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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
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.
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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.
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)