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I am really disappointed by my Masters program online courses because of the quality of the low cost online courses available on the web. I pay 3000 dollars a course for a professor reading slides and forced discussion. On the other side I have paid 27$ for 70 hours of very high quality content.

Professors in universities are not primarily educators. Many are contract or research focused. Teaching is their secondary job. Online courses have instructors who are designing courses and highly invested in the course quality. I think we need some pure educators in universities, otherwise they're going to get burnt when the online courses figure out accreditation.




I always thought part of the value of a degree was the people you meet, so if you're getting a degree purely through online interaction it's hard to see how the school could compete long-term.


Wow paying $10k+ to network, that's great value. I might as well go shoot myself now, because that's just idiotic. Sorry for being harsh, but that's something I couldn't disagree with more and sounds like someone coming from a very very privileged background too.


Well, I grew up probably under the federal poverty line, which tends to make undergrad cheaper, and in that sense I'm quite privileged ;)

I got a CS degree so that I could be employed, but have come to greatly appreciate the friendships that I made in school. MBAs are sometimes sold on the basis of the networking benefits, so my perception comes from that.


Yea, I hear that a lot more with MBAs and law degrees. For my CS masters I am concerned with advanced technical content.


Yeah, I hear you. The reason I brought it up is other parts of this thread are about differences between a university setting and online videos - even though I studied CS for the content, people I know from school gave me job opportunities as well.




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