The time has come

The residential session starts on Tuesday (15^th), and there's a lot of stuff to be read before that.

In fact I only got access to the VLE (Virtual Learning Environment), the place where all the online studies take place, two days ago – honestly, I was starting to get worried that there would be no materials before the course, and we'll just have to start from scratch right there. Now I have the feeling that as long as it's the first time the programme is being administered the guys at JBS and Cont-Ed were just finishing things at the last moment (I got the Programme Handbook in the mail just a few hours ago).

I've been reading the Handbook with some agitation – I've never attended real courses at a foreign university, and the difference in approach is dramatic. Of course plagiarism is not encouraged in Russia either, but I don't think any student here knows what it entails. The pass/fail conditions look tough, and the assessments rules too, but then again I'm pretty sure that if our rules were expressed in such a formal way it would've looked the same. So I'm hoping it's just a matter of formality. Overall, right now I'm glad I decided to start with AD instead of doing an MBA right away, cause getting used to the rules is quite important. But I guess we'll see how it goes.

The VLE is based on moodle (the open-source e-learning environment), and is just another blend of a typical community framework with shared resources, forum, PMs and whatnot. We're supposed to have access to Orbit – the gateway to JBS' library, but it's not working for me right now, which is a shame because there's some reading to be done.

The first course of the programme is called Entrepreneurial Awareness and is all about the Entrepreneur (as I see it) – conceptual theories of entrepreneurship, success factors, basic opportunity recognition, and personal development for entrepreneurs. The latter one is probably the most important part for me at this point in my life, because I see a certain lack of motivation and drive to move forward, and enrolling on this course was one step towards finding an answer to these issues.

Surprisingly enough the amount of participants is rather small – in VLE I can see about 15 participants overall, and out of them at least 5 are tutors and administrators, which means there are less than 10 students. Which is good, and makes you feel somewhat special.

I guess this is the last post before the residential session and I might post something once I'm at Judge. Hey – we've got 24x7 access to the computer lab, so I might post something at night, because the library there is great, and I'll probably come there to do some reading.