Born and (mostly) raised in Calgary, Karl has been taking courses on and off at AU since 1999. At one point, he changed his major from Computing Science to Computing Science because the new program requirements fit what he’d already taken better. Since then, he switched to English and graduated (w/Great Distinction he likes to add) proving along the way that it is entirely possible to complete an entire AU course within a three week period. If only he had done this at the beginning of the course instead of in the last extension.
This is not something he advises unless you are desperate, masochistic, or, ideally, both.
He is currently the managing editor of The Voice Magazine, where he tries to put his education to use helping other students as they provide content for The Voice
Athabasca University has recently released is 2024-2029 Strategic Plan, titled “Like No Other”. Like many strategic plans, this one is filled with a lot of aspirational words, lofty ideals, and precious few hard metrics. Sometimes, this is okay. After all, as has been said, the moment you define something as a numerical metric to reach… Read more »
This week, our featured article, is, to my great surprise, a poem. Since I included some poetry recently, it was no surprise that this week there was another poem in my in-box. That’s a bit of what I was afraid of happening, that including any poetry would open the floodgates, and before I knew it,… Read more »
That was a surprise, wasn’t it? I don’t think even Republican voters in America expected the popular vote to swing to Mr. Trump. I certainly didn’t predict it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as much of a surprise as I expected it to be. What remains, however, will be the results, some of which are happening already… Read more »
This coming week is election day in the United States. There have already been far right groups in the United States threatening violence if their candidate doesn’t win. Some suggest if that comes to pass, it shows that democracy has failed in the U.S. It was a nice experiment and all, but, as always, we’re… Read more »
Last week, my own ever cogent rants against anything that catches my fancy were missing. If you’re reading this now, it means you may have noticed. And if you didn’t notice, you’re probably not reading this one either, so my referencing people like that here seems a bit silly now that I think about it…. Read more »
Each week the Voice Magazine publishes information on upcoming events and information about an upcoming scholarship from somewhere outside of AU or AUSU that you might qualify for. But that information doesn’t come out of nowhere, and longtime writer Barb Lehtiniemi is actually our “Behind the Scenes” seeker who finds all this information, vets it… Read more »
This week, we start off with a short interview with a student in Nova Scotia who’s done everything from avionics to massage, and who still considers herself a new student. She gives us some insight into how she studies best and also some really solid advice for new students. We also have a Cities in… Read more »
I’m very happy to announce this week the return of the Course Exam column. This column, designed to give students and prospective students a better understanding of what’s involved with various courses was a mainstay of the Voice Magazine for many years, and several instances of it still regularly rank among the top articles for… Read more »
So just yesterday, I received official notice from a member of AUSU staff that Jodi Campbell, the Executive Director of AUSU, and Chantel Groening, President of AUSU, are both no longer with the organization. In all honesty, I knew a couple of days before, when something that big happens, information has ways of getting out… Read more »
A surprisingly fun issue this week, as Alek has provided us another one of his larger-than-life tales which I’d typically write off as humour reporting, except that he’s got the pics to prove it. Pics, they say, or it didn’t happen. Well, right here is proof that it indeed did happen, and a reminder that… Read more »