Or see what the Distance Learning Association is saying about employers and online degrees, which is that employers just love those virtual plans. http://www.usdla.org/pdf/DL_Draft_v6.PDF

Frankly, though, it seems as though any employer who is so behind the times that it can’t understand legitimate distance learning, is not an employer where you want to use your new degree.

***

Disregard the photos in that DLA brochure, by the way. They depict very young people inexplicably gathering on campus, which can be hard to do when you live states or countries away from your classmates. More to the point, though, not all distance students are young.

Come on, maybe it’s the degree I’m getting, but that depiction of young people rings false. Distance learning has opened up a whole new world for people who have too many responsibilities to leave home for a bricks-and-mortar class. Often, that means older or “non-traditional” students, not those post-high-school kids in the photos. Don’t be put off by such advertising. There will be people in your classes who are older and who share your experiences and concerns.

On the other hand, though, no course is truly complete without the younger perspective. As a rule, their thinking is alternately smart, cute, refreshing, original, funny and insightful. In my experience, they are eager to assist us older folks, who in turn can offer a lot of practical experience to their studies. Tip number two: Never miss a chance to mingle intellectually with younger classmates. It is you who will learn.

Then suddenly, the plumbing goes, the car breaks down, and every unplanned family event one can imagine rears its inconvenient head. There’s a wrench in the works of our carefully laid plans. Course work, at a time when it should be front and center, is relegated to the rear, supplanted by small emergencies and events.

Toward spring semester’s end, my course work competes with holidays, gardening deadlines, graduations, religious events, and my desire to spend time with my aging parents and see to some of their needs. Because my master’s is in a family field, it is too much an irony to ignore family to study for this family degree. Still, in a weird, mutually dependent way, what I learn for the degree helps manage family needs.

As adults, our daily lives are a living result of the foundations we’ve built over the years with families, jobs, friends and household duties. We may even have volunteer work thrown in. Those entail rotes, responsibilities and traditions, things that always culminate at semester’s end, in May or December. We plan so that those times are cleared on our calendar, which works fine until the small emergencies crop up.

Meanwhile, distance education can lull you with a sense of enough time for life and school. By taking care of immediate issues during the day, you think you can always do your course work late at night or on off-times. But that’s a fallacy. Non-traditional students usually are older. After putting out daily fires, we are tired. Rather than read those gripping academic articles or fine-tune our term-paper prose, at night, we want to fall asleep. It is easy to put off the inevitable.

Is there a solution? I’m still looking. It seems that my personal reality is this: Regarding my multifaceted life, once delegation and saying no have been exhausted as options, I push on through. I knock down my responsibilities one by one, knowing it will end. At some point, I’ve learned that I really will look back and be able to say, usually with some surprise, “Hey, I did it, and it’s not too bad.” Maybe that will be my legacy, if I have one.

In graduate school, as profs are fond of saying – or writing, in distance learning – they don’t tell you what to study. You bring them your work. Meaning you imagine it and then go get it. With so little direction, you’d think they wouldn’t be too picky about what you bring back, but think again. They not only eye it in exquisite critical detail, but they PUBLICLY POST IT!

What a rare and humbling way to spotlight your own failings. In my class, for example, I heard – read, in distance learning – that some students landed grants to do their research. And gauging from their well-written, publicly posted papers, all of the others must write amicus curiae (friend of the court) briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court in their spare time, even as academic journals vie for their works. By contrast, my paper sounds more and more like my grocery list.

But hope springs eternal, even if energy doesn’t, and these are my suggestions for doing research articles.

• Start early. If you get three months to do it, there’s a reason for that.
• Forget books about writing research papers. That’s amateur stuff. You likely need professional level academic research help.
• Learn the language of research methods, such as meta-analyses, cross-sectional, qualitative and quantitative. Then move into the advanced language. Make flashcards, if necessary.
• Learn theories and statistics, quick.
• Practice succinct e-mail. In distance ed, you can’t question a prof during a lecture, when the topic is fresh. Instead, give your e-mail questions context: “HELP! Doing research paper. I see that research methods are not ‘Internet versus the library,’ but something else. Please define.” And the prof will respond soothingly, “This is graduate school. You tell me. And don’t worry. You’re doing fine.”
• Before undertaking any exercise program, see your doctor. Trust me, this is an exercise program.

Anyway, writing especially is critical in distance education (DE) mainly because you’ll need to get your ideas across quickly, concisely, clearly, regularly and hopefully, with color.

If I could pass along any piece of advice on that, it would be to stay true to your research and content. The writing style will follow, if you know what you want to say and how you want to say it. Simplicity takes hard work. Show your effort by keeping your writing simple until you’ve learned the language of your field.

To get started, check out these books, if you haven’t already:

* Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

* The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White, which is fairly inexpensive for those of us who keep losing it or lending it out.

And most of all, remember to read Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” a short (for that time) piece that still packs a lot of writing tips into an amusing critique of Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer series. A few pointers from this 19th century writing tutorial that still apply in the blogosphere:

“In addition to these large rules there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.”

Check out the rest of this inimitable humorist's writing tips at the Public Broadcasting System’s (PBS) website: http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_fenimore.html