Germany's State Distance-Learning University
fernuni-hagen.de
fernuni-hagen.de
In a way it was a precursor to similar material on YouTube and MOOCs - technical material freely open for all.
https://archive.org/details/m203analysis1tv8completenessintr...
Thanks for finding!!
Personally, this feels fair enough - it's not clear why this sort of education should be subsidized.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/aug/08/open-unive...
The core aim of the OU is to help build the economy & promote social mobility. One of the ways this can occur is via easy access to retraining as job sectors die (either locally or nationally). If a degree-level education is required, OU is one of the few realistic ways of acquiring that education. Substantially increasing the price of degrees closed this path off for many. Whether a person has a previous degree shouldn't really factor into an ability to retrain if necessary (and yes, successive governments since the 80s have given lip service to the need to provide for this and done nothing, allowing this was just more of the same)
Wow turns out they're astronomically expensive and even a simple bachelors takes a stupid number of years.
Also maybe it's just my field but I never see any research output from the OU either, and I don't know any academics working there at all, so I don't know what kind of standard of staff you're getting.
I'm not sure who's spending money on these things?
https://www.open.ac.uk/stem/computing-and-communications/res...
Ok - they're not Stanford, but they are a pretty respectable bunch.
The standard of academic staff is much like any other uni: we try to get the best we can.
Here's our department's publication page (i haven't updated it since March though): http://cs.ou.nl/publications.php
(Quality: three TACAS'20 papers this year... and most of our departement doesn't target that conf)
Our programmes are accredited by the same institution as other programmes of all other unis in NL. The accreditation committee was even impressed with the quality of our bachelor theses in comparison to other universities.
I definitely think there's room for improvement, but the Dutch OU is a serious university, and aims for a high quality of teachers and teaching materials.
Sure, but it’s still a BA from a real and accredited university, and there are plenty of situations in life where that’s needed, regardless of the subject. Many immigration programs will take it into account, if you want to become a teacher, access to further education or professional qualifications.
In short, I don’t think a BA in Open Studies or whatever they call it is any less useful than a BA in International Relations or any number of other non-vocational BAs.
Secondly, though, to pick up on your "I suppose one could tailor a particular Open Studies degree to be quite vocational", I think you can actually take that further. With reference to the link below, I think you could create a curriculum that was far more relevant for the roles most people do than most degrees are? I feel like I could pick out courses there that would make a university a far more useful developer than most compsci courses?
https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
If you are interested, here is a good starting point:
Edit: Changed "free" to "almost free"
"A complete bachelor's program costs between 1,600 and 2,400 euro, while a master’s program costs between 1,000 and 1,200 euro. These estimates are based on course costs of 20 euro per credit hour, plus a student body contribution of 11 euro per semester."
BTW, I never knew, but they run an efficient operation, it seems.
My Alma Mater, the University of Stuttgart, has 23k students, 5.3k staff, including 265 professors. They run on an annual budget of 536 million Euros.
(All numbers from Wikipedia)
The FernUni has 76k students (3x), 1.3k staff (1/3), including 90 professors (1/3), on an annual budget of 90 million Euros (1/6).
If you look it through the reverse lense, the ratio of professor to student is much worse than your alma mater. So one professor has to take care of much more students, exams, etc.
To me the Fernuni seems great if you want to study while having a job, during a pandemic, are just interested in the degree, are not a in-Person Person, are a Self-motivating learner or live far away from a Uni City.
The traditional Uni seems great, if you want to experience social life, are a study group kind of person, want to go into academia, like noodles for 2€ in the Mensa. Also a lot of STEM or medicine that needs access to research facilities will be easier in a traditional Uni.
Ich komm dir gleich rüber! /s
Speaking and writing German is a bit complicated but for rudimentary understanding of texts you do not need to know as many words as in English.
If you are looking for Computer Science there are many English lectures available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language
The title translated into German is "Die Schrecken der deutschen Sprache" ("The Horrors of the German Language") which is more appropriate.
There is a saying: "Hungarian... the only tongue in the world the devil respects."
(Disclaimer: I say this as a physicist, where all the German words for physics concepts are quite straightforward.)
This statement is not true. It is the case though that many if not most public German universities have costs that run in the very low thousands i.e. 1-5k for total degree costs.
However, there are some drawbacks to the way this system works. For one, you will be hard pressed to find online degree offerings or continuing studies options from public Universities (i.e. these types of low costs offerings) that allow you to continue your education while working fulltime. Most of these come from private institutions or specific programs which have higher costs typically running in the 10k+ cost range area.
Its great if you are a student graduating from high school and going to university - you won't be burdened with high costs. However, the public system largely still neglects (this lone University being the only example in all of Germany which I am aware of) many other situations where people might want to further their education.
We do have something called Volkshochschulen, which is in some ways similar to Junior Colleges in the United States and provides some level of extended studies at a public level, but anyway, I won't go into details, suffice it to say the systems don't translate one-to-one onto each other and there are cons with our system as well.
Yes indeed this is the only state run distance-learning university, but I'd argue that you only really need one such institution. After all, you can study from anywhere :). They have regional centers in many German towns, but for most courses you only need to be there for the exams at the end of the semester, so you can also study hours away from the next regional center.
And it's quite successful. By number of enrolled students, it's the largest university of Germany at 77k, with the runner up having only 56k students.
Regardless, I think initiatives like this one which in general provide more opportunites to more people to better their lives is something I would like to see more of, not just in Germany but all over the world.
The atmosphere is very different and having studied in the UK i see the merits of both: a UK university basically runs like a school with a very strong support system and 1:1 touch with academics. In Germany its really a more "mass" approach in lectures and then seminars with lower ranking staff, not the actual professors. Also less other support e.g. psychologists, tech support,.. To succeed at a German university you have to grow up ;)
Also interestingly German universities seem to be much more political places. The UK I experienced as filled with extracurricular stuff, while in Germany there's much less of that and in return a much more vibrant political and debate culture.
Volkshochschule courses are usually languages, painting, photography, cooking etc. The teachers are usually non-professionals. The course is usually about ten weeks of one or one and a half hours.
- Onboarding students directly out of secondary schools who don't yet have the academic requirements or financial ability for university, usually with intent to use this as a springboard to a cheaper university education; usually this terminates with a transfer to a university (and may or may not include an associate degree);
- Providing formal education for people interested in changing or advancing their career; usually this terminates with an associate degree;
- Providing formal but "casual" adult education, which includes the kind of courses you find at a Volkshochschule but also simply introductory tertiary courses (many of which would actually be final secondary courses outside the US) - the teachers are usually professionals but there's no expectation for the students to "use" the knowledge and auditing may be as common as taking the course for credit.
The main thing I want to point out is to avoid translating Volkshochschule as "junior college" which has an increasingly negative connotation in US English. Most decent junior colleges have expanded their programs and rebranded to full community colleges (or even universities) now and the term is mostly used for private, for-profit, vocational training.
(I should also add these terms vary a lot across English-speaking countries; I'm just referring to the US here.)
Volkshochschule is not a college but does offer yoga and knitting classes, some language classes and maybe a computing class for seniors.. nothing that would prepare you for a career
I generally agree with you but this is a little too far. At least bigger Volkshochschulen do offer non-academic qualifications, especially in the area of continuous education for those with existing qualifications.
Besides languages, this ranges from various finance and law classes for people who are starting their own business, over “Ausbildung der Ausbilder” (Train the Trainer but a formal qualification the German dual system), to certificates like CCNA.
The courses that are offered vary widely between cities, it’s difficult to generalize.
What you find is courses that are job-qualifying degrees. The VHS is really structured around taking individual, stand-alone, courses.
The one exception I can think of is that some VHS’ are offering “Hauptschulabschluss” for those who left school without graduating.
Sadly the Fernuni is in one way stuck in the past: for many (all?) courses there are mandatory presence seminars. You can do the exams at many places in Germany (e.g. Volkshochschulen) and at all embassies and Goethe institutes abroad, but for the seminars you have to still go in person it seems. Else I would long have done a Fernuni degree.
Volkshochschule are "low level" community training courses. Yet many people successfully learned Languages there. It is far below a University or a poly-technical college. It has nothing do do with a real degree.
FUN FACT: I read once a Serbian guy took a course there in Economics, had the certificate translated into Serbian and the translator translated "Volkshochschule", to "Peoples University" and became an Economics professor with this certifica in Serbia until the whole scam became public.
To give you the perspective: Basically every guy here on Hackernews could give a "Python course" there or something. for 2 hours every week for 6 months and one of the attendees would manage to become a CS professor with this.
Also I agree with foepys that you can do more in German with a smaller vocabulary. Schlag is also used in sports and music :) Plus, people like to downplay it, but most people here do speak english, so if you have difficulty, it's ok to ask in english when you're 1:1.
In Law though, nothing seems to beat the preciseness of the German language. It’s very good in expressing exactly what the relationships and rules should be. Some people love it from the “literalistic” point of view - but I just like the efficiency of the English language and the distinctive humor that a lot of english speaking authors put in their writings; so I can’t speak to that. The German language feels to me like it wasn’t made for science, engineering or fun but rather law and bureaucracy.
Just my personal two cents.
Also Western philosophy had a slightly German-language bend.
I doubt there is a substantial body of science that can be expressed much better in English. It's probably a wash, with some words and concepts easier to express in this, and some in that.
No meaningful papers in these domains are published in German...
Of course most people don't do that, because they learned the terminology in English and there's no particular reason to invent a completely parallel set of made-up terms. But if there were such a reason (e.g. if English literacy were uncommon among German computer scientists) it could be done.
Yes, you would not make up these words just for the sake of speaking in German. We are not in the 30s any longer.
But no person in its right mind would speak German with 30% of the words “borrowed from english” because “all the other advantages of the German language outweigh borrowing so many english words”.
I love how people are downvoting me in their evening frustration about their lives - but yeah, if you miss like all the relevant vocabulary in a language why would you state that communicating in it is “smart of efficient”? There is no inherent reason. English has -for many fields- the best vocabulary. The english language does not get lost in four line sentences so easily like the German language and it’s not made up of 80 character words.
Have any of you ever read a German paper or textbook on a topic? Its awful. I love english textbooks I love english papers.
Of course, today everyone publishes in English. And of course, many English words are used in German academia.
But there is no inherent property of the English language, why it is better suited to communicating topics in machine learning.
No, but I suppose you miss all the vocabulary you need to efficiently communicate about ML in German... Or why is it?
My experience is quite the opposite anyways, I often felt, English sentences lacked clarity that you could have in a German sentence
I mean, like I said for contractual arrangements etc. German is more precise.
But I never found that the “English language was not precise enough” to convey something - unless it was a choice by the author.
It’s easier to express because Englisch is _the_ lingua franca of those fields. It would have been a totally different case had some other language, say French or Mandarin had been at the forefront of scientific literature advancement and dissemination.
You miss 30% of the vocabulary, well, you won’t have a great conversation about a topic...
A friend of mine was translator into English and French, and she said that it was easier to translate into French, because there was basically one way to say it. In English, there'd be many different options (mostly vocabulary substitutions, but not only), with slightly different connotations.
A pertinent aphorism I've come across (anyone know the source?):
"English is among the easiest languages to speak badly, but one of the most difficult to speak well."
I’d buy the english original book on any topic 100% of the time instead of a german alternative or its translation.
Ask any german university student in computer science or engineering or business - 9/10 prefer english textbooks.
I would love to see how you tackled the Adjektivdeklinations issue in German. For me that has been an achilles' heel, and there's simply no easy way around it.
I found the material of good quality, and the tutorials/lectures I attended were fantastic. I did, admittedly, feel that the level of support could've been greater, but for a predominantly distance learning education that's par for the course, IMO.
The debt is indeed a bummer! Still, their fees are lower than most other UK universities right now, and my study landed me my current DevOps position, so I'm very happy.
While I didn't personally feel like I needed support, there were others in my tutor groups that did, and it was apparent that the level of input from tutors varied wildly - I recall one that offered weekly 1-on-1s for anyone that wanted, and another that took days or even weeks to respond to any query whatsoever.
My wife is now studying at the OU, and her more contemporary opinion echos everything I said above.
I studied at a university that regularly ranks top three in the world, and felt exactly the same way...
I considered it for my studies, since my area's universities were pretty far away. They're as strict as the regular Spanish universities and you'll get the same degree.
Also, depending on the faculty, UNED books can be pretty bad (and expensive), although I heard this changed lately.
From what I gather from people in other countries, they also require you to study and to be competent, but it is extremely rare to find teachers and professors with ridiculous standards that you often find in Spain. So, If you have the opportunity, save yourself the pain. You'll still learn, be respected and it will be easier.
They even had an electrical engineering program, one of my colleagues got a Master there, but they shut it down a few years ago. I suppose the lab work was too difficult to support.
On the other hand I heard from a friend, who is very introverted, that he liked studying at the distance learning university quite a lot. So it looks like it depends what kind of person you are.
I found Hagen much better, they had really good scripts.
One of the reasons why I haven't bothered to get my degree is due to the cost. I'm not interested in one for obtaining jobs, but mainly situations that have a hard requirement for a degree (ex: obtaining a work visa).
I'm not familiar with the differences in degrees between countries, but assuming a person is already competent in German, I don't see the downsides (barring that "obtaining a first job" mention earlier, I'm sure employers wouldn't like it) to this path versus a degree from the USA.
Networking with your average person in a state or random private college is the same as networking with someone you meet at a Meetup.
Now it’s true the further down the prestige chain you go the less it matters, but saying that networking via meetups Birmingham is equivalent to the network you’d get via having gone to U. Alabama or Auburn seems unlikely.
The first is the real killer. You can't use financial aid. You could maybe use a private loan, but I am not aware of anyone giving those out for foreign schooling.
Also most fees are payed on a half-year Basis, Students have Access to cheap housing. For example the city I live in (Leipzig) has yearly Uni fees of ~500 EUR, monthly lodging for ~300 EUR. Assuming you work weekends, you can easily earn ~800 EUR per month which gives you enough wiggle room to eat at the Uni canteen (price per meal 2-5 EUR, heavily subsidized by the state). In the study breaks you are able to work more.
Edit: University Leipzig lists [0] the following costs of living on "average" per month:
231 EUR lodging; 140 EUR food; 50 EUR clothing, cosmetics;
45 EUR ISP, mobile, netflix; 50 EUR partying; 35 EUR misc;
30 EUR books & materials; 40 EUR for fees and local transport
=> 621 EUR month
[0]: https://www.leipzig-studieren.de/studium-organisieren/was-ko...
Also, students from most countries are not allowed to work more than 120 full (8-hour) days per year: https://www.daad.de/en/study-and-research-in-germany/first-s...
If you can find a job that pays significantly more than minimum wage, that's not going to be much of an issue, but otherwise you might have to control your spending very carefully.
Fun fact, in my last working student job before graduation I earned more net during the brake per month than in my first full time job in the first 6 months. Of course, being full time counts towards retirement and a couple of other things working students are not eligible for. But still.
In my case I do know enough to transfer into a program but as I haven't completed a degree there seems to be no way to get those credits recognized.
Also interesting that you are not able to self-employ as a foreign student. This is how I worked most of the time while studying.
Anyhow, spending money carefully is kinda implied with the numbers above. But we were mostly discussing money spent compared to the US, here is an example. Let's assume you want a BSc in Computer Science. According to [0] tuition alone is around ~25k USD for an affordable Uni in the US, while 870 EUR monthly expenses [1] TOTAL * 36 months around = 37930 USD for a BSc. And this is comparing a rather low tuition with average total cost of living in Germany.
[0]: https://www.geteducated.com/online-college-ratings-and-ranki...
[1]: https://www.unicum.de/de/studentenleben/geld-finanzen/lebens...
They have also several other niches. E.g patent lawyers are getting trained there after their STEM degrees.
AMA
I have been toying with the idea of doing some kind of maths or comp sci degree for a while now. It would have to be part time / remote because I'm not willing to stop working. The only suitable thing I've come across is Georgia Tech's online masters.
I considered the Open University but their CS courses look poor and it has become too expensive for something that would be a hobby.
However, I'm not really sure what FernUni would offer over just buying OU books on Amazon and working through them.
A very active Moodle instance, graded homework and access to a tutor.
If you're in Germany: regular homework discussions with a tutor at your local regional center.
Not to be underestimated: a whole cohort of other people that are going through the exact same material and exact same homework at the same time.
Also, some external "motivation". "I need to submit my homework tomorrow" is much more urgent than "I originally planned to read chapter 3".
Also, your nickname makes me nostalgic. ;)
It's cheap, I like doing it, and if I'm like most who never make it to graduation, who cares? It's still fun and valuable (to me).
I'm somewhat less convinced about the CS credit I did (as a minor), some of it seems hopelessly outdated.
AMA
Took me 4h a day for 2-3 weeks per test.
I don't really do anything fulltime. But yes, I work besides my studies.
The good thing is, every test gives you 10ECTS, so even when studying fulltime, you only have to do 3 per semester.
Did everyting besides my thesis, just can't find a topic/time.
If I completed Masters from this university and apply for Canadian PR, would I be getting extra CRS points for completing Masters from this University?
Thanks beforehand for taking interest in my questions
"The University of Hagen is a member of the European University Association (EUA), European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) and it is accredited by ACQUIN, FIBAA (Foundation for International Business Administration Accreditation) as well as AQAS (Agentur für Qualitätssicherung durch Akkreditierung von Studiengängen)."
I guess if Canada recognizes any European university, it will recognize this one. Hagen is only different because of its remote learning approach, legally it's exactly the same as any other German university.
Edit:
They want 2300€ per semester.
Hagen wants 11€ plus 100€ per course you take, and fulltime is 3 courses per semester.