bachelor degrees, on the other hand, seem to be pretty desolate. There are a handful of well known, decent schools that offer online bachelor degrees, but majority seem to require existing credit or offer non-sense sounding degrees in favor of normal ones (i.e. I've seen schools offer degrees in Professional Studies, Organization studies or Interdisciplinary Studies vs. Computer Science or Physics). Occasionally, you can find a legitimate looking CS degree from a legitimate school, but the programs still seem be below what you would get in-person.
I imagine there has to be a number of uneducated, working people who want to achieve more, or who's career progression many be held back because they don't have that credential, but the only schools advertising to them are the for profits, who charge exorbitant amounts for what seem like below average programs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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://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?
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.
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.
(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.
Most Universities want the high price/high value programs to remain on campus and don’t want to undercut themselves by putting them online.