However, I wonder if this would devalue a degree from Georgia Tech. You'd obviously have a lot more people taking the course than you would if it wasn't an MOOC. Thoughts?
As someone who has suffered alongside you (though 6-8 years ago, when it wasn't so bad and scholarship money flowed a bit better), I feel your pain. But if I have overpaid for my education, knowing that I contributed in some small way towards the globalization/openness of post-secondary classwork was well worth the price.
I think they made a pretty smart choice starting with a CS degree. The field is notoriously full of extremely talented autodidacts, whether because the material is more amenable to that approach or because those who learn it are more capable of doing so.
In any case, the attitude towards educational background in the field of CS/software engineering is already quite liberal and accepting. So there's less of a prejudice against this program than there would be for an online MS in many other fields. Now they just have to make it work.
Despite other comments about not staking their reputation on this degree -- and I agree that the "Online" part of the title seems like a hedge -- Georgia Tech takes its reputation extremely seriously. Smart people are staking their own personal reputations and careers on this program. This is something new and it may fail, but not because there is any intent to deliver a lesser education.
The biggest impact for those who don't qualify for admission may be in advancing the legitimacy of online education, with or without a degree.
As an employer, the difference between an awarded MS and a certificate of completion in this program is not going to be that substantial to me. I'm going to interview both candidates to determine their level of knowledge and skill, and both indicators communicate the same educational background.
I expect a natural outgrowth of this sort of thing will be students providing access to his/her detailed course records as part of their resume. If I'm interested in hiring developers for machine learning applications, being able to read the code from those standardized, well-known assignments would be tremendously more useful in skill assessment than asking somebody to code FizzBuzz on the whiteboard and "riddle me this, batman: why are manhole covers round?"
The "GitHub account as resume" idea is an interesting trend, but they're not standardized and I don't have time to digest 20 unique projects in 20 different languages on 20 different frameworks to ferret out the non-boilerplate bits which may tell me something about the candidate.
While I feel like this is a step in the right direction for online education, the fact that this has the online designation plus its availability to a much, much wider audience seems like it would be a temporary setback in the eyes of employers.
> Galil and Bras both said they did not think the Udacity partnership would cannibalize its existing master’s degree program. They said the residential college experience would still appeal to students who are on a Ph.D. track, who want a full range of career services and who want visas to live in the United States while they study.
A Bachelor's would be easier to accept, but a Master's? I don't think people are ready for that yet.
This only makes sense if you consider degrees to be collector's items. Maybe the problem is not with the degree.
A masters requires a lot less courses, and you don't have to worry about general education requirements, which often involve a routine amount of writing and open-ended discussion (as opposed to a Q&A basis you'd likely find in STEM classes), or, for example, science courses that may require labs.