Guide to Online Education > Online Education In-Depth > Meet Real Online Students > Mary Lea, MS in Instructional Design & Technology
She has embraced the technology that has freed up space and time and allowed massive amounts of documentation to be stored on thin CD's. "It's much easier now than when there were actual paper documents."
Name: Mary Lea Castelbury
Age: 60
Marital Status: Married
Children: A daughter, 39, and a son, 37
Biggest Difficulty: Managing to stay in school in the midst of a family tragedy
School: Western Illinois University
Target: M.S. in Instructional Design & Technology, 2009
After receiving her bachelor's degree, she kept up the momentum and immediately enrolled in the master's degree program. She was on track to receive her master's in two and half to three years when tragedy struck.
Her sister-in-law fell ill with a brain tumor last April. Just six months later, in October 2006, they lost her. She left behind three little girls aged 10, 6, and 3. Now it is up to Mary Lea to help her brother-in-law raise them.
"It has been a re-education in mothering," she says with a mixture of emotion. A near forty-year break has left her a little out of practice at reading bedtime stories and getting children off to sleep.
Throughout the devastating illness and all that it meant for the family, Mary Lea managed to stay in school.
She took two writing courses last spring in which she earned A grades. This term she had to drop a course, but plans to take stock of her new responsibilities, and ease back into her coursework next term.
She looks forward to her studies. "It keeps me up on technology," she says of online education. Most classes make use of WebCT or Blackboard. Students post their work and participate in a group discussion.
"We have to be logged on as a unit," she explains. "Sometimes it's hard to set up a convenient time."
Assignments are problem-based. Students read a case and give their opinion on how the problem should be solved. "Depending on what your employment was, your background, and your experience, you respond very differently," she says of the diversity within the groups.
"There are some young, some middle-aged, and some older students. I was probably the oldest."
"When you've lived and worked and experienced things you have a different view," she says succinctly. "I tell it as I seen it."
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