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

Regional vs. National Accreditation – There’s a Huge Difference https://www.edsmart.org/regional-vs-national-accreditation/

I've graduated from this university with a bachelor's in Computer Science last year. Overall I had a good experience. I found the curriculum to be on a weaker side. I was interested in various things about computers when I was young, so it felt like I knew half of the material. While studying, I was working at the company part-time. At the normal study pace, you should be ready to put up to 30 hours per week when taking 2 courses. In reality, it took me half of that time. Usually 10 hours per week. Some people with whom I've studied had a full-time job. I guess its a tradeoff. You have a less rigorous curriculum but you then have more time to pursue other interests. Closer to the end of the studies I quickly found a full-time job in a good company locally.

The tuition-free part is more of a marketing. At the end of the day, it cost me $4,060 for the whole degree which is quite reasonable.

Speaking of employment and red flags, from LinkedIn I know that those who had studied at UoPeople work for many big companies including FAANG. No problem here.

1. Yes, absolutely. I love learning. I dislike that courses are only 8 weeks long because I would like to dig deeper into the material than that timeframe allows. However, I definitely feel the time is well spent.

2. I am less concerned about the credential. I already have a bachelor's degree and some graduate school. Thus, it's not likely to give me any extra weight, and I don't plan to pursue jobs with it. However, some of my colleague who've moved on have found it both helpful and valuable in that regard.

I will note that the school is nationally accredited, so this can be quite limiting (e.g., grad school options are very limit, transferring credit is limited, etc.). So, this is a consideration that must be taken. However, I'm happy with the return on my investment (knowledge) so far.

3. Real, college credit which can be transferred. While it has limits in that regard, I am not aware of any colleges that will accept MOOCs for transfer unless they were explicitly designed to be credit granted (e.g., some of edX's stuff or maybe some Coursera's new stuff).

That said, I would argue that UoPeople is really "self-teaching" like you would with MOOCs. While the school implements a form of "peer learning," I find it to be poorly done and not very helpful. I do meet some others who are genuinely interested in the topics, but most students are just interested in getting through the courses.

And, ugh, I loathe peer assessment. While it's not the only form of assessment which takes place, it's the most obnoxious part of the school. It's worse when you peers don't understand basic things like how files and directories work.

This part term I was told by a peer, in the discussion forum, that my post was "wrong." (It wasn't.) And the student told me to read so-and-so's post to see why. The student subsequently marked me down. (Fortunately, it had minimal impact. So I didn't bother appealing it.)

I couldn't really give any advice for your son. If he can handle academic work on his own fairly well, then it might work for him. However, some students struggle with online learning and there's not a lot of support structures in place at the school yet.

So this seems like a good time to ask, does anyone have experience with University of London's online degree and how US employers feel about it? I've been eyeing it for a couple years now and was wondering if anyone either has experience directly with this program, or at least can speak more to how US employer's feel about degrees from overseas.

https://london.ac.uk/sites/default/files/prospectuses/comput...

https://www.coursera.org/degrees/bachelor-of-science-compute...

Sadly, yes. College Algebra, Stats, Calculus (one-term), and Discrete Mathematics are all the math requirements.

I plan to do my math elsewhere.