About 2.5 years ago I wrote about a talk by Charles Isbell, one of my grad school classmates who is now at Georgia Tech, describing an online Master’s in Computer Science program. Today’s New York Times has a story on the same subject. Could it be that a crack in the edifice of high-priced higher education is developing? I wonder if people will look back 50 years from now and say that it was Georgia Tech that brought everything down.
6 thoughts on “Georgia Tech online Master’s in Computer Science”
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Education is changing dramatically. But isn’t it accurate to say that MIT has gone further and earlier in pushing content out? (I guess they stopped short of a degree).
Tim: Throwing text and video “over the wall” (virtually) of a university is only loosely related to coming up with a practical way for a student to earn a degree (with supervision, assistance, and evaluation). MIT did the easy stuff of taking content that was already mostly available in digital form and putting it onto a web server.
Everyone offers online CS degrees, nowadays. They’re horribly implemented, adhering to the traditional lecture format. They provide recorded lectures from a single course given years ago yet charge the same amount as if they gave the lectures every year. The materials from the past course are provided 1 week at a time. They could provide all the materials for the past course at once & let students work at their own pace. All the content is available from better sources for free, so you end up skipping the lecture videos you paid for & watching the foremost expert’s lecture on youtube. The only value is saying you passed a test given by a certain university. Helas, evolution will be slow as long as H-Rod keeps blasting money at higher priced education.
The best paper text book on any subject is the way to go in my experience. Do all the exercises and check your answers.
I don’t know why the College Board doesn’t start expanding out tests to very specific subject matter at a professional level. Can Do Linear Algebra, Gets Algorithm Analysis, Understands Lexers/Parsers/Generators. Let’s say that’s three tests that cost $120 each, conducted at a site as with the GRE et al.
What is the point of many undergrad and masters level degrees when the relevant hard technical skills can easily and cheaply be assessed by test?
It looks to me that Trump is deliberately picking small contractors that are unlikely to sue. Here is another story:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/28/i-sold-trump-100000-worth-of-pianos-then-he-stiffed-me/
Is it illegal? No. Is it scummy? Yes.
The biggest benefit to my attending a top engg school was interacting with other high-performance people. Going from a top student in a very mediocre high-school to a mediocre student in a top university challenged me and pushed me in ways that an online school never could. I had to adopt much better habits and develop a much stronger work ethic to end in up the top third of a class where pretty much everyone was an actual genius.