Are online degrees worth it

Online degree classes comparing them to a traditional college degree

Colleges have changed a lot in the past decade and so with admissions rates decreasing steadily and applicants rates increasing more than ever with this massive influx of students trying to go to college more than any students have ever tried in the past.

Colleges are totally different than they used to be with the introduction of online classes more and more students are moving to a digital world, where they can study what they’re trying to learn from at home or a totally different country.

Then come these questions…

I’m going to evaluate the in-depth analysis of traditional college as well as online college and in between mixed colleges so we’re going to talk about the pros and the cons of all three of these options and decide which one is actually best for you so you can get the most out of your college career without compromising any cost or experience that you otherwise might have if you did not understand this.

Online? Traditional? or Mixed degree?

Now comparing online classes to traditional college so you have different options. You can go to a traditional college and take regular classes just as people have been doing for years and years or you can go to a traditional college and take a few classes and then take some online as many students already do or lastly you can take an entirely online college and receive your degree.

Join only accredited online degree programs

Before you join any of the above, you really want to consider when applying to these colleges is whether or not they’re accredited so depending on what program you’re trying to get into or what field you’re looking at you really want to consider what the accreditation needed is for that field and how important it really is so.

For example in engineering ABET is an accreditation that a lot of colleges have and it really shows that you meet certain credentials certain standards that the college needs to abide by in order to show that you learned what is you know commonly considered engineering.

So different programs will have different accreditations and a lot of times these accreditations are prerequisites in order to take some exams and get some licenses in the field. So be sure you look at that before looking at any online or traditional college options.

Are online degree program certificates as valuable as traditional campus degree certificates?

Now you may doubt does your online degree have the same weightage as traditional degree offered by numerous colleges. You may be heard some employers do not value it, but it’s not the case actually. The successful online degree holders showed a great level of time management skills and the ability to meet deadlines and determination is so high.

Not all online degrees have the same value though – a lot depends on the school you choose there are a few factors to keep in mind first you want to ensure that your online degree is from an accredited college this means an outside body like the Higher Learning Commission holds the college to certain standards of quality.

Second, the top-ranked online schools tend to be traditional brick-and-mortar colleges with an online presence versus internet-only schools. Therefore degrees from traditional colleges online degree generally carry more weight.

Third look at a college legacy – does it have a long history of serving students? is it respected known by local employers? is it nationally recognized and finally it also makes a difference whether a school is for-profit or nonprofit?, generally non-profit degrees are more respected by employers. However, getting online degrees from well-known universities like Stanford is better than some tiny college that you haven’t heard of.

Choose your online degree program wisely. You want a school that’s accredited, respected, and has a track record of student success.

So if they know Stanford, for example, is something that is very difficult to get through the program, and people that have done it have already proven that they have the skills required.

Now if you acquired the skills from an online course the employer might not know that just from looking at that so it’s to read on paper and in that sense, the certificates are not quite equivalent to a degree.

You need to show your skill, and the projects you worked on with your acquired skill sets.

So then this brings up the next question of why would it be worth it to actually go in college and learn on a traditional campus when I could sit at home and learn from Stanford and Harvard professors for way less money.

Is it worth it to do an online degree at big colleges or is it better to just do the actual campus learning?

Now of course if you’re going to Stanford while you might be learning from better professors there is a lot more to it that you carry the name with you on your resume that people look at and say alright you got through one of the hardest obstacle courses as far as colleges go, therefore you must be a very intelligent person.

Another thing is all the connections you make on campus, connections are extremely important on campus and you won’t be making that online as much. So if you’re making on campus connections at Stanford for example or Harvard you’re meeting people that are going to be the future CEOs and millionaires of America and all over the world.

So, what are the pros of online degree programs?

Online degrees are cheap

Why would you even consider online degree classes if you could do a class in on campus, so really the main benefits here, of course, the first one is cost.

It is much cheaper to do online degree classes for several different reasons.

No need to commute to college

Now, first of all, it is a lot cheaper to not have to commute to not have to live on campus and walking across it every day you can wake up every single morning and simply do your work in your bed or on your desk or anyplace you want it.

You can essentially live anywhere you want and learn or work remotely so theoretically you could live with your parents if you wanted to and you know pay almost no rent or whatever.

You could live with a friend you could live in a cheaper location in the United States or you can move to a totally different country where it is way less expensive to live and so with all that being said it is ultimately less expensive to do online classes now.

You will be paying less per credit

Another thing is if you’re doing the MOOC (massive open online courses) you actually will be paying less per credit than you would an actual college class so that is enough way that people save a lot of money.

Learn online degree at your own pace

If you want to go and take online degree classes, you can blow through the whole class in weeks rather than sitting through 12-20 weeks of a course that might be a great option. So you don’t waste your time sitting there and learning way slower and getting distracted and just wasting your time.

There is an advantage if you learn a little bit more slowly. If you want more time to review study material and just kind of slow progress through the course at your own pace.

Online degree courses come with the ability to take these classes at any time you want, so you can schedule more or less at any given time. You can also work on these classes at midnight, late at night, in the early morning, anytime you want and that allows you to then go and get a job.

Therefore, if you have a side job or a full-time job a lot of people like you do online classes because they can do other things if you have kids at home or if you have no family to tend to or anything like that this is a very convenient way to do that.

So, what are the cons of online degree programs?

Prone to cheating

One of the problems with online colleges is that know it’s very easy to cheat. They give you online exams and yes you have to scan your desk and you have to sit there and they record you but that doesn’t mean you can’t cheat there’s so many easy ways so many loopholes around that to cheat now.

If that’s attractive to you and you want to cheat I don’t condone that. I don’t think that’s a good idea because you’re really wasting your time then to get a certificate that’s not really worth it. If you cheated the entire way and as soon as you get hired somebody’s going to know that you cheated through it when they give you a real task and you can’t do it.

So whats the point in cheating any way? You think about it before you do.

You need to be discipline yourself

Now with that being said it’s also very difficult to discipline yourself that much that you do the online learning every single day without having to go to college classes with your friends or without having any kind of attendance or anything like that. So it’s easy to forget things and sort of just fall behind with these classes so along with those two things another reason that it is probably better to go to an actual college campus is for the extracurricular options the activities you can do after school and the programs offered on campus.

You’re gonna have different resume building workshops, you’d have different career connections, where people will come in and talk you’ll get to see you know free concerts, you’ll meet lots of friends and all kinds of things like that.

What is the value of an online degree?

As technology evolves and more online graduate programs become available at a much lower cost, I think it’s time to reconsider traditional higher education in a classroom setting.

See how some students earning master’s degrees at Georgia Tech are paying little or nothing for online courses from a top program.

Let us look in to the following real life example…

It’s graduation day, and these two students are earning their computer science master’s degree from a top 10 masters degree program in the country. But it’s the first time they have ever visited campus.

VANESSA ANDERSON, one of the online degree student says: This whole experience was very surreal. This is her first time on campus, to receive the graduation degree.

Students Vanessa Anderson and Miguel Morales did all of their course work for Georgia Institute of Technology online. Neither live in Georgia.

MIGUEL MORALES, another student: he going to be working in autonomous systems, and just it’s his dream job.

The average starting salary for Georgia Tech’s master’s degree graduates is $150,000. Last spring, 64 students earned their computer science master’s degree on campus, but 212 earned them online. It’s growing fast.

Charles Isbell, a senior associate dean for Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, helped design the online master’s program. He says it’s about accessibility. We see that we can get many more people who don’t look like the traditional folks that we have coming on campus.

In fact, online students are typically older and have full-time jobs.

Online, there are nearly twice as many of students as on campus. And the quality of learning is equal for the two programs, he points out one key difference: cost.

Why online degree fees are more affordable?

So, for the same experience, there is a huge difference in the course fee, There are three big things that make this possible.

The first is, that college doesn’t have to pay for buildings. they don’t have to build new classrooms. These two big things make the difference and thus college can deliver an online master’s degree at $6,600 while traditional on-campus full-time students pay a whopping $42,000 for the full course.

And the third, big difference is scale. College now has about 4,500 students in the online degree program, compared to the 400 or so that they have on campus.

A recent Harvard study of Georgia’s online master’s concluded that the combination of a top 10 program offering a traditional degree at significant cost savings has created a whole new consumer market in higher education.

For some students, tuition is actually free. Many companies offer their full-time employees’ tuition reimbursement.

Student Nica Montford is a data integrator for General Motors Innovation Center in Roswell, Georgia.

Every GM employee gets $8,500 to spend in higher education every year, and so it falls well within the $8,500 range they get.

After two-and-a-half years studying online, Montford plans to graduate this December.

Many more students didn’t want to go into even more student loan debt.

What about human connection?

But does online learning suffer when the human connection found in physical classrooms is missing? students and teachers says, no.

Charles Isbell, the program designer says, if you’re on the fourth row, the fifth row, the 27th row, you’re about as close to me as someone who is online, right? You’re not really getting the face-to-face interaction.

In fact, she says, the way our culture thinks about a classroom should be reconsidered. Evolving technology, allows online students to keep in constant contact with classmates.

Students can communicate daily through chat. They communicate through Google Hangout, through videoconferencing and in platform forums. We e-mail each other back and forth.

However, Bell says answers from teaching assistants are not as immediate. They have to go to this online discussion, type their question, and then wait for a response. And, usually, the response isn’t no more than a day, but even the fact that thay have to wait for a day, whereas, if she is in the classroom, just raise hand and will get immediate feedback. Online chat do the same thing though.

That’s where Georgia Tech professor Ashok Goel comes in. A professor of computer and cognitive science, Goel created an artificial intelligence tool to help answer questions for the 4,500 online master’s degree students.

So, as students ask questions, AI powered teaching assistant gives answers to those questions. Students who are highly motivated, and highly engaged, they ask thousands of questions. Some of this can be delegated to an artificial intelligent T.A., thereby relieving the professor to answer more creative questions, more open-ended questions.

Times and circumstance are different now.

Well, we have campuses because we didn’t have online education 150 years ago, right? Students have to feel they’re a part of that community. They have to feel engaged. That’s what you get being on a campus. You get to meet people. You get to build friendships. You still get to do that online, via online student communities, chats and events.

Online universities have become an effective way to earn your degree especially if you have a busy schedule and can’t enroll at a standard campus they can be tailored to your career goals while giving you the advantages and comfort of studying from your own home.

Now it’s time for hearing it from actual online degree students

Where to find best online degree courses online?

Here I’m going to tell you about the three big online courses that are massive open online courses MOOCs. If you want to learn about it. So the big three that most people talk about Udacity, Coursera, and edex so these are three different ones, of course, each one has different pros and cons to it.

Each of them has unique different things that will draw you to one rather than the other so, for example, some of these give you certificates for different classes some of them give you certificates for when you finish a program some of them give you actual College equivalent credits so you can transfer into a masters / Grahame or just an undergraduate program and use these credits there or while you’re in the program you just take them you know over winter break or whatever now.

Three of them have over 3,000 different courses you can take, which I think that alone should tell you that is a very large base out there of users that are interested in these courses and a lot of people are doing it. Possibly more people than you realize now these courses each one may cost anywhere from $30 to $100 within some platforms or upwards of maybe a thousand dollars for some online degree programs.

Now overall this is a lot cheaper than going into college classes because college classes will ultimately cost about three to five hundred dollars per credit sometimes more depending on where you’re going of course.

Now another thing is some of these classes are taught by are mostly taught by very reputable professors. I have friends that have gone through Coursera and they were trying to do an MBA program and get their certificate in the end. So ultimately technically it’s not an MBA at the end but is an MBA equivalent with certificates and all of their learning was done from different professors they can pick and choose. Say I want some from Harvard and Stanford and you’re learning from the best out there in the world.

How to effectively study with online courses – BYU independent study

Online learning: Keys to success

How to study an online, part-time university degree

A day in the life of an online college student

Hanna Coleman – Online college student

Day in the life of an online college student! In the bleow video, you can see the vlog – a realistic day in her life as an online student in New York City. She shows you her daily routine on how she manages her time, class schedule, and gives you a realistic look at what it’s like if you are considering going to school online.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoVI3glyWjo

Sydney Hembrough – How she is managing work and online education lets see it

Sydney Hembrough loving her online classes so far. The freedom it gives her and the control she have over her own life is exactly what she love about it. She can’t wait to see where this new-found freedom of online college will take her.

Emily Bruce – Balanced success with work and online college education

Emily Bruce – Lets hear and watch her, how she succeed in online college and work.

To conclude…

Going to campus is actually very helpful in the end but basically what is the best option for you well it really depends on who you are so if you are somebody who is already employed and you’re looking for some kind of promotion within your business or if you’re trying to maybe get another degree or your first degree or anything like that it may be a good idea to take online classes on the side so that you can gradually work up to that promotion. You’ll get your certificate you can show your employer they might even pay for it (Tuition Reimbursement Programs) and then you can move up in your program. You can get your raise or whatever you’re looking for within your program.

If you are self-employed it might be best to go with the MOOCs that I was talking about because it doesn’t actually matter if you have a certificate or a degree really what you’re looking for is the actual raw learning. Therefore you can learn those skills on your own at home while you’re trying to start your business and get yourself growing.

I hope this article helped you give a little bit more insight on whether or not you want to do online courses or an online program rather than traditional college let me know in the comments below which one you actually think you want to choose and maybe why you would want to do that. I’ll come up with another informative article on your education goals next time.