Distance Education now vs. then

In 1983, I enrolled in a distance education MBA program in St. Louis. Each course in the program was to be completed in a six week period. We received our syllabus by mail, began the assignments and met for two intensive weekends at the three week and six week marks. Most of the classes required "case studies", following the Harvard MBA case-study method. Some classes required as many as six case studies to be turned in by the first weekend meeting. Cases were to be typed. In those days, personal computers were bulky, expensive desktop models. Word processing programs were in their infancy. (Remember PFS Write, anyone?) I typed my cases using a typewriter.

During the first three or four courses I took, I was working for a CPA firm in St. Louis. I typed my cases on an IBM Selectric in the office after work or on weekends. Then I changed jobs and began traveling most of the time. I stayed in hotel rooms during the week and was home most weekends. In one or two cities I remember renting typewriters from office supply stores so I could type my cases in my hotel room in the evenings after work. It was exhausting and quite stressful.

That was then.

Now I am working on my teacher certification through a distance education program. My work requires typing responses to assignments in textbooks, writing brief research papers or analyses of articles on assigned topics. I use a desktop computer at home because I'm more disciplined sitting at my desk and my printer is still connected to my desktop. I also use the laptop my darling husband gave me for Christmas. When we travel, I take along my laptop and work in hotel rooms.

Today we are in a hotel and I needed to print some papers to do some reading assessments with our friends' daughters. I emailed myself the papers from my laptop, ran downstairs to the hotel business center, logged on their desktop computer, opened the email attachments, printed the papers, picked up a couple cups of coffee, and was back in our room in five minutes. That's when I remembered the ordeal of renting typewriters to do my college work in hotel rooms in 1983.

Then vs. now. Gotta say I love this progress.