I finished my first StraighterLine course!

Hello y'all,

So, Introduction to Religion is now behind me, and I can begin spewing forth opinions.  Yippee!

For a quick overview:  StraighterLine offers online college courses, but not degrees, and you can take classes to either transfer credit or for personal enrichment.  Ultimately, I'll transfer everything over to WGU.  

I moved pretty quickly through the material.  For each unit, there was a "lecture" for each topic, and there was a test every other unit, plus a midterm and final.  The lectures were self-paced and a lot like power points, with a mix of narration, text, images, and review quizzes.  Speaking of the narration, it seemed awfully expressive for a robot, and awfully inexpressive for a human.  (If it turns out it was a human and she reads this, I apologize). 

The self-pacing was very nice; I could skim through subjects I was familiar with (ie: Christianity and Judaism), and spend longer on things I struggled with (sifting through Sanskrit terms that all have entirely too many letters). 

Coming from high school, it was so liberating just to have lectures and tests, without time-consuming assignments to get bogged down in!

The final was taken through ProctorU, a remote proctoring service.  They match you up with a friendly technician who spies on you through your webcam to make sure you aren't up to anything fishy.  My only real complaint was that SL didn't do a great job explaining how that all worked, and I was a bit bewildered and had some delays.

I graduated with an 80% overall, without that much effort.

My other objection is one that I'd have with pretty much every other world religions course.  It's not that they try to be impartial and fail, but that they succeed.  I think the only way to really understand what members of a religion believe and what it means to them is to learn about it from one of them.  You will get a much better idea of Christianity from reading C. S. Lewis than Wikipedia.  An impartial course will be happy to tell you names and dates, but has a hard time explaining the actual, far more important, spirit of the thing.  It will inform you that Pentecost occurs 50 days after Easter, but has a hard time conveying the importance of the Holy Spirit in guiding our lives.

Well, that's enough blathering.  Thanks for reading, and have a great day!