Indiana Wesleyan University Online

I have been in this University for a couple of months. There are so many useless classes that have nothing to do with your degree. You cannot have a work/life balance because you have so many assignments each week and so many discussions you have to write about and reply to others. Some of the discussions and assignments are not clear on what they are asking of you. I am a full time employee, I do not have time to do all of these assignments. I cannot even imagine having children and working full... Read More time and attempting these classes. I will be withdrawing soon. It is not worth my time and hard earned money if I am not learning anything.

Most of the classes I have been have been run by classmates I have seen in other courses. Out of all of the classes I have been a part of so far, I think I have actually learned from maybe 2 of them. The rest of the classes were useless and you are basically given 100% on everything regardless. Also, if you are a student or considering being one NEVER called student services for help. I recently moved and it was right around the time they sent out financial aid checks. I simply called to ask if my... Read More change of address was going to impact my direct deposit. After being a student who has been set up for DD for well over a year, they intentially sent a paper check that is MIA. At first it was a good school, but now im thinking once my degree program is complete i am going elsewhere!

I have received an Associates's, a Bachelors and soon I will finish my MBA at IWU Adult Studies. This program isn't for everyone. It is online and it takes a lot of work and perseverance. I am an over 40 learner and learning does not come easy, but I really wanted it. If you cannot work independently, do not sign up online. Find a college with a campus. Otherwise, IWU is everything. I have already doubled my earnings since I started my schooling here several years ago. Good luck! Oh, did I mention?... Read More I have a son who is now attending online for his computer program and he loves it. He can work and go to school at a full-time pace.

This college is a degree mill. After submitting my transcripts I was told I would graduate in about 10 months. Two years later the day finally came. I was assigned a school VA representative that had absolutely no clue about the VA and it's processes or what benefits military members should and should not receive. The only professors with Doctorate credentials taught religious based courses that I was forced to take. The college illegally double dipped using my full national guard tuition and %40... Read More of my VA benefits. By the time it was ready to graduate I was told I would owe anywhere between $1600 and $156 depending on who I was talking to. Outside of the programming courses, the professors in general were incompetent and lacked fundamental course knowledge which was apparent in their directions/rubric which conflicted with all other instructions. Tuition increased significantly while I was attending and the all of the "fees" were without representation. The best thing about graduating from Indiana Wesleyan is never going back.

Learner beware. This is a diploma mill. Do not sign up for this school online. The marketing firm they employ to act as admissions counselors will lie to you to get you to enroll. Firstly your degree read Bachelors of Science without any concentration noted. Your transcripts will read "General Studies" because that's actually what you've signed up for. All of the textbooks I had throughout my 2 years at this school were at least five years old. It's 2019 and one textbook they sent me was written... Read More in 2010. A decade-old textbook in IT is worthless. They do not have actual instructors online. These people are called "facilitators." They're basically digital babysitters who do absolutely nothing. 99% of them will not answer ANY specific questions regarding any homework problem. They simply will not. There are no lectures or actual classes. You learn from a textbook that they mail to you and again these books are 5-10 years old. They are so cheap and money hungry they don't use a professional online classroom platform like Blackboard. They use a glitchy, cheap platform named "Brightspace" that they literally change every couple of terms. Each evolution is worse than the last. The courses are totally canned. 100%. Just like the old textbooks the so-called course content and resources in each course is way outdated. You'll see the date the course was created. Again it is now 2019. Can someone explain why their course content is referencing resources and information from 2010, 2011, etc.? It's because that is literally the last time someone updated the "course." The courses are riddled with typos and spelling errors. They hyperlinks they provide to research and learn more about a topic is often broken, so when you click them you get a dead link because the site the link is supposed to go to is no longer there! That's routine. That is how old the material you're supposed to learn from, as an IT student, is. When you mention it to their so-called instructors they may or may not respond. If they do respond it's along the lines of, "I'll let the person who writes the course know." But you know they won't because that course has been there for seven years untouched. Many of these instructors have no business teaching. They do not have the proper credentials. Some do hold masters degrees but few hold a PhD. The one instructor who had a PhD it was in adult education and she was trying to teach programming. I asked her a simple question that she could not answer. I Googled the information in a few seconds. I requested a 1 on 1 meeting for help. She begrudgingly agreed. When we got on camera together she was sitting in her rundown living room couch with her feet up on the coffee table. She hurried me through the session in less than 10 minutes. When I told her I wasn't getting the grasp of the information from the textbook she laughed and said there's no way you can learn this stuff in 5 weeks. Those were her actual words. At that point I knew I made a huge mistake enrolling at IWU. There are no videos to learn from. Just a textbook. This same instructor embedded a video from the Instructor's resource site that students don't have access to into the course to demonstrate a concept. Nice except the volume was so poor that you could not hear the video. I let the instructor know twice that I couldn't hear the video. She never responded. I had to download the video myself and download an audio en coder to increase the volume so that I can hear. The overwhelming majority of the people teaching at this school for online courses teach at several different schools and they are not the cream of the crop. They're supposed to be Christians but they're rude, nasty, condescending, and in some cases mean. I had one particularly nasty instructor tell me that I had "diarrhea of the mouth" because I wrote a discussion post that was longer than he liked. Now mind you the discussion posts are supposed to be your classroom time. They stipulate how many posts you must make a week and some say how long they have to be. This particular man was a bully and talked nastily to several students in the ORIENTATION course. Yes, that's right. The first course you have a man who is supposed to be some sort of a Christian and a professional educator telling someone they have diarrhea of the mouth because their post was a paragraph longer than he wanted it to be. The administrative team is a joke. They will not return phone calls or respond to emails in a timely manner. They seem to feel as though they are doing you a favor by responding to you at all. The course material is an absolute joke. As a Christian I am embarrassed I went to this school and feel embarrassed to put it on my resume. There are a few real IT courses there like Java, Programming Concepts, and Networking. However, the actual coursework is fluff. They know there is no way anyone can learn programming concepts in 5 weeks. So they water it down. You answer questions out of the back of the book and talk back and forth to other students on a message board. The few classes that actually required any programming was overwhelming for most students so they just disappear and stop responding in group projects. If you care about your grade you do the whole assignment and everyone gets the points. For the networking course final project we were required to write an APA style paper. Yes, that's correct. You are frequently asked to write papers for IT coursework. You'll never use an IDE or any software more complex than Microsoft Office. You will be asked to source outdated software like Microsoft Access and given a broken link to try to download it. This school's accreditation needs to be snatched. This is another Devry or ITT Tech type operation where people enroll believing they'll get the skills needed for actual IT jobs. You won't. If you're already working in IT and just need a "degree" for your HR file to get a promotion then this is the place for you and that's what many people use this for. If you have no IT background and genuinely want to learn don't come here. There's a reason it's cheap. You will not learn anything. There is no career services so you will not get job placement assistance like a real school. Their tutoring is outsourced to India and you can never get a tutor. I asked for a tutor to help with my Programming course and was told because I was not disabled I did not qualify. However, on demand tutoring is one of the points they lie and draw you in with. This is a massive fraud and scam. I earned all As except for 1 "B." I earned the "B" because one of their administrators "taught" a capstone course that requires everyone to write a long paper on the value of Christian liberal arts education. I kid you not. Instead of my Capstone being building an app or discussing something even remotely IT related, we were required to talk about what we learned at IWU and the value of liberal arts education. When I expressed my opinion, as instructed to do, that liberal arts education is on it's way out and the issues I had with several instructors, I was given a "B." Not because the paper was written poorly but because she disagreed with my opinion. I took the time to write this to warn people. Do not enroll here for IT. Knowing what I know now I wouldn't enroll at this school for any degree but I've only taken IT courses.

The graduate program is not set up for anyone who works in the corporate world. I was mislead from enrollment all the way through my first few classes. They kept telling me the work load would lessen, but it increased. Expect to write four significant papers each week. Expect to spend 20 hours each week to complete the assignments. Anyone in the corporate world that does not have flexibility or reduced hours cannot keep up. Id be more accepting of the workload if this were a school with the reputation... Read More like Johns Hopkins or Duke. But come on… It isn’t even close. If I am going to put this much effort into one single class, my degree should say something a lot more prestigious than IWU.

I am currently in my last class for my BS in Information Technology. I did receive my Associates degree from this school as well. Here are my thoughts on my own experiences. Keep in mind, everyone has different experiences and not everyone had the exact same classes or professors. I will summarize what I am about to state below, you are buying a degree. What you put into this college experience is what you will get out of it to a certain extent. Much like you will experience in life, it is not always... Read More fair. It is a commitment that you will need to adhere to for several years in order to obtain the end result, a degree. The reason behind my negative review marks here is because of the issues I outline in my negative responses below. Like most things in life, you need to review and make changes. I do not think this has happened yet but hope it does change for everyones experience going forward. I thought I would start with the good points of this online experience. Both degrees were accomplished through online courses. This was the biggest selling point to me. Originally I had chosen the online schooling because my schedule at the time did not allow for a brick and mortar experience. Getting to a building by a certain time, was just not in the cards at all. Even when taking my Bachelors program, this was also the same reason why I went back, along with not having to worry about credits transferring. I can tell you from being a working adult with a full time career, a married man, and also a father raising two little kids, this schedule worked for me. It was not always easy, in fact there were times especially on the weekends when I would perform the bulk of my work, and it was getting to be stressful. It was great that at any time, I could just complete my work, assignments, discussions posts, and also quizzes. This was very convenient for me on many levels. A lot of times I would work ahead. I would save my work according to the week and assignment so I could turn it in later. For my degree, I had to take classes for some programming languages. I did enjoy this because not only did it give me some hands on experience, I also felt I was learning something new and useful. During these classes, it was fun and also educational to create things and understand how they work. I have found this served me well since I now have applied this to my career. The classes ranged from 5 weeks to 8 weeks in length. There are times the classes seem to drag and others would go by quickly. You will have to manage your time wisely, also another reason why I would work ahead. I would look at the assignments to help me see how much time I would need to apply towards certain assignments. Some of which needed more time and others not as much. This is also helpful when you need a weekend off, because you will. You will get a good understanding overall what is expected of you and also the workflow from class to class. In order to complete this online education, you must be self-motivated and have a great work ethic. It is not easy and can weigh heavily on you after a while. Now here are the negative points. First and foremost, do not buy your books from the school. You can use the textbook butler to help you find the book you will need for your class. Go to Amazon or something similar and buy the books there, it will save you a lot of money. The school wanted to charge $300 for a book I found on Amazon for $15 brand new. Prizes even there will go up a little but it will be considerably less than the school, I always checked. On some classes, I would just buy the PDF version, especially in a class that I really did not care to have the physical copy. Every professor is different on what they expect, especially on APA formatting. I had seen some not really care, and others ask for things that I had no idea where that pulled it from. I always used the same template, I changed it accordingly to classes and also if the instructor stated they wanted to see something. It was kind of annoying at times, but change it once and you are good the rest of the class. Some would grade harshly on this while others seemed to know the format. Just pay attention to announcements, syllabus, and forum discussions. The first week or two are usually a learning curve for the new class and grading style. Professors, instructors, adjunct faculty, they are NOT going to teach you. I only had two professors during my entire time with the school who actually made an effort to instruct anything, two. I think that is rather sad to be honest. You could simply make a video that you just use for your classes. If you are teaching Java or HTML, you could make a weekly video explaining that weeks assignments with examples, something of substance towards what you are doing that week. This unfortunately may never change, just do your best. Ask questions, get to know some classmates and work together. The forum discussion board is helpful at times. There will be times they have no idea what work is being asked to perform. Almost always they do not know that you are on break that week for a holiday as well. Just make sure you know the correct dates. Grading, this will frustrate you many times over. There are some professors who are on the ball when it comes to actually grading in a timely fashion. This is very important to have grading and some feedback. There are times I would be on week 4 or 5 and they have barely finished the first weeks grading. You really have no way to know if you are continuing to perform the work correctly. Could be something in week 2 or 3 that carries over to the final week that you were completing incorrectly. Luckily I did very well with my courses but I always double checked my work. You will have some that give you proper feedback while others are completely lazy and give you nothing. Online quizzes can be a pain at times. I have seen some that did not tell you what the answer was, just that it was wrong. I would personally like to know what was correct and what was not. Only a few times did this seem to be an issue, and one class that I felt I had the wrong book, of which I did not. I bombed the vast majority of the quizzes in that class. The questions did not repeat so knowing the correct answer would not affect you taking it again. Overall, they were pretty straight forward with the substance of the book and class work which made them easier. However, just keep in mind that you may not know what was incorrect. Defeats the purpose in my opinion, but that is how it is for now. It can be expensive to go here, and it can upset you at times seeing how much or less of an effort is put forth by the faculty. I actually had a class where I deemed it to be pointless overall and nowhere near what is should have been. I gave a very negative feedback on it along with the professor. This is going to happen, just try to move past it the best you can and continue on. In the end, the degree will help you with your career, it has with mine. The Christianity thing can be overdone at times, and even some of the questions relating to Christianity and your work is laughable at best. It is a religion based school after all. Make the best of your experience, do the best you can. Set your goals, manage your time and you will be fine.