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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.