Ely Golvin is a fourth year honours student, majoring in History at UBC. Ely has taken two distance education courses: HIST 480 – Social History of Modern China, and HIST 432 – International Relations of the Great Powers in the 20th Century. HIST 480 explores life in China during the Qing Dynasty, The Republican Period, and since the formation of the PRC (The Peoples Republic of China). HIST 432 presents the history of international relations during World War One, World War Two, and the Cold War. Ely decided to take these distance education courses over the course of two summer semesters because he wanted to continue his studies while he traveled with his family to New York and Toronto. Taking these two courses allowed Ely to maintain the flexible schedule that he needed for his travels and helped him fulfill the degree requirements he needed for his major in History.
Ely noted that both courses consisted of a lot of readings and small assignments that needed to be completed every other week. In HIST 432, students were required to work on group assignments. Initially, Ely found online communication to be a bit challenging because he had to “touch base with group partners and professors without even seeing them in person.” However, using course features like the online discussion board pushed Ely to improve his “online communication skills.” Ely found HIST 480 to be particularly beneficial for him in the long run because he came across the subject, China’s minority policy in Xinjiang, which inspired his current thesis topic. The “flexibility” of topic selection in HIST 480 allowed Ely to “pick a rather obscure topic” which really interested him and benefitted his research in the long run. Since HIST 480, Ely has become “rather obsessed” with the topic, and thinks that he would have “probably never heard of it had he not taken the course.”
In addition to being able to travel out of town with his family, Ely found that taking these two distance education course benefitted him at a personal level. The distance education experience forced him to “evaluate people purely on the quality of their work as opposed to what they looked like, how they spoke, or how they behaved.” He isn’t as quick to judge people now. Furthermore, the distance education courses helped Ely to figure out his most efficient and effective method to study for exams. He recalls that he was “very nervous,” before writing his HIST 480 final exam, as the exam covered the entire six month course. In the end however, he did much better than he expected, and has since “used the same study method” for all his other exams.