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Ask HN: Best accredited online education?

2 points by pc86 ↗ HN
What is the best online education that ends in a certificate or degree? This obviously excludes Udemy and similar sources - I'm referring only to accredited institutions that give online learners something that can go on their resume that employers outside of Silicon Valley would respect (or at least acknowledge).

Some institutions that come to mind are the University of London[0], University of Waterloo[1] and University of Illinois[2], although I'm sure there are others.

[0] http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/ [1] http://de.uwaterloo.ca/programs.htm [2] http://www.online.uillinois.edu/default.asp

9 comments

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plant42
The university of Liverpool has a number of decent online programmes in cooperation with laureate international. I'm currently on the MSc Web sciences & Big Data programme.

http://www.university-liverpool-online.com/

pc86
This looks very interesting. Are you a UK resident?
davismwfl
In the U.S. there is a school http://www.wgu.edu/ that is accredited and is DOD and government approved for financial aid and reimbursement. I recently interviewed a couple of grads out of their B.S. in Software Development degree program and they were on-par with most public university students in the US. A little weaker in a few areas, but prepared to do real day to day work. Both candidates I interviewed came out with Microsoft certifications too, can't remember what they were but both said it was part of the program. I looked up the school because I hadn't heard of a B.S. degree in Software Development.
dragonwriter
WGU, as I understand their model, provides certification of competency and information on recommended educational resources to help develop the competencies they certify, but doesn't actually provide education in the traditional sense.
pc86
Yes, I've read a little about them in my earlier research on this topic and it seems they are mostly (if not entirely) self-guided in terms of the actual education.
nickdude
I'm a current graduate student at WGU. From my experience, most courses are well laid out with syllabus, required reading, exercises/papers/tests to judge competency of the subject matter, some classes have video lectures others are based solely on the readings and exercises.

It is self guided in that you can go at your own pace and like a traditional brick and mortar institute, you can put in as much work as you deem necessary to pass a class.

My view is that I'm getting my degree for a reason, so I'd rather walk away with something more concrete than the diploma. I actually really enjoy the structure (or lack thereof) as I struggled quite a bit during my undergrad at a traditional school with the slow pace of most classes.

pc86
Why the seeming random downvotes in this thread regarding WGU?
FlyingLawnmower
Georgia Tech, a top 5-10 Computer science school offers an online masters degree in computer science. Unfortunately there isn't an equivalent for an undergraduate program yet.