Vancouver Learning Network

I am taking 9 courses and it's absolutely terrible.Science 8- ridiculously long, assignments do not correlate to the learning material provided. ex. after learning the 3 lines of defense i was told to put an egg in white vinegar to see the shell melt off.Pe 9- both science and pe required a terrible amount of money. i had to go out and by every sports ball in existence and for science i needed to find myself a syringe? like hello?french 8 - i had to draw for my final project. draw.art 8- one of the courses i actually somewhat enjoyed, i will say that i did have to go out and buy a ton of supplies

Called to ask if I could pull out of a course - I was very polite and calm the whole way through but the phone operator sounded very annoyed, half dead, and had a very strong attitude the whole way through. Would constantly refuse to answer questions and say things such as yeah well you should have known that." she said "k bye" after my first question and ended the call before I had finished."

After my son took Science 10 and Math 10 through VLN, I believe I could give constructive feedback. Both subjects were excellent. Math assignments were marked in two days, and science assignments were marked same day or the following day at max. Teachers responded to emails same day or the following day (2 days later at max with math). Responding to email communications (office) literally took a couple of hours or one day at most. Work load: many assignments but make student stronger in the subject. Huge thanks go to Dr. Rozitis, Ms. Hollands, Jas, and Barry. They are the best!Suggestions: I hope you consider having a couple of benches in the hallway way for parents who wish to wait for their kids during exams.Front desk staff: I hope you consider situation when parents would like to wait for their kids, especially if the parent has obviously some struggles like hand in splint. There is waiting area in the office, and I do not think it is good to deny parent's request waiting there. I have encountered this for two times in a row (last time for a meeting, the time before for another reason). This is not OK! Thank you to all the good people at VLN!

I genuinely cannot tell which was worse; the teachers or the course structures. In the website, in each lesson, most of the links will not work or be of any use.In Chemistry 12, the quizzes did not allow much time (I believe it was 30 minutes for 20 questions), and a good portion of them were not taught in the material. Also, when I got a question wrong on the quiz on my first try, and wanted to ask my teacher about what I did wrong so that I could prepare myself for the second quiz try, the teacher (I don't remember her name but she was an elderly woman) would rudely reply to my email saying that I was not allowed to. In one case, I was able to ask her about a question I got wrong on a quiz by not mentioning that it was from the quiz I took, and she replied to the question saying that it is a question that did not make sense. This confused me, because I'm not sure how she expected the other students to figure out this question as well.In the assignments, it was more reasonable compared to the quizzes and homework assignments. A majority of the questions were asking to predict the outcome of practical or real-life chemistry experiments, which could be done with much research. However, the marking methods that the teacher used was terrible. I lost marks off for underlining/bolding certain pieces of text, including water" and "soap" in my list of required materials for an experiment

I decided to take a course with VLN concurrently with my physical school schedule. I started in September and it was manageable. I did learn a couple things out of it and was getting a very good mark, however this level of manageability kind of stopped when I got to the midterm/oral exam. The teacher was constantly changing for unspecified reasons so I found it really difficult to contact someone to schedule the exams, and I could not efficiently move forward because of that. Also, when I did contact the given emails, I sometimes was not given a reply in a timely manner or even a reply at all. It was very frustrating, and I came to the conclusion that I had to switch DL systems in order to do this course more efficiently. I have wasted half a year on this course because I could not do the exams because of this lack of communication between student and teacher. I've had better communication and flexibility with another online school.

Do not attend unless you have previously taken the course and know what you are doing, because the videos provided do an utterly, and comedically poor job of explaining content. In several cases, they do not provide you with the resources to complete questions (ie. do not provide you with equations or explanations as to why things work). Absolutely terrible.

I am currently doing three courses with VLN and my experience has not been the best. Firstly, I am surprised by the amount of grammar mistakes in the assignments that are given by the teachers. I do appreciate the work the teachers put in to them, but maybe check if your instructions make sense, before even giving them out? Secondly, be prepared to learn a subject by yourself. The concepts that are taught in my math course are drastically different from the assignments I have to hand in. No tutor to help you? Crying will be your new hobby! Thirdly, it can be very hard to contact your teacher. I once received a reply two months after an email about an assignment.I do appreciate that online school is an option, but VLN really needs to do some upgrading. I wouldn't recommend this school to a fellow student.

Took my first course with VLN and by the time I was finished my final exam, less than 4 of my assignments had been marked (I completed over 15 assignments). There is a clear lack of consistent feedback. For example, three weeks after I had finished my course, a new teacher came on leaving comments on my assignments/projects such as, Please put this in a word doc format next time". How am I suppose to do anything when I finished my course 3 weeks ago? It is not my responsibility to read feedback comments 3 weeks after I have finished my course. The type of feedback I am getting should have been given to me WHILE I was completing the course

One of the teachers I encountered was completely and utterly incompetent. He never responded to emails, marked things ridiculously slowly, and the work he gave us was inconsistent, not to mention false. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Here is my review on three different grade 12 courses from VLN:1. Economics 12 - this course was the MOST stressful because of the inconsistent and unnecessarily complicated load of tests and assignments. Even though the course material was very long and tedious to memorize, I’d say difficulty is only moderate as concepts were generally easy to understand. However, the problem is the actual correlation between course material and the assignments/tests. ALL of the assignments/tests BARELY had ANYTHING to do with the actual material taught. This was incredibly frustrating and the quizzes were UNREALISTICALLY long. A ten question quiz(worth ~2.5%)took an average of TWO HOURS to complete. The assignments were WAY beyond the course material and I had to do look up UNIVERSITY level economics to do the questions. The course material did not teach ANYTHING helpful to do the questions. On a last note, the teacher for this course is very unresponsive. I had to email multiple times through this course and only got a reply 1-2 weeks later. I originally took this course as a grade booster but ended up actually brought down my GPA. Overall, unless you want to make complications for yourself and stress yourself out, I highly discourage anyone to take this course.2. Mandarin 12 - although this course was relatively easy for me because I already had a strong foundation of Chinese, I do not recommend it to anyone that isn’t exceeding/proficient in Chinese language.3. Calculus 12 - honestly it was okay for me only because I could understand the concepts through YouTube videos on calculus. The course material itself felt very rushed and made it 100 times more difficult than it actually was. Bottom line, if you take this course, I’d recommend to skim through the lectures and watch YouTube videos instead to understand the concepts. Also, the teacher for this course never responds and puts in the absolute minimum to help students. Whenever I’d get a question wrong on the assignments, she would only make it as wrong and not even circle or mark up what I did wrong. It makes me feel like she doesn’t actually know how to do calculus and that she’s just marking the papers up with an answer key and calling it a day. This course is all about self-learning. You will not get any help from the teacher or the course material.To be honest, I wasn’t even going to write a review, but I think it’s important to have people aware of what they may be getting themselves into. In general, I think VLN should do a lot better at providing useful and comprehendible courses. It was mentally draining and I’m just glad I never have to take another course from this school again.