I remember when MIT first started publishing their lectures online. I would watch them for my chemistry and physics classes and was astounded by the fact that the lectures were basically identical. Ivy league schools had this mystique around them and I always wondered what it would be like to be there instead of a community college. Turns out, the difference is absolutely not in the lectures or tests. At least, for freshman-level courses.
I think we are slowly getting here though. The number of credible online degree programs has exploded in recent years. Online education used to be like online dating: only something losers would do. But now it seems to moving towards the default way of doing business.
I had a similar experience about 8 years ago in Intro to Linear Algebra. I had been attending lectures at my school but I ended up missing a day so I decided to find the corresponding lecture from MIT. It turns out, I was able to watch a lecture from the author of the textbook we were using. Even crazier, the lecture I watched online ended with him working through an example problem but he did not finish.
When I went to the next class in person, our professor was finishing up the exact same example problem from the lecture video. It could have just been coincidence that that exact lecture lined up the way it did, but it kind of opened my eyes to how silly it was to have professors repeating the same thing year after year.
Agreed, I also found this to be the case for my CS degree. When I realised that some courses were essentially facsimiles of courses I could take on a MOOC, I changed the way I chose my courses. Why take a copy-pasted course, when I could just take it online for free from the original source? I ended up doing a lot more project-based courses after that.
The difference is the other students. For most, your peer group is what motivates you. A peer group which values excellence in X will motivate you to become excellent in X.
The peer group in the ivy leagues have been strongly pre-selected to value achievement in academic related pursuits.
Not really. There is an online MS in Computers Science from Georgia Tech, that's really well regarded and will cost you approximately $8,000 for the whole degree.
A lot of materials science is highly experimental, so it's not super easy to teach advanced skills. I went to a top 10 materials science school for my PhD, and the absolute vast majority of what I learnt was self-taught. However there is a caveat - I self-learnt by doing, and failing multiple times. The advantage of a high ranked school is that the research facilities are top notch and professors bring in external grants, so the research facilities are always maintained at a high standard through overhead costs.
There is also a lot of value in the conversations you have with other students and faculty something that is really hard to reproduce remotely. It's also something where quality matters, I suspect.
"Online education used to be like online dating: only something losers would do. But now it seems to moving towards the default way of doing business."
As a self-taught developer and proud of it, I like this quote. A lot. It's easy to let yourself fall into a toxic mindset where you (and many employers) unjustifiably feel inferior because you didn't take the traditional 4-year college route.
But in less than a decade, hearing of couples who met on Tinder has gone from a novelty to the norm, reminding us of how quickly societal paradigm shifts can happen (for the better, imo).
Only fools with zero foresight ever said anything like that. These days I would think less of a person paying $20,000 tuition per year over the person who did all the same work online for free.
I think we are slowly getting here though. The number of credible online degree programs has exploded in recent years. Online education used to be like online dating: only something losers would do. But now it seems to moving towards the default way of doing business.