Serendipity35

Some thoughts after reading "What Georgia Tech’s Online Degree in Computer Science Means for Low-Cost Programs" on the Chronicle website (subscription required to read)

You may remember reading here or elsewhere back in January 2013 that Georgia State University started to review MOOCs for credit in the same way that it reviewed courses or exams students have taken at other institutions for credit. It was the heyday of MOOC madness.

Georgia Tech announced an online master’s program in computer science that grew from the MOOC movement and would be offered at a much lower price than students pay for a traditional degree. They started at the end of 2013 by pairing MOOC-like course videos and assessments with a support system of course assistants who work directly with students.

On the university website, they describe the program like this:

The Georgia Institute of Technology, Udacity and AT&T have teamed up to offer the first accredited Master of Science in Computer Science that students can earn exclusively through the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) delivery format and for a fraction of the cost of traditional, on-campus programs.

This collaboration—informally dubbed "OMS CS" to account for the new delivery method—brings together leaders in education, MOOCs and industry to apply the disruptive power of massively open online teaching to widen the pipeline of high-quality, educated talent needed in computer science fields.

The key here is not just to actually offer an online degree that is as rigorous as the on-campus version equivalent. That is something that a number of universities have accomplished in the past decades. The innovation is to offer that degree at a bargain price. The Georgia State degree costs less than $7,000 for the three-year program.

As the article points out, they don't have a graduating class yet, but researchers (at Georgia Tech and Harvard University) have been studying the students. What interested me the most was a demographic comparison.

• online program got as many applications as traditional program


• online acceptance rate of 50%; traditional 15%


• average age of people enrolled is 35 years old; traditional 24
  


• as with many online programs, they are more likely to report that they are working rather than being full time students


• 80% from the USA; in the traditional program, 75% percent are foreign, mostly from India and China


• 40% have studied computer science as an undergrad; 62% of traditional grad students majored in computer science.


• last year's first group of students had a 3.58 GPA—about the same as the traditional students


• in the 2014 spring and summer semesters, the pass rates of about 88 percent


• mostly male - 14% female online and 25% female in traditional
  

Is the low-cost version hurting the traditional program? According to the article, "For Georgia Tech, the early data are encouraging enough. They suggest that it can offer an online computer-science master’s program without cannibalizing its more-expensive campus version."