uopeoplestudent

Algorithms is a separate course.

https://my.uopeople.edu/mod/book/view.php?id=45606&chapterid...

Note that this syllabus is somewhat out of date. The second textbook link is a bad link. I can't find any material on the (unofficial) CS Discord about updates to the course.

The school is accredited by the DEAC which is recognized by the US DoE. It's national accreditation which is less prestigious and not always "accepted" by regional accredited schools.

https://ope.ed.gov/dapip/#/institution-profile/233675

The Master's in education is recognized by International Baccalaureate (IB) which is a well regarded program. I'm not sure of the exact relationship as the program is new. (It just started this year.) However, it likely wouldn't be accepted by the various state education bodies for teaching licensing. (This is a guess based on my past experience in education.)

Sadly, yes. College Algebra, Stats, Calculus (one-term), and Discrete Mathematics are all the math requirements.

I plan to do my math elsewhere.

Yep. And this is absolutely a concern those considering the school should take seriously!

That said, the school started the process for WASC accreditation. They announced it about a month or two ago. Thus, those who start now and take 4 years to do a bachelor's may end up with a regionally accredited degree instead of national.

1. Yes, absolutely. I love learning. I dislike that courses are only 8 weeks long because I would like to dig deeper into the material than that timeframe allows. However, I definitely feel the time is well spent.

2. I am less concerned about the credential. I already have a bachelor's degree and some graduate school. Thus, it's not likely to give me any extra weight, and I don't plan to pursue jobs with it. However, some of my colleague who've moved on have found it both helpful and valuable in that regard.

I will note that the school is nationally accredited, so this can be quite limiting (e.g., grad school options are very limit, transferring credit is limited, etc.). So, this is a consideration that must be taken. However, I'm happy with the return on my investment (knowledge) so far.

3. Real, college credit which can be transferred. While it has limits in that regard, I am not aware of any colleges that will accept MOOCs for transfer unless they were explicitly designed to be credit granted (e.g., some of edX's stuff or maybe some Coursera's new stuff).

That said, I would argue that UoPeople is really "self-teaching" like you would with MOOCs. While the school implements a form of "peer learning," I find it to be poorly done and not very helpful. I do meet some others who are genuinely interested in the topics, but most students are just interested in getting through the courses.

And, ugh, I loathe peer assessment. While it's not the only form of assessment which takes place, it's the most obnoxious part of the school. It's worse when you peers don't understand basic things like how files and directories work.

This part term I was told by a peer, in the discussion forum, that my post was "wrong." (It wasn't.) And the student told me to read so-and-so's post to see why. The student subsequently marked me down. (Fortunately, it had minimal impact. So I didn't bother appealing it.)

I couldn't really give any advice for your son. If he can handle academic work on his own fairly well, then it might work for him. However, some students struggle with online learning and there's not a lot of support structures in place at the school yet.

Some people do it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WGU/comments/g7h1qz/bscs_87_credits...

Speaking on your comment about plagiarism, my second term there was a student who submitted their Java homework in a Word document. It contained two screenshots. The first was of the NetBeans IDE. The second was of their browser opened to a Github page that contained the answer to the assignment. They'd un-destructively cropped the second using Word. They made it look like it was typed into NetBeans. I was able to track down the original source.

I've attended several schools online at both the undergrad and graduate level including a for-profit school. I don't find much different between them because they've all followed an asynchronous approach.

However, UoPeople is different in that it's much, much less instructor led. They use a "peer learning" pedagogical approach. It's something I quite dislike about the school. I consider it to be poorly implemented and leads to problems like "revenge grading." However, I tolerate it because it allows me to study in a structured environment for less than I'd pay at my local community college.

It's not something I would recommend for weak learners and/or for many who need a regionally accredited degree.

> The new institution, learning I had been attending U of the P, promptly told me that U of the P credits would not transfer. Universal transferability in question, I opted out.

Yes, many schools will not accept coursework from nationally accredited universities. This includes coursework from UoPeople. You will not be able to apply for many graduate schools as well. A degree from UoPeople definitely comes with limits, and I wish the school was a little more forward about that. (There are lots of discussions about this on the internal social network.)

See my addendum. Didn't mean to miss it. Just answering several people at once.

Aside from being a student, I have no other affiliation with the school.

Tuition-free, not completely free. There is a require one-time app fee and exam fee for each course.

Shai Reshef is the person who started.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kH-uYwt0qs

It's non-profit. Not sure who "owns" it. It started in 2009.

Edit: Addendum. I'm not sure they need marketing. When I started last year (Sep 2019), they had ~20k students. They've added another 10k over the course of the academic year. I believe they were at 5k students in 2016.

I'm actually concerned about the sustainability with this growth, but we'll see how this ride goes.

It's true. The current "catch" is that the school is nationally accredited. This means you can encounter some issue getting your degree recognized (e.g., some grad schools in the US will not consider nationally accredited degrees, some schools only accept their credits on a case-by-case basis, and so on).

However, if you know that going into it, you know the primary shortcoming. (Fortunately, I have a regionally accredited degree already, so I didn't care about that.)

I'll just add that many UoPeople students in the US transfer to WGU to complete their bachelor's degree. (WGU is regionally accredited, so it carried more weight. And it accepts UoPeople credits.)

Regional accreditation is the "gold standard" in the US. National accreditation is consider below that. However, the school is accredited by the DEAC which is recognized by the US Department of Education. (Some have tried to claim the school is unaccredited, but that is false.)

As a US based student, it wasn't too difficulty. It's comparative to any other school in the US. For students outside the US and particularly outside English speaking countries, it can be more involved.

Yes. In fact, I believe most of the students are international students. In my last course, I had students from Nigeria, Italy, Germany, the US, Vietnam, and China.

Modest to "it depends." I'd place it on par with a local community college for myself. However, I think it depends more on the student.

The instructors act more as moderators rather than instructors. There are no lectures, and they have limited interaction (e.g., a few posts in the forums and responses to our weekly learning journals). Thus, it's hard to really take advantage of their knowledge.

Instructor are also volunteers. I've read that they're paid a small honorarium, but I've been unable to find supporting evidence in any school documentation. (Granted, I haven't looked hard.)

You will primarily teach yourself through course materials. The materials can vary from excellent to awful. Thus, it can be a challenge sometimes. (Fortunately, I've been to grad school [education field] in the past, so it's not much of an issue for me.)

The school talks about "peer learning," but it is poorly integrated. It mainly amounts to peer assessments and required discussion forum posts. So, as you might guess, the quality of the latter varies wildly.

There are definitely quite a few students who struggle, and there's not a lot of support structure built into the school yet. (It's still young. ~10 years old.)

The CS curriculum is fairly standard (e.g., operating systems, programming, algorithms, data structures, etc.).

Current student in the CS program. Feel free to ask questions.

Not yet. They started the process a few months ago.

The only required fees are an application fee and an exam fee per course. There are fees to transfer courses in, and many courses require a proctor. You can opt to have a professional in your community or use the online service ProctorU for a fee charged by that service.