Comment by rl3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rl3 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

In principle there's nothing wrong with the concept of online degrees.

In practice, it's currently a complete cesspool of low-quality for-profit degree mills.

I would argue that MOOCs from top tier universities far, far exceed the average online for-profit in terms of quality of content. It's ironic, considering they're free. The caveat of course is you don't get a degree, though many have options for certifying you took the class.

In my opinion, a bullshit degree is worse than no degree. The person with no degree is relying purely on skills and experience. The person with the online degree meanwhile may be of questionable caliber.

I have sympathy for people who people attain online degrees out of necessity and are fully aware they're just getting a piece of paper to satsify whatever arbitrary bureaucratic requirements. For example, it's not uncommon for a minimum level of education to be retroactively forced upon already-competent employees. The questionable caliber part comes into play when you have people who fail to realize that their obviously poor-quality online school is, well, just that.

I think we're all familiar with the guy who acts like his University of Phoenix degree has launched him into the academic elite, and certain programs that are notoriously bad are and perhaps should remain a large negative signal.

But to that end I've heard multiple people in hiring positions whose opinion of Georgia Tech's CS program has diminished greatly because they now view them as "that school with the online Master's." I'm hope the net effect is negligible but I've heard too many people say that or agree with the sentiment to dismiss it entirely.

Ask around at any university. Some classes can be taken online. These are the classes the students throw on top of an already full schedule for free credits because they know they are complete bullshit and will take zero time and effort. If I had a M.S. from Georgia Tech and actually did a degree program with other students in a class and spoke with a professor many times a week and dedicated 1-2 years of full-time study and then my alma mater started giving out MY degree for people who sit in their pajamas and copy paste answers off the Internet I'd be pretty annoyed since the thing I worked so hard for/paid for would be devalued. I think being VERY skeptical of any online degree is quite wise and students should be required to say whether their degree was in person or online when, say, applying for a job, etc.

Online education might be a real thing one day but it's got miles and miles to go before anyone takes it seriously. Right now it's at the level of "there are pretty good lectures that you can listen to if you're curious about a topic".

As it turns out the reason most people don't do education and have a full-time job at the same time is that they are essentially incompatible. If you are dedicating enough resources to your job to not be fired, you are not taking your education seriously (unless your period of study far extends that of traditional students by many years). A serious degree program IS a full time job even if it's only a few hours of week of physical in-class time. Online is a way to cheat and pretend you can do both, when in reality you can't and one or both of them suffers a great deal.

I think the implication that you can get an online Master's from a reputable school (Johns Hopkins, Georgia Tech, MIT, etc) by "copy paste answers off the Internet" is pretty baseless. The posts on /r/OMSCS seem to point directly to the contrary at least.

The idea that being in a physical room and speaking to a professor in person makes you more worthy of a degree is simply not accurate. A degree should be a measure of academic ability, not a measure of physical proximity and willingness to put ones life on hold for a predetermined amount of time.

> willingness to put ones life on hold for a predetermined amount of time.

That is almost the definition of a degree. During a degree, every class expects you to devote time and resources to learning. The degree programs we see today are structured in such a way that they expect you to drop everything else and learn (or research, in graduate studies).

If you can't 'put your life on hold' in order to study you won't be able to do it quickly or coherently enough to generate the large body of knowledge that a degree represents.

The idea that "online classes" are the bullshit, easy-credit classes is false. When I was doing my undergrad years ago I took one class, statistics, online because of a scheduling conflict. The only way my experience differed from that of a person sitting in the classroom was how my lectures were delivered. Otherwise, it was the same homework, same quizzes, same exams, same everything. (The lectures were also the same, actually, having simply been recorded and put online a day or two later.) Moving your body to a particular physical location has a couple benefits, to be sure, and the trick to online education is to try to make that ground up. It's certainly not fatal to the educational process. Why would it be?

I am enrolled in the Georgia Tech online computer science masters (OMSCS). The rigour and the grading is the same as for internal students for many classes. Some classes even posted comparison results for exams between online and internal students (results are very close in every statistical measure, even the number of failures is similar). There is a substantial workload required to pass courses and I have taken leave from work in order to complete assignments. Saying a masters is at least a dedicated full time job is delusional and out of whack with many students today. I worked the whole way through my undergrad because my parents were not wealthy and I needed to live in another city to go to university, I was not alone in this.

Cheating is cracked down upon and students have been expelled for collusion. Exams are proctored by humans or AIs (it is easy to do eye tracking and screen scraping, it even detected me trying to open the exam from a VM and refused to open). These (Georgia Tech's, MIT's, Standford's, etc) online programs are going to eat the middle out of the rest of the university sector as the content is substantially better than most midrange universities for a fraction of the price. You may be prejudiced against online programs for whatever reason but they are here to stay at the top end and the bottom end and it is important to be able to distinguish between the two.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com