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[dspurlockjr]

My bachelor's degree is from a traditional school.  I have two master's degrees - one from a bricks-and-mortar and one from an accredited online school.  I would say the quality of the instruction was similar between them.  In the online world I have had great and not-so-great faculty.  In the bricks-and-mortar world I had the same thing.

I am now ABD from an online PhD program.  I have no regrets.  I have gained skills in writing, research, and collaboration.  I fully know I have not had the typical PhD experience in my field, but this works perfectly for me because I never want to work in some of the places that worship a traditional PhD.  I have published in the peer-reviewed literature, worked successfully with colleagues from traditional schools, and have an agenda for scholarship.

To sum it all up, I think it is largely what you do while in school and then with your degree after graduation that matters most.  What good is a PhD from Large Public Research University if you never do research after graduating, don't stay current in your field, don't write, and just treat your academic position like a job?

[gesualdo]

... I think that, in general, a degree from an on-line program that is housed at a good-quality bricks-and-mortar university has a good reputation.  The purely on-line universities are merely money-making machines and don't care much for the quality...

I think this argument really sums things up for me.  Although I can't be sure if I agree with your blanket assessment of purely online universities (and I might very well do so), I suspect that is the type of institution most people think of when referring to online degrees.  Because a degree from, say, the University of Texas generally looks good no matter how you earned it.

[johnbear]

The purely on-line universities are merely money-making machines and don't care much for the quality...

Well, not always. Some of the best (my opinion, of course) and most popular purely (or almost purely) on-line universities are non-profit, even state- or other government-run institutions. A few examples: Thomas Edison State College, the University of South Africa, Charter Oak State College, Open University, Excelsior College, Athabasca University.

[he_famktg]

And although I never mentioned the online nature of my degree in my resume, it did sometimes come up in my cover letters and nearly always in my interviews.  Being able to navigate the online world is a necessity and my responses to questions demonstrated that my "online" degree was an asset, not a liability.

Exactly! My resume lists my degree, the college, the city and state, and year. Very few make the connection that my employment doesn't list that I lived in Washington State (where the college is located from which I graduated) during that same time frame. I have even had one interviewer ask me how I liked Washington and was surprised when I clarified that I have never lived there. I usually mention it in interviews and list the characteristics necessary to complete a degree online - self-discipline and motivation, commitment (completing my degree while working fulltime with a child), resourcefulness, etc. I don't hide it, but I don't cry from the rooftops about it either. Over half of my courses were in brick/mortar settings. But I had to finish it online. I've taken traditional classes, online classes with active weekly discussions, distance ed classes where it's all given to you at one time and you have 10 weeks to send it back, and I've taken (my favorite) accelerated 5 week brick/mortar classes. The active weekly participation online was adequate, although not as engaging as the in-person classes. I think you learn a little bit more from the teachers when you are in a classroom, but if that is not an option, then online is the next best thing!

[mabeelrc]

Would you choose to go to a neurosurgeon who got his or her degree on-line?

[zharkov]

Would you choose to go to a neurosurgeon who got his or her degree on-line?

Would you trust a physicist who got his doctorate in a non-residential program, all the while keeping his "day job" as a patent examiner?

[mabeelrc]

"Would you trust a physicist who got his doctorate in a non-residential program, all the while keeping his "day job" as a patent examiner?"


Trust him to do what?


The only problems I have with on-line courses and on-line degree programs (whether those courses/programs are offered by for-profit, state, or elite private institutions) are:

1)  Nobody--I repeat NOBODY--knows for certain who is doing the work or who is taking the exam.  Nobody knows who might be in the room with the student helping with the exercise or exam.  There is just no way to tell.

2)  Anybody can buy a proctor.

[twofish]

"Would you trust a physicist who got his doctorate in a non-residential program, all the while keeping his "day job" as a patent examiner?"

Trust him to do what?

Invent special relativity.  He's referring to Einstein.

1)  Nobody--I repeat NOBODY--knows for certain who is doing the work or who is taking the exam.  Nobody knows who might be in the room with the student helping with the exercise or exam.  There is just no way to tell.

If you have multiple choice exams that are machine graded this is true.  If you have an interactive discussion then this isn't, and the more advanced the degree it is, the harder it is to fake.  If I have a one-to-one or one-to-few mentoring relationship with a student, then it's very hard for the student to fake something.

For example, I see that the student is online and I suddenly asked him over IM

Ask me an original question about the delayed deflagration model in type I supernova.

If the student knows anything about the subject, he or she should be able to have an intelligent conversation about this.

Frankly, if the student can answer the question on the evaluation by searching google, then its a bad evaluation.

2)  Anybody can buy a proctor.

But again it's the evaluation method.  I e-mail the student, five papers on recent research and astrophysics, and the test question, is

"tell me what you think about them"

The answer that the student gives should be totally unique to that student, and ideally I should know the student well enough to recognize the unique way that they approach the problem.  If the student is getting the answer from someone else, that should be pretty obvious in the conservation.  Also, in responding to the question, the student should be perfectly able to get the opinions of other people, but I'll be grilling them to see if they can formulate their own original view of things.

Again, if they can get the answer off google, they should be able to use that answer, and if the evaluation lets them do that, it's a bad evaluation.  Reguritation of facts is "low value knowledge".  What is high value knowledge is the ability to summarize, to argue, and to create original knowledge.

[twofish]

Would you choose to go to a neurosurgeon who got his or her degree on-line?

It's not either/or.  Pure online programs don't work too well for medicine, but there are a lot of online problems (particularly in nursing) where most of the instruction is online while the nurse is continuing to work at their job.  Also, a lot of continuing education for medicine is increasingly online.  I'd have reservations about going to see a neurosurgeon that *wasn't* constantly online looking at the latest developments in his field.

Personally, the major overhaul I'd like to see in undergraduate science education would be to get the student out of the lecture hall and into the lab, and then have the practical experience of the lab be supplemented by online instruction.  The major goal of science instruction should be to increase the amount and quality of teacher-student contact, and moving things online gets rid of a lot of logistical barriers to doing that.  In astrophysics, a lot of the data is remote gathered and could be put on the internet.

This is a lot of what I'm trying to get done on wikiversity (user Roadrunner).

[twofish]

The nice thing about the internet is that I think it is going to force people to think pretty deeply about educational issues that people have taken for granted.  When people think about education they tend to think in terms of classes, grades, tests, and degrees, and I don't think that this may be the most useful set of concepts going forward. 

The current university is set up as an "educational factory" and I question if thinking of education as an industrial. mechanized process (which is the dominant paradigm right now) is useful in a post-industrial global economy.
 

[kaysixteen]

Let's face it-- these programs ARE cash cows for unis, and many of the fields they are commonplace in have enough students getting degrees via traditional bricks-and-mortar programs anyhow.  These fields do not need hordes of additional and perhaps semi-qualified on-line grads further glutting the marketplace.

[zharkov]

Let's face it-- these programs ARE cash cows for unis, and many of the fields they are commonplace in have enough students getting degrees via traditional bricks-and-mortar programs anyhow.  These fields do not need hordes of additional and perhaps semi-qualified on-line grads further glutting the marketplace.

I wonder what glut you are referring to.....

I've taught online business and MBA courses, and there is a decent demand for people with BSBA and MBA degrees.  In my state, the board of ed would be pretty reluctant to approve a program where there was a glut, but I've seen them encourage private colleges to offer more distance learning options as a way to reach the underserved rural population.

[gesualdo]

...I've taught online business and MBA courses, and there is a decent demand for people with BSBA and MBA degrees.  In my state, the board of ed would be pretty reluctant to approve a program where there was a glut, but I've seen them encourage private colleges to offer more distance learning options as a way to reach the underserved rural population.

It's amazing how useful these programs can be for rural students.  So many people from my childhood hometown have no desire to leave, they cannot leave, but they would like to raise their standard of living.  Likewise, because the town is 80 miles from the nearest university, driving to and from classes every day would be a hardship - impossible for those with jobs and/or children.  And another factor for consideration is the school system itself - being so far from a city of any size, attracting and retaining qualified teachers is difficult, even with a higher-than-average beginning salary.  By providing online teacher education to locals in rural areas, the school distict insures that teachers will be available to work in their district and will not leave for "greener pastures."  This saves them from having to run an expensive mass hiring every year.  In this case, I think the employers have a real reason to applaud online degrees, not merely to tolerate them.

Of course, there is one issue that is as yet unresolved - the courses are being offered, but many rural students cannot take advantage of them because, believe it or not, some places (mostly rural) still don't have adequate internet service.  In fact, some have no access at all.  Maybe these same universities should be petitioning lawmakers and communications companies to build more infrastructure in those areas so more people could avail themselves of the opportunities these schools are providing.

[johnbear]

Would you choose to go to a neurosurgeon who got his or her degree on-line?

We may have the opportunity to find out. I wonder what's become of this project the Chronicle reported on in 2002) (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i10/10a03202.htm)

"Colleges in 16 Countries Work to Create a Virtual Medical School
Led by Scotland's University of Dundee, an international group of medical schools is trying to create the world's first online medical school. More than 50 institutions in 16 countries have helped plan the International Virtual Medical School, which its organizers plan to open in the summer of 2004.... The virtual school would allow students around the world to pursue a medical education through a combination of computer-based learning and clinical experience in local health facilities."

Participants included Johns Hopkins and Edinburgh, among other big names.

[twofish]

Let's face it-- these programs ARE cash cows for unis, and many of the fields they are commonplace in have enough students getting degrees via traditional bricks-and-mortar programs anyhow.  These fields do not need hordes of additional and perhaps semi-qualified on-line grads further glutting the marketplace.

One basic principle that I believe is that educating people is a good thing, even if it doesn't seem like it in the short run.  Someone living in the 1200's who could read might be shocked at the idea of teaching everyone to read since it might seem obvious that if everyone could read, that they would be less wealthy, but it doesn't work at that way.

If the economic and social systems of the world can't handle too many educated people, well then, we just have to change the economic and social systems of the world.