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Online vs. Traditional Degrees?
Justin Rainbow asks: "As a computer science student, avid internet user and full-time programmer I find it very appealing to finish my CS degree online. Finishing at least a year early and studying whenever I want are just a couple of the draws to the online campus. However, are these internet degrees even worth the paper their printed on? Is an online degree just a waste of money? Can an online degree give you just as many opportunities as a traditional university? Has anyone in the Slashdot community graduated from one of these online schools? Did it help or hurt your career? What about graduate school admissions? Does an online degree hurt your chances to get into a great graduate school?"
A traditional degree is better for grad school because in a traditional school you are more likely to have opportunites for interaction with professors who can recommend you.
It depends. Right now I'm enrolled in University of Illinois - Springfield's (UIS) online computer science degree and they don't make any mention that it was online when you graduate. So, it is the same degree that the students on campus get, but UIS isn't exactly in the top of the computer science programs. I feel satisfied with the degree though. Also, University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign offers a professional masters degree in computer science (also no mention when you get your degree that it was online) and I believe that would help you quite a bit because UIUC is a very highly ranked computer science program. So, I would say as long as you take it from a school that has a traditional campus and degree in computer science. It'll be pretty much equivilent to their on campus degree. But I wouldn't touch University of Pheonix or similar "Universities" with a ten foot pole. That's as close to buying your degree as you can get and your school still being accredited.
"Curiouser and Curiouser" - Alice
They require quite a bit of group work in my program online. And yes I agree that traditional is better. I have no choice. I'm working full time in Korea and that really limits my options for getting my degree otherwise.
"Curiouser and Curiouser" - Alice
It probably depends on where you live. I did three years of high school completely online in Sweden, only visited the actual school building once. My grades I got from that school are no different than my brothers grades he got in a "regular school" (only mine are higher, but that's because I didn't drink so much beer, anyhow). I know there are several, real, universities here where you can read different courses and get lesser degrees. So it's certainly possible. If you are talking about the kind of "university" you get spam from ("get a prestigious degree from uni. of liverpool" or something) then you should of course stay away.
The Open University in the UK could be considered to do "online degrees" although they call it "distance learning". According to TQI, an organistation that gives access to official information about the quality of Higher Education, the OU is rated very highly for all subjects.
There is no god but Google and GTalk is the messenger of Google.
If someone's talking about U Phoenix or the like, I don't care if it's online or not, it's nearly worthless.
With any online degree program, the one thing that will always be missing is the person-to-person interaction. I'd only recommend online college for people like you who are experienced and have been working in the "real world." For someone coming out of high school, it's a terrible idea - they need to learn how to interact with people.
How the heck are you going to do a real college-level physics lab course, for example, if you don't have any of the expensive equipment? What would a chem course be like? "OK, now mix some baking soda and vinegar, and post about what happened."
I briefly attended a community college with online and by-wire classes. I spoke with someone who had taken Chem 1314 online, and when I asked the same question I got the same answer you just assumed. They'd use household items in really basic home experimentation labs. Sometimes there'd be less common ingredients, like citric acid, but mostly stuff I did in elementary school classrooms.
I took a by-wire class in high school from the same college, the quality was pretty much the same as my traditional classes because it was a Humanities class and largely lecture based. I can't imagine how an online chem course could match my lab experience though, especially with regards to learning proper yield calculations and the use of precision measuring equipment.
Touche! That's why I come to the dot, for the clever repartee!
Look, d00d, I'm not some kind of grammer cop. I only correct people who make their gramatical errors in the course of a snobbish dismissal of other people's educations.
Working in government Research and Development has given me some insight into this subject. Most government labs are a mix of grads from MIT, Georgia Tech, etc and prior service veterans, mostly from the enlisted grades.
Its common practice in the enlisted grades of the US Defense Department to go to school via online programs, "military programs" and distance learning because it works better with over seas deployments. However, if you take 100 average DoD lab employees, put them in a room, and interview them. You will, with little effort, be able to identify who went to a 4 year university and who did it at night and on the weekends.
The bottom line is that you learn more at school then algorithms and functions. It's the interpersonal skills learned from years of working with other students that makes the difference between a successful person and a lab rat.
I'm not sure where you went to school, but I think that most CS degrees require that you take a few courses that aren't actually on computers. That's what the grandparent was talking about. Most universities require that you take a physical science course so that you learn about stuff other than computers.
Also, what's good about a person who does their entire degree online. They may have never worked in a group. Learning to work in a group is an important part of your education and is very important when venturing out into the real world.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm currently enrolled in an online MBA program, a couple of my observations:
I received my undergrad physically present at a liberal arts college. After freshman year, I think you get a lot more valuable stuff out of college than just the knowledge you gain in class (things like social skills, teamwork, and communication).
However if you've been working as a knowledge worker out in the world I think you get enough experience/practice with these in your work, and will not gain the additional benefits of getting this experience in school as well. In this instance, there are a lot of benefits to the online degree: Fits into your schedule, you don't have to sit through a class that goes at the pace of the slowest learner, etc.
Another aspect of the online degree - at least in the classes I'm taking - you are forced to participate and provide original insights throughout the class. Most of this is in the form of threaded discussions, which are monitored by the professor, and which you must post to to receive credit. In a lot of physical classes, as long as you do the homework you can sleep through class and never participate.
In fact, I think for some of my online courses I put in more time than I would if I had to show up and listen to the professor for four hours a week.
I'm attending Keller graduate school. For any of the courses I'm taking, I can choose to take it online, or I can choose to take a physical class at one of the local campuses. I'm pretty sure the "degree" (piece of paper I'll file away and never look at again) doesn't differentiate itself whether its online or physical.
In general, the quality of the education suffers considerably.
Furthermore, as others have pointed out, lack of contact with professors essentially kills your chance of getting into graduate school.
If you're just interested in it as a certificate, I again second the advice of others, you should get it from a real university's online program.
My mother got a Master of Science Education from the Univ. of Montana, which had a big online component (about half of the courses). BUT, it was not *entirely* online, there were significant summer courses. Nonetheless, she liked the program greatly overall.
Read this before you enroll, though. David noble's anti-technology stance is a little extreme for my taste, but he makes excellent points regarding the weakness (and distasteful history) of correspondence-based education. It's out-dated
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
When I was in (engineering) college, our rule of thumb was that any subject which included the word "science" in the title was not a science. We mainly aimed this barb at majors like "political science" and "economic science", contrasting them to things like Physics and Chemistry.
As for computer science, it depended on which computer science major you signed up for, there were two. One under the college of liberal arts and sciences, and one under the college of engineering. The engineering program was far more rigorous.
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. -- Winston Churchill
Having taken an online univeristy class (or two) (From the University of Missouri system), i can that assesment is probably accurate of most of the students in our class.
We had 2, 1 hour online lectures a week - two or three students out of about 20 in the class attended with any regularity, the professor also commented many didn't even take the time to listen to the playbacks later (they were avialible for download or listening through basically a browser plugin).
A signifigant part of the final grade was from particiaption, just listening to the lectures and commenting in an online discussion group - the class average for those 'easy money' points was about 60%.
That's not to say online classes are better or worse than on campus classes, but the percpetion from the students, and I gather your experiance would agree with that, that these aren't 'real' classes. I'd be concerned that an online degree might be seen by employers in the same light, at least an online university might be. Online coursework from 'established' universities might be more accpeted.
The degree is required for most of the jobs I have seen posted just to get your resume looked at. If you wanted to do _entry_level_ network support for the government or many companies they won't even look at anything less than a 4 year degree even if you are a CCIE. With government jobs you can have an engineering degree in tree cutting and get looked at, but if you have a 2 year degree in comp-sci and 20 certifications, they flat out do not care. I am 25 years old and I am as far as I will ever go in life right now unless I finish my degree.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
As this implies, math is not science either.
"Mathematics is an experimental science, and definitions do not come first, but later on." - Oliver Heaviside. Now, you might argue that Heaviside didn't have much authority to say that as he wasn't a "true" mathematician and he pissed off the academic community at the time* but I find it a bit of a stretch to claim mathematics cannot be called a science, be it by denotation or connotation.
* While working on using Laplace transforms for all sorts of nifty things, Heaviside neglected to rigorously prove certain details. Such circumstances are what led him to make the above statement. For example, if you work out the derivation of the Laplace transform of t^n*f(t), it necessitates swapping an integral and derivative. For "nice" functions, this works, but it does not always hold true. You can imagine that leaving out a proof of when or when not this holds could have annoyed certain people.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
I'm a business partner for a internet security firm and, unfortunately, I see it the same way. Personally, I'm self taught from day one. BASIC and DOS knowledge helped me get my first technical job and since then, I've been moving up in the world. Now, I'm "self learning" for Cisco Certs (CNNA, etc) - although I'm doing it right - I have acquired so much equipment to help with my personal goals that when its all on, my home office sounds like a full data center. My wife only lets me use it during certain hours of the day...
The other thing that troubles me is the fact that you're studying computer forensics. This is more than studying habits of people - its where to find files on a computer, how to hack encryption, how to literally pull a drive and mount it on a clean machine, etc. I'm sorry, but I have a little bit of a problem trusting an online course for this type of stuff. Something that sounds as simple as pulling a drive and mounting it isn't as easy as it sounds. I have one machine thats so damn picky, I barely touch the hardware or make major changes to the OS, but I use it as a DB and test machine for home projects... I'd love to see someone attempt to pull that drive and make a copy of it... Wikipedia delves into the hardware argument a little more.
Hell, I want a degree in Mechanical Engineering and the most I'm THINKING about doing are my core classes and I've been researching online schools for awhile because I'm so picky about quality. The only reason I'm considering that is because of my current location - outside the US.
Sorry, DeVry may be a valid school, but its not on my personal lists. One thing you can do is transfer at some point so your degree will actually come from something better looking. When you do that though, you'll probably have to consider taking a few classes over and a lot more classes on top of what you thought was the degree program. Also, when you apply for jobs, don't be surprised if you actually get tested on the skills you say you have. I've been tested on everything from my typing speed to the ability to bring windows back from the dead. In a level 3+ technical support position, its not uncommon to be put in font of a computer and have someone say "theres your error - fix it". Something as simple as a Windows DUN error 691 sounds simple, but is it really the username/password or something else... (I just pulled that out of thin are - thats more of a level 1 question - sorry)
"Mathematics is the queen of sciences and arithmetic the queen of mathematics. She often condescends to render service to astronomy and other natural sciences, but in all relations she is entitled to the first rank." -- Carl Friedrich Gauss
I did the MU system thing as well. The course was entirely online in my case, and frankly, I thought it was worse than non-online, but primarily due to the lack of interaction with other people. Had I decided to go to a larger university than the one I attend, there might not be such a large difference, but I still noticed the lack even while I was doing the course. I can see the reasoning why it isn't "real", because it didn't feel so at times, although I did manage to keep a rein on that tendency by reminding myself of the real fact of a grade on my transcript. The disconnect of taking a class over the internet does that. It doesn't feel like class to someone raised on today's public school systems or the majority of private schools. The length of lectures are a problem, as is finding time to do work. The class wasn't CS, but if you have any sort of long-term project, it can be difficult to find the time to fit the project in if it requires long sessions of work, and you don't have the time in large enough chunks. I would have to agree entirely with what freidog said, and personally didn't find that I liked online courses. During the course I took, I did an average of 12 hours a week of work for 3 credit hours, primarily because the material was difficult to understand and I only had the book and e-mail to work with, although some of it was merely spent catching up because I accidentally entered late. This gave me the impression that the course material itself is going to be a sign of difficulty. An English course may not be too different, and potentially more beneficial in an online form, because discussion can happen more slowly and there is more anonymity and thus less chance people will hold back arguments. On the other hand, beware art, science, or CS courses where the material might be arcane and esoteric or merely not easily translatable to an online realm. The program may have become better since I did it, as it was experimental during my time, but from what I have seen, online isn't the way to go unless its the only way to go. There needs to be some improvement in technology in terms before I would do an online course again. It doesn't feel ready enough. VoIP and streaming video need to improve so that online lectures can happen more easily for those without great connections. Finding a program in your area is a good idea as well. E-mail and the like are good, but nothing beats asking the professor a question during office hours. Go to your local "big-name" state university and see what they have. It has a pretty decent likelihood of not being noted as "online" on your transcript, and you will still have a chance to talk to a professor during office hours. Not only that, but some have secondary campuses that might be easier for you to attend, and will offer night classes, and those will give you the benefits of the on-campus experience. It definitely seems to be easier to integrate online components into a on-campus course than doing a solely online course.