Online students must access their Walden e-mail account daily throughout the course (Walden University, 2012, p. 2). The Message Corner is on the homepage of the My Walden portal and effortlessly displays new e-mails for easy access. Additionally, My Walden have various tools that narrow the gap of the traditional experience.
My Walden Portal.
Traditional students have easy access to course load management while on campus or online. The My Walden University Portal provides similar tools to everything students completing an online degree program. Within My Walden portal, students may retrieve a course schedule that illustrates the beginning and end dates for a course and the breakout of days for the eight-week course. For example, My Walden portal illustrates the Foundations for Doctoral Business Administration Studies course began October 29, 2012, and finishes December 23, 2012, and a student assignment due on week six, day five is due Friday, December 7, 2012. .
Discussion Postings Simplifies Sharing of Experiences.
The major selling point for traditional college is students have the opportunity for informal social and academic interaction (Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991) that occurs in hallways and graduate student lounges is not readily available to online graduate students. Contrary to that argument, the DBA program requires students to submit and respond to fellow student's discussion questions throughout the week. The exchange of ideas between colleagues engaged in scholarly inquiry is a key aspect of graduate-level learning and is a requisite activity in this course (Walden University, 2012, p. 5). The postings are high caliber academic discussions that follow the sixth edition of the APA Manual.
Discussion Postings: No Cake Walk.
To ensure DBA students receive interactions equivalent to traditional students, an experienced instructor facilitates the discussion postings to ensure students submit relevant material.
