Daniel Webster College

Currently enrolled. DWC is a small, private school in Nashua, NH (although most students in this program never see the campus). As a small school it has a homey, friendly feel to it. As an institution, they mean well. But they don't seem to have their goods in one bag. Schedule snafus abound. Technology extremely poor -- they went from a clunky e-classroom system but one that could be forced to work (Blackboard), to an even clunkier one that isn't reliable, garbles presentations, and sends your message-board posts to Uranus. The current, non-working system is called Angel. Well, so was Lucifer. There's essentially no IT support. You are on your own. They are very very defensive about Angel... maybe somebody's nephew programmed it. (In his spare time, without reading anything on human-computer interaction, or using any other computer program he might have usefully imitated). The instructors all seem to be adjuncts. Most of them are working at other institutions and do this on the side. They vary. Interesting note, some of my cohort peers have loathed instructors I loved, and vice versa, so there is a lot of personal opinion, obviously. All of them have been PhDs who have known their subjects well and all have been native or extremely fluent English speakers. I have learned something that I can actually use in business from each and every one of them. The aviation nature of the program is not particularly apparent. Most of the students work somewhere in the aviation industry, in manufacturing, airport operations, as pilots, you name it. Like any advanced schooling, you will learn a lot from your peers. The online nature of the class is what it is. You will either love it or not. It's nice to have the convenience of working from home or the road, and not so nice to lose the student/teacher and student/student interaction of the classroom. Most classes include small-group projects and you get a little bit of interaction there. If you're on this site, you're thinking about online school, so be aware what the trade-offs are, is all. And one more thing: make sure your phone plan covers the minutes you're going to burn with your peers and small-group teammates! Despite being online, it is not flexible in scheduling: if you can't do 20 to 30 hours a week every week without missing one, this is probably not for you. If you can't be online for a couple of hours at a time, or can't be online on a particular day and time to do an exam, you will have trouble (the teachers and administrators will try to work with you). Not a good choice for somebody who's deployed with the service, for instance. Bottom line: give them a couple years to get things sorted out. The students in this thing now are getting to experience all the teething, let them (us) suffer. Make sure that they have changed from the Angel system to something else or don't waste your time and money here.

Attended the "Excel" B.S. Management and Information Technology Degree. I really liked the cohort style of learning, the small class size (10-12) and the business style of learning. The Teachers were from Main stream business which I really liked, however we did have some Day faculty sometimes come in and I found some of the lectures to be always leaning to left politically. Which I expected to some extent, however a few times dissent was not tolerated. Overall I would highly recommend the School as it has really helped elevate my career to another level. The Tech center is beautiful for a Tech person.