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Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

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Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#41

Post by learc83 »

User23 wrote: post #34
bonoboTP wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the end, you shouldn't need a degree if you have the skills. A university degree has multiple purposes. As a student, you want to learn stuff and network with fellow students and get a paper. As an employer, you see that the applicant has work ethic, knows the cultural norms, can obey orders, can interact with people in the field etc. And also that they have a fundamental knowledge of the field. However, a unive…

> It's much less feasible to self-teach computer science and math and so on. A university program will force you to do it even when it's not pleasurable. I'd wager that computing science autodidacts find study pleasurable for it's own sake. Advanced graduate and post-graduate work notwithstanding, the most advanced math you need to master CS fundamentals (and then some) is the predicate calculus and some analysis. Th…

It's possible to complete the equivalent of a decent CS degree on your own, but I've very rarely seen it in practice. For the vast majority of people the fastest and easiest way to acquire the equivalent knowledge and skills is to complete a 4 year CS degree.

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#42

Post by sweezyjeezy »

hogFeast wrote: post #29
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 14k more expensive for a normal degree for UK and EU students. It's cheaper for overseas students (normal price £33k), which presumably who this is aimed at.

You can do this MSc elsewhere for way less than £14k. Is that place Imperial? No. Is that a name brand uni that someone from HR will know? No. But there are lots of good engineering-focused schools in the UK that are known within industry and that charge closer to £7k (and you don't have to live in London). EDIT: just saw is £28k over two years, the absolute most expensive courses in the UK are £28k over ONE year. Th…

I'm not sure I understand - why is 28k over two years worse than over one year? That's cheaper per year.

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#43

Post by iso1824 »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #36
iso1824 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Undergraduate tuition fees are over £9k a year (it was zero when I went to university 20 years ago). That's wrong. In 2000 the fees that the UK student had to pay was £1000 a year (£1700 in today's currency), and the government paid about £3000 - a total of £4000, or £6800 in today's money. Students had to pay this upfront to study. In 2006 these upfront fees were dropped.

Student fees were introduced september 1998, or just over 21 years ago Technically they're wrong but it's a very minor change to their point

Not really, they were still £4000, its just that the government paid the full amount rather than 75% (20 years ago)

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#44

Post by learc83 »

nicoburns wrote: post #35
gmac wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're effectively claiming that university teaches nothing, but good degrees teach independence, critical thinking (analysis, synthesis), research skills, writing, teamworking, presentation skills, and much more. Added to that, your final grade indicates ability x effort. This is significantly more useful than a narrow measure of ability alone.

> good degrees teach independence, critical thinking (analysis, synthesis), research skills, writing, teamworking, presentation skills, and much more. Sadly there aren't a lot of those. Most degrees teach regurgitating what a textbook says in a fancy way that means you pass the "I understood it" test.

My middle of the road state school CS program was nothing like that. I can remember exactly 1 CS class where memorizing the text book was remotely useful.

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#45

Post by bonoboTP »

User23 wrote: post #34
bonoboTP wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the end, you shouldn't need a degree if you have the skills. A university degree has multiple purposes. As a student, you want to learn stuff and network with fellow students and get a paper. As an employer, you see that the applicant has work ethic, knows the cultural norms, can obey orders, can interact with people in the field etc. And also that they have a fundamental knowledge of the field. However, a unive…

> It's much less feasible to self-teach computer science and math and so on. A university program will force you to do it even when it's not pleasurable. I'd wager that computing science autodidacts find study pleasurable for it's own sake. Advanced graduate and post-graduate work notwithstanding, the most advanced math you need to master CS fundamentals (and then some) is the predicate calculus and some analysis. Th…

Out of 100 people who call themselves autodidact CS people, how many are like the ones you describe, who spend years to work their way through CS theory books to the extent that would be required by passing exams with good grades?

Let's ignore for the moment whether it's even needed, whether devs will just code stuff that doesn't need much math anyway etc. as that's a different topic. I want to focus on whether autodidacts get the same level of CS knowledge as university graduates (with good grades).

My CS education did have a lot of difficult math that I enjoyed but in a running-a-marathon way, not in an eat-a-piece-of-cake way. Having regular lectures, homework and topics given to you by experts in a logical order is very important for many people like myself, so they have no gaps and get a well-rounded overview of CS fundamentals. Designing your own curriculum is often how you end up being a crank as well (e.g. see "autodidact physicists").

And it's not just calculus and analysis, but also graph theory, complexity theory, abstract algebra, linear algebra, complex numbers, formal languages and automata, information theory, theory of compression and encryption algorithms, signal processing like Fourier theory, control theory, optimization and machine learning, and various other things you learn here and there, such as Petri nets, quaternions etc.

And also, outside of extraordinary life circumstances, why not get admitted to a university anyway, if you're so enthusiastic about all this theory stuff that you'd learn it to good-grade level just by your own motivation anyway? For example in Germany, university is free and if you prefer you can even skip all the lectures if you don't think they give you value and just take the exams, while studying in your preferred autodidactic fashion.

My default assumption, unless convinced otherwise by evidence, is that self-taught devs can put together functioning code and have familiarity with CS terminology but only a vague folk understanding of the details.

Most people who argue that university is superfluous are usually those who could not pass the exams due to a lack of interest and/or talent (or live in a country with tuition fees they cannot afford, such as the US).

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#47

Post by bonoboTP »

gazelle21 wrote: post #16
bonoboTP wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important quote from the FAQ: > Will my diploma state that I was in an online programme? > No, your diploma will not state that this is an online degree. Personally, I find this practice quite questionable and deceptive.

Why?

Because they purposefully hide a major aspect of the nature of that education in fear that revealing it would make it seem of lesser value.

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#48

Post by gumby »

zerr wrote: post #11

One thing to note - if you're interested only in pedigree - nobody gives a sh*t about Coursera, Udacity, edX or similar "online" labeled stuff.

You can get degrees not just from ICL but UofI and other legit organizations via Coursera. Essentially they are using the Coursera platform the way Uber runs on AWS. The diploma doesn’t say anything about his and you may have taken some or all of your courses online.

This is different from audacity etc where the courses are essentially from udacity.

I only learned this bc my gf worked for Coursera: I don’t know if that’s because they have some deliberate marketing strategy or just because I didn’t pay attention. As she doesn’t work there any more, I can say it makes me uncomfortable. But to be honest: in the long run why should the online experience inherently be worse?

It could be just chauvinism on my part but I feel my university education could not have been as good had it not been F2F

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#49

Post by soneil »

theriddlr wrote: post #9
blakesterz wrote: post #6

That's about $36,000 US. Honest question... is that crazy expensive? How does it compare to other online and on campus programs? I'm guessing it's HIGH?

That's the same as international student fees. UK/EU fees are about half that. Salaries in Europe are lower too. £ 28k is around the median household income in the UK or graduate-level salary outside of London. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...

> That's the same as international student fees.

I'd assume that's who it's aimed at - GCN/SEA. All of the prestige for all of the cost, with zero the movement.

Re: Imperial College London charge £28,000 for their online MSc degree on Coursera

#50

Post by hogFeast »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #42
hogFeast wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do this MSc elsewhere for way less than £14k. Is that place Imperial? No. Is that a name brand uni that someone from HR will know? No. But there are lots of good engineering-focused schools in the UK that are known within industry and that charge closer to £7k (and you don't have to live in London). EDIT: just saw is £28k over two years, the absolute most expensive courses in the UK are £28k over ONE year. Th…

I'm not sure I understand - why is 28k over two years worse than over one year? That's cheaper per year.

Yep, the point as said in the original comment is that this kind of degree is usually 7k/year. 28k is the absolute max.
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