Any course will be mostly ineffective
Course designers often assume that everyone has the same needs. Yet this is rarely true for people wanting to learn writing.
Such learners represent very different ages and backgrounds. No course could ever satisfy such a huge diversity of needs. Students don’t even have a say in what they get. Committees decide that, so courses are even worse than teacher-centric. Inevitably, most material will be irrelevant to most students. Even if learners find something useful, a course will inevitably zip through it, because teachers must cover the whole bloated curriculum to a tight schedule.
Furthermore, courses are extremely difficult to change. In part, overworked teachers lack time for the necessary effort, even when courses desperately need overhauling. Another reason is ego and refusal to consider criticism; I witnessed cases where schools solicited student feedback but discarded all responses, unread. Either way, course material will seldom have been updated for years or decades. The longer this goes on, the more irrelevant courses become.
Even at their optimistic best, writing courses are guaranteed to disappoint everyone. However, many are not even taught by writers but rather by English teachers. In my experience, most are ignorant of fundamental issues and actively mislead students.
Next section: Universities are ineffective
Articulate Writing 