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University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

uopeople.edu

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Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#221

Post by cosmodisk »

themodelplumber wrote: post #40
dart600 wrote: post #33

Hi. I attended this school and then got accepted to another more standard institution, which I applied at the same time to. The new institution, learning I had been attending U of the P, promptly told me that U of the P credits would not transfer. Universal transferability in question, I opted out. I did enjoy meeting people from all walks of life, all over the world. However, I also saw a grossly wide range of educa…

> could not grasp the idea of plagiarism being unethical I remember experiencing this at a private religious university. At the time, my hyper-religious mind was blown to see students outright cheating in the Testing Center. Since then I've been exposed to additional perspectives on plagiarism. It is an extremely deep and nuanced topic. A few years out of school, I ended up mentoring and then teaching college student…

People are extremely good at justifying their own actions in any shape and form. Reminds me ex's mother,who was a hard core church goer and was undeclaring profits from her company. When asked why would she do such thing,her excuse was that the taxes are way too high( the country was within top 20 countries in the world when it comes to taxes). Another thing is that usually these things don't happen all at once but rather gradually. The same is observable in companies,where corruption start from tiny things and evolve over time.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#222

Post by hatmatrix »

non-entity wrote: post #18
aspenmayer wrote: post #5

The first question I always ask of these weird online universities is, are they regionally accredited? National accreditation is not really a high bar and isn’t considered competitive; all legitimate institutions of higher learning should qualify for and receive regional accreditation from an appropriate authority before considering such study in one’s best interest. This online learning site is eligible for regional…

> Not saying this is a scam, but it feels like a scam. Not directly related to your specific concern, but every attempt to make a open / democratized degree has felt like that to me, unfortunately. Example: There was an online degree program I saw that awarded a real, regionally accredited degree from a state university. The degree and course work were exactly the same, but the online program was basically open. No a…

In principle, this could work if the school maintained high standards and allowed everyone to attempt to pass their courses + eventually attain the degree. Having an online platform without limitations (or with less limitations) in instructor resources allows legitimate programs to pursue this model.

To my knowledge, the difference with for-profit schools is that you are essentially guaranteed a degree by enrolling and paying the tuition and fees. If the for-profit institution actually had a good reputation, I can imagine they could also implement more restrictive policies. But the way academia works, a large part of prestige comes with history - and this makes it nearly impossible for new schools to break into this echelon of elites. I suspect it's also for the same reason that for-profit schools are not able to consistently attract talent in terms of instruction, since the ones who can would prefer to be employed by more prestigious institutions.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#223

Post by territop »

dart600 wrote: post #33

Hi. I attended this school and then got accepted to another more standard institution, which I applied at the same time to. The new institution, learning I had been attending U of the P, promptly told me that U of the P credits would not transfer. Universal transferability in question, I opted out. I did enjoy meeting people from all walks of life, all over the world. However, I also saw a grossly wide range of educa…

plagiarism was how the germans caught up on the industrial revolution. plagiarism is how china cought up to the western world. the strict argument on this is that ideas cannot be owned. no one owns an idea. ideas just float around and can be left aside or captured. that's how i think about it anyways.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#225

Post by cosmodisk »

BeetleB wrote: post #197
azinman2 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing and communication skills are absolutely necessary for career growth. The power of persuasion is directly linked to the ability to communicate your ideas well.

> Writing and communication skills are absolutely necessary for career growth. The power of persuasion is directly linked to the ability to communicate your ideas well. I've updated my original comment to reflect that I was referring to writing and not general communications in general (although I wrote it more broadly). I've seen people really value presentation skills and PPT. Persuasion on 1:1 and via presentation…

I work for a small(about 50) company. The ability to write well is absolutely huge.I've seen people being refused salary increases(indirectly),not given more important tasks,and simply struggle on daily basis when they can't put in writing what they need.I wouldn't be able to count how many times I had calls from partner level supplies telling me they can't understand what the email they received from my colleague means. It's so bad sometimes I'm honestly thinking of introducing writing test for the next hires.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#226

Post by BossingAround »

znpy wrote: post #213
BossingAround wrote: post #198

I'm taking this Uni in my free time. I am a full-time at a large IT company, and when I started, I had too much free time. I thought, I don't have a degree, I learned everything myself, let's see what the rigorous side of CS is. Well, UoPeople is both good and bad, as everything in life. On the bad side, some teachers are not only useless, but actively making your experience worse. This is mostly cultural, but teache…

Nice review, how does one takes exams at this university?

All classes have multiple graded activities. There are weekly assignments, that are peer graded. There are three graded exams throughout every term that count to the final grade. There are learning journals that I mentioned, which are teacher graded and contribute to the final grade. And then, there is one final exam, that accounts for something like 30% of the whole grade.

Most often, this final test is done online, without any supervision. For some classes (like math classes), there is an online proctor required (ProctorU, costs around 15 bucks an exam). You might have your own proctor somehow, I didn't try that.

Grading is another area that I am ambiguous about. Peer graded exercises are kind of hit or miss. Sometimes, the peer marks something as incorrect because they are incorrect. Sometimes, they mark everything as correct because, I don't know, they want to be nice or something. Sometimes, there are mistakes in the grading key that peers should use, and that's the most infuriating to me, because the teachers' attitude towards mistake in grading keys vary significantly (and they mostly correct your grade but not the grading key, so future students will hit the same thing).

Overall, the tests for CS courses were, so far, somewhat unimpressive... I've seen questions like "who created C", or "what is the output of this python code" type of questions. The tests are mostly multiple-choice. I'd prefer if the class could elect not to do tests, and do a large project instead. Maybe for more advanced CS courses, that's how they do it, but so far, I've not seen anything like that (and I started 2 years ago, though I took some breaks). It's mostly the exercises and assignments that students are graded on throughout the course where the bulk of learning happens.

For the math classes, they were much tougher, where even a multiple choice answer is not making it significantly easier. For math classes, the tests are no joke. The strange thing was that the math classes teach quite advanced concepts that require you to calculate, for example, e^x or a sum of squares, or straight out use R, and then, in the final tests, you're allowed only a four-function basic calculator. That's amazingly frustrating to me, and I ended up guessing a lot of the questions (as in, e to the power of 4 would be probably less than answer A, but more than answer C and D, so B it is).

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#227

Post by metrokoi »

myself248 wrote: post #105
pugio wrote: post #71

I took a semester of courses from UofP. It had a wonderful diversity of ages, genders, and nationalities. Interacting with those people through peer assignments was interesting, and I applaud what they're trying to do. Ultimately, however, I found the entire thing way too tedious - full of the classic "make-work" and silly hoops. The level of pedagogy was very basic. I dream of (and am actively working towards) a day…

A young lady's illustrated primer? ;)

The greatest potential benefit AI has for humans is the ability to act as a life-long personal mentor: to collect, filter, summarize, translate into a form best suited for the individual, and communicate that information. Especially as we enter into the "Post Information Age", where the amount of information becomes so large that traditional methods of management such as search engines become unusable.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#228

Post by skinnymuch »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #199
cguess wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A degree says something about the student. I completely understand why universities would not want to accept credits from school below their own qualification level. If they confer a degree to a student that student is representing the university's education quality to everyone that hires them or works with them. Spending three years at a community college and expecting the credits to transfer to a major university m…

Your example (3 years) is extreme. I could not get 15 CS credits to transfer from one private, 2nd tier US college to another (Boston university). BU refused and i took the classes again and paid for them twice. It put me in the rare position of being able to compare the quality of education at the two institutions side by side.

Hah! Don’t leave us hanging. What was your experience between the two for classes?

I took some community college programming classes in NJ and NYC. Didn’t have to repeat the ones I did. I was in awe at how weak the curriculum was in both cases. It’s not the student’s faults imo that their programming skills were lacking. The classes weren’t challenging.

Yet some of them eventually transferred to State Uni for comp sci. It really amazed me. Wonder how they fared and if that just means that specific state school is just really easy too.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#229

Post by BossingAround »

yellowapple wrote: post #204
BossingAround wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pay I believe ~60USD signing up fee and then 100USD for each class (or 200USD for each graduate class). It's tuition free, not free.

Is that $100/$200 not "tuition"? I mean, it's cheap tuition, but it seems like it's tuition nonetheless.

Well, the term "tuition" refers to a part of the overall university expense. For example, for NYU, a quick search reveals a whopping $55,018 in annual tuition. That's not the total cost, which is higher since you might be paying for room and board, administration fees, classes/credit-hours, etc.

In general, universities in Europe tend to be free, so I agree with you, 100USD per class is indeed tuition for me. But, it is not the US-centric "tuition" of the brick-and-mortar schools.

Re: University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs

#230

Post by skinnymuch »

uopeoplestudent wrote: post #141
dmix wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples of 'peer learning'? I noticed OP said that about plagiarism and I was curious how that works. The problem with all forced group work and not being able to choose the group is you get a very mixed quality of effort and talent. I'd stay away from any program that pushed that heavily.

"Peer learning" is implement primarily in two ways at UoPeople. The first is through discussion forums. We are required to post a response to a discussion prompt each week. We return to write a minimum of three responses to our peers, and we also assess their response on a scale of 0-10. The idea is that peers will touch on different aspects, extend one another's learning, and engage in further discussion. In reality…

Local community college online classes has that same mandatory writing something and responding 3 times. I really disliked it. Forcing that sort of thing with such specific requirements made it so the majority were talking without much care at all. I was the same as I don’t like the forced interaction. At least the way it was set up.
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