore, has completed two correspondence courses, English 101 and Political Science 110.
Housh said he took the English course when he was a junior in high school because he couldn't picture it through a grammar courses in college.
Students have nine months to complete correspondence courses and may extend this time by three months. But Housh said he finished his English course in three months.
Lutz said she guessed that the average time to complete a course was nine months.
Nationally, she said, only half of those who enroll complete correspondence courses. But the average number of those completing courses through KU is higher than the national average because the course design has been remodeled over the past three years.
"It's the same material," Lutz said, "but we've streamlined most of the writing. People are completing it and time and are getting better grades."
On Tuesday, Housh said, he completed his political science course, which he began nearly a year ago.
He said the 15 lessons he had to
complete involved writing two to three essays for each lesson
"They critiqued my papers," he said. "They tell you what is good and what needs to be explained, instead of just grading you on a test."
Housh said that sitting down and starting on the first lesson was the most difficult part about taking a correspondence course. But, he said, once he got started it was better than sitting through class.
"Most lower-level classes you skip a lot and don't go to anyway," he said.
The courses cost $40 for each credit hour, not including the cost of materials, Lutz said. It costs $15 more for a three-month extension.
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