This university launched an online MBA program early on, and built it out with a bunch of other offerings as well. We were genuinely ahead of the curve on a bunch of things, but we were also pretty separated from the rest of the university, physically and culturally. We had our own building removed from campus, and we did things a little differently. Not quite Silicon Valley agile, but comparatively. Meanwhile, the rest of the campus was adamantly against online learning, for years.

I think a big part of this is that we had an older faculty and institutional culture that was pretty set in its ways: they didn't see or recognize the value that the internet afforded their classrooms, and weren't set up to implement them. That's begun to change a bit as we got younger faculty, but there's still a tendency towards in-person learning, because of the tradition and training behind it.

I don't think this is necessarily malevolent on their part: they just haven't thought deeply about it. Plus, there's a lot of infrastructure that you'd have to build out to provide online learning: there are a lot of logistical obstacles in the way. You need to select a CMS, hire course developers, train reluctant faculty and staff, figure out how to make it accessible and ADA-compliant, design courses that make sense for online learning, then market to students who are willing to go up online to take their classes.

Those are a lot of hurtles to overcome for an institution, and it requires a lot of willpower and political wrangling within the institution in order to make sure it gets done. As a result... it just doesn't. I think it'll change with time, but it's like turning an aircraft carrier: you can't do it overnight.

I have thought semi-deeply about teaching online. I do believe it can be done well, but only with a lot of effort, and (at least in my department) I don't think it would save the university money, if done well.

Personally, I'm not terribly eager to invest this effort. I've had a poor experience with our university's training, and also I just like interacting with people in person better. Maybe I'm just being selfish, but there are a lot of other things I can do to benefit my university and my students, which I'd enjoy more, and I'd rather invest my efforts there.

That said, I do think that universities who are willing to hire faculty for remote work could develop fantastic online programs. There are tons of dual-career academic couples that don't get jobs in the same city, and try and make some crazy commuter marriage work. Hire them.

IMO universities these days are mainly in the real estate business. The maintenance on a building with multiple 1k person lecture halls isn't cheap. Faculty are underpaid. And yet it's more and more expensive.

What I'm saying is there is no obvious reason why a university costs more to run today than 1990,but tuition has gone up far more than inflation.

However the ability change more doesn't force it. Administration could presumably keep prices down instead of - here I have no idea what they are spending it on.

This lack of knowledge means that I cannot comment more. My opinion on using the money to pay more teachers thus reducing class size is very different from my opinion on private jets to some exotic vacation. (I don't think either of the above are the case but I could be wrong)

Why is that the targeted benefit? I would think the main thing to gain from online courses is the ability to disseminate knowledge and learning to a broader swath of students.

If universities have to be closed for the next 6 months, And is this could happen again next year, online learning will be their only source of revenue

It seems that some people are hoping that the COVID-19 outbreak will get a lot of universities, and individual professors, excited about the long-term potential of teaching online. I don't expect this to happen -- although I could of course be proven wrong.

The is very, very hard to do.

Look at how many BA students wash out at respectable institutions. At least 50%.

It required more than classes. It requires mentoring, encouraging, and shaping students to a degree that’s hard to do online.

Graduate degrees are different. They take in people who have already graduated, and who are more adapted.

Not many Ph. D students throw keggers five times a week.

And say what you will about whether or not a college degree is "important", everyone I've ever met[1] who has one has some key skills that not everyone has; the ability to work on a project over time, some ability to research a question, and the ability to work on "uninteresting" things to get to the "interesting" things.

Getting a masters degree is about processing information, organizing it into something you can use, and then demonstrating your skill at that by applying to to a problem of your choosing. These programs can "assume" you've got the basic skills already and work from there.

[1] And being a nerd is biased toward BS degrees rather than BA degrees but the trend seems consistent to me.

Around 70% of students who graduate high school are going to collage. That’s a huge swath of people who are dealing with a huge range of issues.

Interesting. I saw the opposite; people who are struggling don't always have the time, energy, or skills to build relationships with potential mentors.

University is a filtering mechanism as much anything. Our culture no longer has any formalized rite of passage the way indigenous cultures have. Getting through university, especially in tough programs such as math, hard sciences, or engineering, is the only rite of passage we have left. Even the days when someone could graduate high school and immediately get a factory job that pays well enough to support a family are gone.

Not really true. Anyone who wants a more traditional “rite of passage” to adulthood can join the military at 18 and go to boot camp.

Yeah, doing 4 in the Army is so inferior to that.

Government is us, it does great good and some bad, but ultimately it is civilization. If you want to change it go vote and get involved, but don't complain about the people trying to make the world better in their own way.

If you look at the average freshman class, well over 50% have some medical condition.

Sorry if that’s nitpicky, but a really large number of young people just don’t qualify.

Also, the military isn’t really in the right of passage business anymore.

In person colleges have stronger social bonds - for better or worse.

For example, some colleges are reinventing fraternities and sororities to encourage people to develop healthy habits.

Of course some frats are carrying on as they were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University

Only a small minority of degrees have modules that can be studied this way. You need to show some evidence that you’re capable of study at this level. For my Finance Master’s[2] a MicroMaster’s in International Law from UCLouvainX[3] sufficed. It’s also difficult to get the Master’s in the minimum two years this way because they won’t let you transfer from studying individual modules to doing the Master’s without your exam grades having been released and being satisfactory, though it is possible to do it in two years if you start with the first session of the year.

[1] https://london.ac.uk/courses/international_type_of_study/15/...

[2] https://www.cefims.ac.uk/programmes/economic-policy/masters/

[3] https://www.edx.org/micromasters/louvainx-international-law

It’s a well respected institution and it’s graduates are well regarded by employers.

The Open University satisfies the requirements for US visas, so it can check some checkboxes. The cost may be higher for people outside the UK, but I haven't looked recently.

It’s legitimate, source: I know someone who did it and is working as a webdev in PDX.

You think you'll do an online degree in your spare time and it turns out it's a decade of work and costs thousands of dollars.

120 credits = full time studies, 40 hours per week. So 30 is 10 hours, 60 credits is 20 hours.

This is of course an estimate. Some weeks you have assignments due as well as course material to study. There's a two week break for Christmas and usually one week around Easter and that's it.

If you work full time and you're doing 60 credits that'll take you 6 years working 60 hour weeks, maybe more, assuming your job is just 40.

I did an FOIA request. After 11 years of study (11 picked because I wanted to confirm a comment on the guardian), of those students who have ever indicated formally they want to obtain a bachelors, around 15% have actually done so.

If the student has self declared a mental health disability the figure drops to 9%.

Last academic year 55% of students passed their modules across all modules. This excludes students who opted to defer or refund within the grace period at the start of the module.

Cost wise these days on UK or EU fees it's about £3k for a 60 credit module.

Personally if I knew what I knew now, I'd go back to full time education.

Edit to say: the course is flexible in the sense study timed are not fixed and nobody cares if you turn up to tutorials, often done online, or not.

It is not at all flexible on deadlines of any kind. On a 60 credit module you could easily have one assignment per month, plus an exam at the end. The assignments, depending on your level, aren't necessarily that challenging but they do take time.

If something comes up at work or in life and knocks you back, you either accept the damage to your grade and complete the module or you defer. Definitely don't go via the OU if you have a demanding job with unpredictable requirements.

At the time, I thought it wasn't particularly hard - I had it in my head that bricks and mortar universities were somehow more challenging and rigorous. Having recently completed a master's at a campus university, my feelings about the OU at the time were without basis. By comparison, the master's was easier, less challenging and less valuable.

Looking back on my OU experience, I can appreciate how enriching it was. The course materials and syllabi are fantastic and are often used by other universities. Associate lecturers can be hit and miss. Fellow students tend to be engaged - because they _want_ to do the courses - and often make for a supportive and thoughtful community; I actually found it to be far less isolating than the campus experience of my master's.

I was fortunate to have undertaken my degree prior to tuition fees increases, but I would still recommend them. Compared to other UK universities, the fees were still relatively low, last time I looked.

Of that, there are probably 4x 30 credit classes in first year, 2x60 in each of second and third year. For a degree in a specific subject, these are all going to be “in major”.

My read of it is that it’s a more focused, less all around degree than what I remember of an undergrad degree, where I had 4-5 classes 2x per year for 4 years. I can’t speak to the technical level, as she’s doing languages, which are all Greek to me.

https://asuonline.asu.edu/online-degree-programs/undergradua...

The stigma for attending one of these schools is terrible. Not undeserved, as they are predatory and for profit. But so are community colleges, in maybe different ways, but for the same reasons.

I keep it on my resume even though I work in IT. I’m personally proud of it as an accomplishment despite the crap I catch whenever it’s brought up.

I think this is, perhaps, to be expected. 4-year universities practice selective admissions, whereas community colleges generally let anyone enroll. Community colleges make opportunities available to all, including some who find they aren't well prepared for them.

> the equipment was only adequate.

Tuition is much cheaper than at 4-year universities. This is inevitable.

> The quality of curriculum and teaching was typically poor

Mind you this was 10+ years ago. Maybe things have changed.

As for the textbooks, I'm curious what you observed? I'm unaware of any university profiting in this manner. I am extremely aware of textbook publishers profiteering, as well as the occasional individual professor-author who shamelessly convinces the rest of their department to adopt whatever book they wrote.

But the most likely reason that the book changed, in my estimation, is that individual faculty members are often given leeway to choose their own textbooks. This has some negative consequences, but in my opinion it's a good system overall.

And, incidentally, if you want the best deals -- then I'd recommend that you neither buy your books from the school, nor sell them back to the school.

I'm not from the USA, but UoP is notorious.

Emphasis not in original.

Could not recommend this school enough.

Disclaimer: I do not work for WGU or any of these affiliates. This comes across as a bit like an advertisement. I really do think it's been amazing for her.

Just like the "B&M" classes I took previously, some classes are great, some less so, some hard, some less so. Anyone who thinks a school like WGU is "less good" probably has not actually experienced it and / or has a reason to protect the status quo. A student does have to self direct more in online programs, for a fact. But with that comes much more flexibility and scheduling freedom. And the price, at least for WGU, can't be beat.

I second and can vouch for this one. I completed my B.S in 3.5 yrs with WGU, and it was one of the best decisions I made. Competency based (don't need to waste 3 months doing a course I already know about), and flat-fee (2.8k a 6mo term). It is very affordable and if you're self-sufficient, WGU is a great option. Really flexible and good curriculum if you're self-motivated.

Then after a while I started contemplating going to grad school, more of a nice to have for personal development reasons.

But I couldn’t without a completed undergrad. So a little over 2 years ago I enrolled in WGU and now I have 3 classes to go.

Out of curiosity are what is your major? WGU undergrad degrees dknt seem like they would qualify you. Many CS Masters I've seen require 2 or 3 courses of calculus where the WGU C.S. bachelors looks like it only has 1 course.

Now take a Master’s program. Most people are done with college and are working full time. If you seriously want their business, you better offer them every flexibility in the world. It’s a whole different game.

One group is literally groomed to hand you money, often not even their own. The latter is a group that is no longer part of that setup and will make an independent decision based on a variety of factors.

I'd say online doesn't work for all programs or courses. But do you need to sit in a room with 1k people in order to learn calc 1? It's just the prof going through some examples on the powerpoint/overhead nothing more. Asking questions isn't easy either.

Upload some lecture videos and then hold office hours instead of lecture hours. It's not like what you taught in psyc 100 last semester is much different than this.

What university is that? It sounds awful.

> But do you need to sit in a room with 1k people in order to learn calc 1? It's just the prof going through some examples on the powerpoint/overhead nothing more. Asking questions isn't easy either.

> Upload some lecture videos and then hold office hours instead of lecture hours. It's not like what you taught in psyc 100 last semester is much different than this.

That's only kinda true of 100-level courses and massively popular generals, and quickly becomes false the farther you advance.

And even if it is a 100-level general, you can still ask questions if you're motivated and curious. When I was considering a career change, I retook general chemistry and a few other lower-level science courses as an adult. I asked a lot of questions, though many were picking at things that were too advanced for the course. You can't do that with a recording.

Rather not say, but a few do that. Plus in something like CS there's an hour long wait for office hours which are 2 hours twice a week with maybe 3 profs - so 6 hours for 500+ students - not much opportunity to ask questions.

> That's only kinda true of 100-level courses and massively popular generals, and quickly becomes false the farther you advance.

Absolutely. Get rid of the 1k lecture theatres for the undergrad courses and build some labs. Get some 3D printers/CNC machines for the Engineering students. A mock court room for the Law department? Some chemistry labs? Move the "I don't need to be here to learn" courses online and expand office hours, TA availability and provide more hands on experience.

Ya, I wouldn't want to see a doctor who learned online. But one how took some calc or basic med courses online but has more hands on/practical experience? Sure!

I have learned literally more than 99% of my knowledgefrom strangers on the internet and ad hoc conversations on irc and reddit.

Not everyone indulges in "ad hoc conversations and events with professors". Some maybe, but most people just get by with minimal work.

I've done both for a very long time. There used to be value in going to the computer lab and spending hours and hours working through problems with peers and seniors.

But that doesn't happen anymore. I've learned just as much in slack chatrooms with fellow students at Georgia Tech, if not more.

If you want to learn, you'll learn. If you don't, you won't -- no matter what the environment is.

Events and conversations might offer superficial exposure to new ideas or areas of interest but actual understanding requires extended, focused thought that nobody else can do for you.

But yeah, I guess it depends on a lot of factors; I just can see more benefit from msc/phd physically with peers and profs while bsc is more imaginable as online course. For my feeling at least.

I self studied for a long time, topical, learned online mostly. You can do this, and can be very successful.

The point of academic environments is much like that of an office over remote work. One of the pros is the cross pollination of ideas across expertise barriers. This is where innovation happens, faster and more frequently.

I don't know why this pattern makes my blood boil, but it does.

A bachelor’s degree is valuable to the student and to society as a transformative period of time when someone can study a wide range of topics, especially topics that focus on large-scale world ethics, and integrate the moral and social maturity imparted by it via social networking within and across universities.

The particular domain knowledge or training in eg math or computer science, pre-med, sociology or psychology, music, education, etc., are not very valuable. Employers don’t really care about any of that, apart from virtue signaling to weed out mass candidate pipelines. The actual knowledge itself is just table stakes and pretty worthless; companies will have to train you to do jobs that have effectively zero to do with acquired skills like programming. But general well-rounded cultural appreciation of a base foundation puts everyone into a level playing field to be fit for plugging in as an employee: basic understanding of how to work in groups on projects, managing interpersonal relationships even when you don’t like them, having a common standard of collegiality and “how things are done,” common understanding of academic/liberal social norms.

While possible, there has not been created an online bachelor’s program that successfully replicates anything like this yet. They all focus on skill building and curriculum, as if that was any part of the purpose of college.

Master’s degrees are quite different. They are a pure credential kind of thing, a certificate of advanced training. It’s assumed you already have the social norm education and that’s not the goal. The hard skills of the training still don’t actually matter to anyone in master’s degrees (nor even PhDs), but they can be used for clout or authority or stack ranking in terms of how decision-making ranks are established. This is much more amenable to online courses because all that matters is the certificate at the end, nobody cares how you got it. With bachelor’s degrees they actually do care that you physically attended “intellectual workforce finishing school” at a physical campus, because the social norm / behavioral training is the only part anyone cares about.

a counterexample would be the existence of respected schools with a large amount of commuter students, many of whom continue to live with their parents while going to school. I graduated from such a place. if you really wanted (in cs at least), you could only show up in class for exams and still get an A if you did all the homeworks and projects. this school is one of the most heavily targeted in the state for tech recruiting.

> In addition, I know that a massive number of people who take online courses (just the individual ones from Coursera and the like) tend to drop out, so maybe they colleges think that if they had an entire 4yr degree online almost no one would actually graduate (which may hurt their rankings or they dislike for some other reason that doesn't bother for profit colleges).

this is a bit more convincing. online schools already have a stigma since the originals were almost (or actually) scams. probably no one want to take the risk of offering the first online degree.

This is one of those statistics that (I think) misses the context. In college, you complete courses for credit which generally requires sitting through the whole thing.

On Coursera and the like, you typically take the course because there's something in there you want to learn. A particular learner may only be interested in a piece of the overall course and so ignore the parts they're not interested in while focusing on those they are. The engagement paradigm is different on every level from traditional courses, so I don't think it's meaningful to talk about "drop out" rates in that context.

Where it may be more meaningful is to look at drop out rates of students who have paid to take the course for a certificate. In that case, they have signaled intent to complete the course, so talking about a drop out rate becomes meaningful.

"From my understanding Bachelor degrees are much more regulated (in Australia anyway). Private Colleges can offer Grad Cert and Grad Dip and Master degrees but not Bachelor degrees, which make me think the government has highly regulated Bachelor degrees. I think that there must be a certain percentage of face to face, practical subjects, mentoring and industry placements, but I imagine in the current environment that this will be all up for discussion."

https://study.csu.edu.au/courses/technology-computing-maths/...

You have to sit exams in person at the end of each semester. There are exam centres all around the world https://exams.csu.edu.au/dist_students/centrelist.php?intern...

https://www.coursera.org/degrees/bachelor-of-science-compute...

I began this year teaching both as in-person classes. When restrictions from COVID-19 the bootcamp quickly responded and converted all of it's classes online with relative ease. It already offers these classes online with great success and the content has converted into the virtual world _very_ well. Students are completing their work just fine.

The university on the other hand was somewhat slow to respond. The faculty I work for reacted much faster and jumped into virtual classes asap. Even then, the content just isn't designed for online classes. I don't have the tools to properly communicate or provide help. The students don't have the etiquette for it or the motivation.

The cohorts are quite different too - mature students vs. high school graduates - so I guess the compared experiences are muddled by that also.

Overall, I've found the university just hasn't invested in its content. Not to say the program content isn't valuable - I completed it myself years ago. The educators there don't have the drive/need/want to create content that works virtually. They're comfortable where they are, and to be fair, I honestly think in-person teaching can be more effective. However, you can get damn close - virtually - if you can write good content.

I think this echoes other comments here. It's hard and they don't have the resources to get everyone on-board with making online-capable content.

The implication I read from this is that online degrees are not taken as seriously. And the fact is there's a lot you get from school beyond the lectures; the interactions with other students and with faculty and just being out of your usual zone all make a big difference.

It's also a lot of work I imagine to get on a platform like Coursera's, and while it's the only one I've really found useful (I've tried a few for a class here or there) I still didn't like it much.

Note: my gf used to work there which is why I tried one course on their platform and why I even know about this at all. Which is another sign that online degrees are still considered marginal.

I would think online only programs would have a hard time competing with universities for people that can design and execute effective courses. There are so few that most universities don’t even employ many of them. Why would someone like that work for an online school when they could work for one that would give them tenure, funding, lab space, grad students, etc?

Generally speaking, universities don't care much about teaching ability. Hiring decisions are based almost entirely on research profiles (except where the institution itself has a clear focus on teaching over research, as at e.g. some liberal arts colleges). There are two main reasons for this. First, research brings more money and prestige. Second, student satisfaction has little to do with teaching quality. You can make students happy just by giving them a light workload and good grades.

So in fact, there are lots of people who are good at teaching who universities have no interest in hiring.

Well, someone like that would love to not have to waste time lecturing. By not being on campus they could go to more conferences and spend more time in the field. They could recruit ideal grad students from anywhere on earth without worrying about immigration restrictions or family ties.

What does a reputable university have to lose by offering equivalent degrees online? Quite a bit actually

To you point about "career training", I don't see college as a vocational school. The best point of college in my opinion is to learn not only a lot of facts and specialize in an area of study, but more importantly, to learn how to think and solve problems.

If you learn a lot of facts and rely solely on the facts that you've learned, then obviously you won't adapt well to the real world where most of the problems you encounter are situations with imperfect information and no clear best solutions. However, if you choose your college degree wisely and learn how to learn, then you'll be able to tackle most challenges that come your way later on in life, both in your job and outside.

The only way I see a credible one existing is if people focus on just coursework for one area of study, each of these being a startup, and then later on down the line, consolidation through mergers and acquisitions starts to produce a multidisciplinary program.

The only other path I see is a credible meatspace bachelor program moving entirely online.

I suspect the idea of a bachelors program will die before any of this happens. The increasing focus on indoctrination in higher education is destroying the credibility of the humanities departments. I'd personally be more interested in hiring someone that spent two years doing a focused engineering degree than someone that spent 4 years pursuing a bachelor degree that contains 2 years of engineering and 2 years of indoctrination and brainwashing.

Another established and well-regarded institution is the University of London International Programme (https://london.ac.uk). The courses are relatively low cost, but rely a lot on self-discipline.

[1] https://www.cefims.ac.uk/programmes/economic-policy/masters/

In contrast, a typical middle of the road University might only see 60% to 75% of its original freshmen class students graduate in 6 to 8 years. 40% in 4 years is common. So, a majority of undergrads do not, for one reason or another, stay on the recommended track for graduation.

A big part of this is supper resources: many\most schos are under staffed in academic support services. Now consider, in that context, an online course: it is even more the case that such students are further removed from the support structure provided by the college.

Finally, there simply isn't strong demand: most students are looking for the traditional undergrad experience, which is at least as much a social environment as a learning one. You don't get that online. Contrast that to post grads looking for a Masters, which tend to be a group much more focused on the nuts and bolts of completing their program.

Source: I work in Higher ed analytics, focussing quite a bit on success factors in persistence and completion rates.

For masters work and above I suspect this concern is less prominent because it’s likely to be a smaller student pool (easier to police per student), doing higher level work (harder to cheat successfully), and to be less accessible to would-be cheaters (due to filtering at the bachelors level).

One way to open up this market to innovation would be to try to get the laws changed about accreditation. Make it so it's much easier to objectively prove that the institution is providing ongoing value to its students, and receive accredited status without significant involvement by people who are not incentivized to encourage innovation.

People might be involved in the process, but rather than making subjective judgements about whether the program is good enough, make the measures objective. Then the person involved is really just checking boxes. If they refuse to check the boxes despite evidence, there should be an appeal process with civil damages for any clearly unnecessary delays caused.

The Bachelors is the period where students go from being taught in High School to learning on their own. It probably is harder to implement effectively online than the Masters.

I took my sweet time because, alongside my studies, I've maintained full time employment in industry (first as an SE and recently moving into cloud architecture). I share this to highlight that, although I've been in it for the long haul, the quality of the education (e. g., course design, instructor engagement, CMS quality, etc.) has kept me thoroughly rapt along the journey.

[1] https://www.worldcampus.psu.edu/

The WGU (wgu.edu) mentioned elsewhere here is also probably very good.

(Of course right now with the virus we are trying to do as many regular meetings online at the scheduled class times as possible and I feel it is more similar to face to face teaching.)

For young people universities decide their cohort for life. This determines success.

Like you say, masters online is more common, cohort's by a masters are often already decided.

Fully accredited by the KGI so also has some legitimacy.