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Distance Learning Recommendations?
Coventry asks: "I left college two years ago. At the time, I was actually on staff and going to class for free - working on the in-house network. I left for better money, but now I want to finish my degree. Now, I can`t go back to school full time, I need to work, so my questions is several fold: (more -->)
"What accredited colleges or universities offer a full Bachelors in Computer Science through Distance Learning? How much do they cost? What are the policies on transfered credits, and 'Challenge for Credit' (testing out of a course for full credit) ? Has anyone else looked into this? I know that I want to teach on the college level at some point, and I cant seem to get my foot in the door, reguardless of my other credentials, at certain big and blue company. Any ideas? I do NOT want a buy-a-degree type thing. I'm more then willing to put in the effort and go through the course load, but I need to do it remotely, and preferably at my pace (fairly fast!)"
I have been thinking a lot about the education system and it's structure lately after I had an interesting experience. I was majoring in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering here at the University of Minnesota, and now that the semester is more than half over I decided to peruse the web pages of the Computer Science courses that I would be taking later. I looked through their homework, their midterms, the notes, etc. and over all was not very impressed.
Day after day I skip about 80% of my classes as the exact same thing that is taught in lecture is almost word for word in the book.
What's to stop us, the Open Source community, from creating these very same textbooks (which could be written much better as often times these $100+ textbooks are written to supplement lecture material, therefore being clumsy in many areas)? Once they're online not only would students save thousands of dollars, but it would be a great step in the direction of making education available to everyone regardless of economic class.
At South Dakota State their lectures are broadcast on the dorm's cable network. Why not tape these lectures? It's not like in today's generic university there is any "interaction" in a 300+ student lecture hall. Now that bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper, these could be online as well for those that "need" to see someone doing and saying the material.
It seems extremely inefficient for professors to teach the same thing semester after semester if not several times a day. The same material, over and over. A bit inefficient by today's technological advances, no?
I want to create a whole new model of schooling, free schools, so bad! So, why not?