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Big MOOC On Campus: Georgia Tech's $6,600 MS In CS
theodp writes "Next January, writes the NYT's Tamar Lewin, the Georgia Institute of Technology plans to partner with Udacity and AT&T to offer a master's degree in CS through massive open online courses for a fraction of the on-campus cost. Georgia Tech's Online Master of Science in Computer Science can be had for $6,600 — far less than the $45,000 on-campus price. The courses will be online and free for those not seeking a degree; those in the degree program will take proctored exams and have access to tutoring, online office hours and other support. AT&T, which ponied up a $2 million donation, will use the program to train employees and find potential hires. Initial enrollment will be limited to a few hundred students recruited from AT&T and Georgia Tech corporate affiliates. Zvi Galil, the dean of the university's College of Computing, expects that the program could attract up to 10,000 students annually, many from outside the U.S. 'Online, there's no visa problem,' he said."
Such as myself, I wonder if it's worth getting the degree? I'm already a partner at a start-up and a decent coder. Is it worth it?
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
It will be very interesting to see what their retention numbers end up looking like. We've had cheap, modestly interactive, education since 'correspondence courses' hit the scene (examples date to at least the 18th century, with spikes and troughs in popularity over time); but we've had less success getting the results achieved in-person from even the most tech-laden variations.
Sorry, folks, but no Master's in CS is worth $45,000, and certainly not from Georgia Tech when better schools offer the same for half the tuition (Univ. of Texas comes to mind), and regional schools for a quarter of this. This seems to be nothing more than a marketing ploy to show what a good "deal" you could get if you went 100% online while at the same time inflating the quality of the on-campus program at Georgia Tech.
In my experience, what you describe is a doctorate program. A masters is mostly courses with research as an option.
For the UK version at the Open University the exams are held at a local college and proctored in the normal way. Presumably this could operate in a similar fashion.
Somebody please *please* hear this message before it's too late. Too many bright foreign students who get into top notch schools are denied visas. I've seen this happen first hand multiple times at a good school. Politicians can debate visa allocation as much as they want in general. But when MIT (or some other top notch school) accepts someone can you please just give the kid a visa? Oh, and not kick him out when he graduates? Because if not, then your protectionist strategy creates a market for programs such as this one, which is a hundred times worse than the scenario you are trying to prevent.
When you get a masters' degree, you spend a year or more committing yourself 24 hours a day to learning something, and you're in a community of people who are engaged in the same commitment to learning something. Your eating, sleeping, and social life revolves around an intellectual community. You learn a lot through serendipity. A chance meeting in the hall can give you a direction for your career.
When you take a MOOC, you're not giving it the same commitment and you're not among the same community. That's especially true if you take it free.
You could just read the same textbooks that masters' degree students read. But you'd be missing something.
I could read transcripts of the Feynmann lectures. But that wouldn't be the same as going to school and taking lectures with Feynmann.
Except colleges rarely teach "state of the art", they usually teach theory or programming languages a few years behind the times...
I don't disagree a BS is a great foundation or that keeping up is a good idea, but once you are an experienced engineer it's really not that hard to "keep up" on your own - for free.
Also, given a good, experienced software engineer can make $150-200k+ these days, any time away from that is probably a bigger expense than will ever be paid back through salary raises, etc.
Only if it's original research. A typical PhD program requires that you advance the field, whereas a masters program will permit you to conduct research that's just investigating things that have been investigated and synthesizing other people's research into new papers.
It's a $7000 MA for people hand-picked from Georgia Tech's corporate partners, funded by the $2 million dollar donation from AT&T. So, assume that's covering a large chunk of the cost. The press release says that it's "initially" expected to be under $7,000.
So if you actually want the degree, it's currently not available to everyone, and it's eventually going to be more expensive.
http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/faq/
"All exams are proctored using national proctoring standards. We have access to 4,500 physical proctoring facilities and are working with online proctoring institutions."
But you'd be missing something.
Not wasting money leaves an empty hole in my heart.
Just because some people are lazy, unmotivated, and unintelligent doesn't mean that everyone is.
Either you're very hard-working, motivated and intelligent, or you're an example of the Dunning–Kruger effect. I wonder which is more likely?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/05/15/023234/georgia-tech-and-udacity-partner-for-online-ms-in-computer-science
Georgia Tech and Udacity Partner for Online M.S. in Computer Science
Nothing different, except this time an NYT article that references the same?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
So they would go to a LOCAL school in their region or country and take it there. Exams can be emailed, faxed, etc. to other places which can proctor the exam.
This makes some sense. Nearly all Fortune 500 companies offer some type of personnel training in the form of "University", aka Disney Univeristy, Oracle University, Cisco University, P&G University, etc... is typically what they are called. And if I recall can cost upto $2K (internal overhead) per course which lasts 2 weeks on avg.
"Off shoring" the corporate training basically to Academia removes the overhead costs and the companies can reducing training offerings as needed (during layoffs for instance). As for Academia, they would like to have the funding of this extra private money and will legitimize smaller schools that want to compete against the big dogs (Ivy, big state universities). Somewhat of a win-win short term, BUT will push training responsbility off corporations to individuals (we all might as well be contractors) and schools will push what businesses want rather than trailblazing or going against the status quo, as basis for a free thinking environment. Hence long term this is is likely bad.
I have two masters degrees (quant/stats and MBA), work in software development for 10+ years, and have been debating either getting a masters degree in CS or a law degree in IP in the next year or two. When I read this article, right this very instant, I realized it would be more profitable in the long run to get a law degree than to get a CS degree.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
how do you spend $100,000 on an undergrad degree?
After scholarship, MIT undergrads average $24,000 a year.
http://mitadmissions.org/afford/basics
Carnegie Mellon $46,000 annual tuition.
http://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/tuition-fees
Stanford $14,000 per quarter
http://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/tuitionfeesandhousing/#tuitiontext
for some IT jobs 4 years is overkill and for some parts of IT CS is not the right fit vs more of a trades fit.
if you're choosing between 20 freshly minted CS master degree holders (theroy loaded classes) and 20 say people with 2-4 years tech school degrees (classes with more hands on work) and experience
I know this sounds lame but Masters Degrees helped me draw higher pay. MBA my salary rose by 40% same company, Engineering another 20% new company, stuck it our for 1.7 years and my salary rose by another 25% -now I've breached six figures in non trivial way with options and decent bonus on top of the nice base. Although I think degrees are over rated especially from big name programs, I still can't argue with the financial results. At $6k or $7k -a Masters in CS sounds like a steal?
Wonder if any of the veterans on /. truly believe the extra letters and relatively cheap out of pocket expense would somehow hurt their careers or bottom lines. Most IT workers (managers and line coders alike) spend ours studying and techniques anyway. If you can get a few extra letters and more long term for a small outlay of $6k why wouldn't you???
Even if you thought the degree added little to the field of CS overall, it's impact on a programmers earning power seems like it would be real enough on a cost vs benefit basis... And god forbid a decent programmer actually made it into management and actually helped fix what ails many organizations' IT/Business relations (ie a sane use of technology to advance business instead pet projects not worth the 8.5x11 powerpoint page used to write 'em up)...
I've been there and done that. The start-up almost surely won't last forever. Even if it does, you won't want to work 55 hours a week while your baby is waking you up at 3AM. At some point, you'll probably want a nice 8-5 with good insurance and time off. When that time comes, you need letters behind your name.
I had all of the other credentials. I have seventeen years of full professional experience. I'm an Apache contributor. At one interview, the interviewer asked me if I had experience with Debian, as that was their preferred distro. I asked if he'd seen that morning's Debian security update. He seen it and applied the update. My name was on that Debian alert, I discovered the security issue all Debian users were alerted to that morning. I didn't get the job. Put letters at the end of your name while you can.
I wonder which is more likely?
I'd say fallacy of the false dilemma. Plus, you still have yet to acknowledge the huge cost differential here.
Well, I know in certain fields (say, MBA), you don't need to do research, and I have vaguely heard of a way of doing a Master's through courses solely, but I'd say 95% of the people I know (computer science, mathematics, physics people, so YMMV obviously) go down the thesis or article route. Again, from the perspective of someone going through such a thing, I doubt you'd be able to learn anywhere near as much just by following courses, especially remotely.
Indeed. I work closely with Open University as we extend the software they use (Moodle) to work for our students at the Texas A&M System. Until this year, people would travel from all over the world to attend our firefighter school for twelve weeks. Now, all of the classroom part is online, so they can either come to Texas for just six weeks, or they can do our online classroom and then do field exercises in their home area.
We're rapidly expanding the capabilities of the software system it all runs on and trying to change the mindset from "correspondence" or "online book" to instead be a rich interactive experience. The students interact with the course content, with each other, and with an active instructor.
The blurb says 'Go ahead, take the courses online, $6600, work hard and get a degree'. The reality (when you read the site) is that online courses won't be available for over a year, if you want to be accepted to the program, you have to go through a rigorous application process, including multiple references from people, full documentation from post secondary institutions, and a highly regulated, process to allow entry to the program (there is a massive chasm between the blurb and the apparent reality). There is even stuff on the main site about 'even if you don't have a BSc in CS but a degree in something else, go ahead and apply anyway, whereas the actual application insists that you meet all prerequisites, that all payments must be prepaid, and it seems you face a very rigorous, highly discriminating process.
There are a lot of junk online courses out there. A lot of them are simply videos of lectures, repurposed as "online courses". Stanford does a lot of that. Their original machine learning class was like that, and it is painful. Especially since the instructor's blackboard writing (yes, it's video of a real chalk blackboard) is messy. This in a field which has its own unique (and not very good) notation.
Khan Academy has courses which consist of a color etch-a-sketch display of the instructor's writing plus a voice-over. I viewed the lectures for forces and torques recently. The instructor had clockwise and counterclockwise reversed, used a multiply symbol where he needed an add, and went from talking about a body in free space to one pinned at a pivot point without mentioning that he'd shifted. Not only is the production value very low, nobody is reviewing that stuff, or even proofreading it.
MIT's course on rotating electrical machinery is basically the class notes from a course. There are a few drawings, then endless math derivations. You don't get the labs online.
I've seen some good online courses, but most of this stuff is a low-budget conversion of old lecture and notes.
I have two sisters with Masters degrees. One went the fairly traditional route of 4 years for an undergrad degree, a decade or so in the work force, then another decade or so working on her Masters at a traditional institution as time and budget permitted. She finally completed her degree shortly after she turned 40. She has been working as an globe hopping industrial trainer, author, and project manager all along.
My other sister took about 20 years to complete her undergrad degree and another 4 to complete her Masters' in non-profit administration online. She is now the director of a small non-profit organization that trains dogs as companions/ assistants for people with various physical disabilities.
While my younger sister would concede that the MOOC does have some disadvantages when compared to the more traditional model, she chose to go that route because it was (a) cheaper and (b) was something that she could largely adapt to her schedule.
Neither one of my sisters felt it was necessary or beneficial to be buried in a Masters' program for 24 hours a day, though. I think that's a model that may fit well with particular areas of study. I certainly don't think it's the only model that works.
Dude, this is Slashdot, people here will never ever agree that getting an education can help your career. Around here, the mythology is that super-genius programmers don't need any education at all, and anyone who isn't a super-genius programmer can go to hell because they don't fit into the mythology.
As for me, my name-brand expensive education was hands-down the cheapest cost-per-value thing I've ever purchased by a long shot.