Online Alcohol Education is Time Wasted

By: Steph Sullivan
Posted In: Opinion

Long, boring and aggravating. This describes the Alcohol Education online course that every first year student must take and pass before October 8, 2004.

The course was supposed to educate or refresh every freshmen about making bad decisions involving alcohol. The course has five chapters with two sections in each. The chapter’s views range from Shaping our Decisions, to Deciding for Yourself.

Along with first listening to the section, you’re then asked to respond to a journal question, do exercises, review a fact sheet, fill out evaluation questions and, finally, before that part of the section is over, you listen to a summary of it.

Then, you’re required to pass with a 70 or above on the final exam. And if you think you’re done, you’re mistaken. Thirty days after taking the final exam, you will receive an email saying that you now have to take the Course Conclusion, which is just waste of time.

And to top it all off, you then need to attend a lecture on the course with your New Student Seminar class.

There are many problems with this online course that I found while taking it. First, the material in the course is stuff that has already been embedded in each persons mind from junior high upwards.

Why should we have to listen to it yet again? It’s not going to change anyone’s mind who already drinks, and if a person doesn’t, their decision has already been made.

Another major annoyance in doing this course is the constant stopping and freezing, which, if you were in the middle of a section, you would have to shut down and go back in, and re-do the whole section again.

It wasn’t fair for people to have to take so much time out of their own studies to do this course, because it did not allow them a reasonable time frame for completion.

The course shouldn’t have taken three hours because, honestly, when you’re a freshman in college, you don’t have that kind of time to waste; you need to be doing other homework.

I realize that the need for alcohol education is important, but perhaps there could be a better way for that message to get across