You're paying for certification, acceptably proving you've learned what an accredited institution expects you to learn.
The problem I've seen with "I don't need a degree!" people is gaping holes in their self-taught education, missing things that every degreed person learns.
Yes, I'd trust an OMS from Georgia Tech over "I read some books and here's a good portfolio of personal projects". I'd be seriously concerned that the latter missed stuff any MS in the subject should know.
> The problem I've seen with "I don't need a degree!" people is gaping holes in their self-taught education, missing things that every degreed person learns.
I know people with degrees who have gaping holes in their knowledge.
Remember the old adage "C's get degrees"? You only need to understand 50% of the material (C- grade point average in my country) to get your degree. That's not to mention people cheating or bullshitting their way though their degree. I knew plenty of people at university who were lacking basic skills, but managed to get pulled through by group assignments.
A degree certifies that you've been taught a body of knowledge, not that you've learned a body of knowledge.
I'd trust an actual bachelors or masters degree over "self taught" too yes, but as someone else in this thread also pointed out this "online masters degree" looks like it only really covers 100 level bachelors content and not much else.
If it’s like the OMSCS they cover lots of topics that are covered in anundergrad but the marking scheme is that an undergrad A guarantees you’ll pass and if you want an actual A on the course you’ll have to work harder. Any OMSCS grads feel like (dis)confirming?
Currently in OMSCS, after very recently taking some bachelor's level courses. The OMSCS classes are significantly tougher, go far deeper into the material, require more research and involve less hand-holding than the bachelor's level classes.
I interacted a bit with OMS CS students that were taking Udacity courses (there is some link between Udacity personnel/classes and OMS CS), and they all reported being flooded with difficult homeworks/projects, often racing against the clock to submit things before deadline. Some classes even take >40h/week according to them. It doesn't seem to be anything trivial as you'd have implied; more like a proper MS from a Top-10 school. Imagine you need to get a lunar lander module landing on the moon in OpenAI gym via Deep Reinforcement Learning, write your own real-time Augmented Reality system as your final project in Computer Vision, beat real-world radiologists using the very latest Deep Learning research from Stanford as a final project in health informatics, write your own Swift-like compiler etc. Does that seem trivial? If anything, it's awesome people can learn those things online with the proper academic rigor and without dumbed-down curriculum.
I believe it's not really hard to check one's competency level in STEM fields. Suppose you're interviewing those with bachelor's degree in math. Intro to Abstract Algebra and Real Analysis are two of the core requirements for those in undergrad math. Admit all those with papers automatically. Place a super high bar of responsibility and expectations on the so called "self-taught" ones. For example, accept only those who can solve every single problem in Hatcher's Algebraic Topology cold. I doubt even 10% (numbers out of my ass) of the undergrads in the US are capable of this feat. Anyone who taught themselves this shit (gaping holes or not) can kick some serious ass. Sounds fair to me.
The idea is that any one who masters some obscenely difficult area can easily be taught anything they are missing. Hell, you can tell them to pick up whatever you need them to know on the weekends. The book and the subject matter I suggested so happen to be brutally difficult. Anything they have to learn at your org will likely be trivial by comparison. Any one who learned this book on their own can easily walk in and out of any math PhD program (let alone other subjects).
As someone who did a bachelor's at GT, students constantly complained that none of the classes prepared you for Day 1 of a job.
GT's collective response was always that that wasn't their job. They expected you to pick up {new-js-library} while you were studying.
Their job was to "train you for the last job you'll ever have."
And there's a certain wisdom to that. I can learn a new library -- I'd be unlikely to learn the full networking stack, RDBS internals, the history of hardware / software development, or OS & processor memory handling.
How would you trust it compared to 5+ years experience with CISSP and possibly one of the more advanced ISC2 certifications or any of the SANS GSEC certs?
I understand that you are saying any accreditation is better than none. I am just playing devil's advocate with an accreditation alternative to formal education.
The two curricula are incomparable. A CT MS is academic; the courses are formal college courses, independent of a sponsoring corporation and its commercial S/W products. The role it prepares you for is IT management. Certificate programs prep you for staff level work, as an implementer.
Here are the 3 possible curricula for the GT program:
Core:
Introduction to Information Security (CS 6035)
Information Security Policies and Strategies (PUBP 6725)
Info Security Track:
Applied Cryptography (CS 6260)
Secure Computer Systems (CS 6238)
Network Security (CS 6262)
Information Security Lab (CS 6265)
Energy Systems Track:
Smart Grids (ECE 8803)
Introduction to Cyber-Physical Electric Energy Systems (ECE 8803)
Introduction to Cyber-Physical Systems Security (ECE 8803)
Computational Aspects of Cyber-Physical Systems (ECE 8803)
Policy Track:
Introduction to Information Security (CS 6035)
Information Security Policies and Strategies (PUBP 6725)
Information and Communications Policy (PUBP 6502)
Privacy, Technology, Policy and Law (CS/MGT 6726)
Internet and Public Policy (PUBP 6111)
Scenario and Path Gaming (INTA 6014)
Data Analytics and Security (INTA 8803)
Information Policy and Management (PUBP 6501)
Challenge of Terrorism in Democratic Societies (INTA 8803 G)
I think it's a valid question since the CISSP seems more geared to managers, not "staff-level work." The most common advice I've seen about answering questions for the CISSP exam is "think like a CEO."
You would trust the OMS to do what exactly? Opine on computer science theory? Perhaps. Do solid work for you? That's a much closer call, in my opinion.
I am a Senior Software Engineer in my mid thirties doing an Online degree at a local university of applied science in Germany. I am doing most of the work at home and just go there 4 times per semester and once for exams, but i have a lot of deadlines for assignments during the semester, while i work a fulltime job obviously. As far as i can tell, they apply the same standards to exams and grading than they do for normal on-campus students and I need to go much deeper into subjects than i would if i would self study for fun, to get good grades. I also need to study stuff that might not be on my list if i would only self-study, but in the end often is really valuable.
Maybe some people can go really deep into topics when learning by themselves, for me the fact that i need to pass an exam and want a good grade helps a lot to go the extra mile on some of the harder stuff.
So when someone says an Online degree equals "I read some books and here's a good portfolio of personal projects" i honestly get mildly offended.
In my case it's https://www.vfh.de/ which is a group of Universities of Applied Science throughout Germany that offer a selection of degrees. I myself am in Berlin, experiences may vary between different universities. I am doing a Medieninformatik Degree which equals something like "Computer Science and Digital Media", meaning some emphasis on Computer Graphics, Web/Mobile Development combined with CS fundamentals etc. If you want a Degree from a research University in pure Comp Sci, Fernuni Hagen is the only options for remote studies afaik.
I speak okayish german. Can definitely understand and work with it, but I think that writing a essay in German for me might be too much. So I've been delaying my MsC until I learn better German, but this will take forever.
I am german, so yes i guess you could say i am fluent. However, since the studies are mostly remote and a lot of communication is in written form, you should get by with okayish german during the semester and exams. There are quite some essays to write and presentations to hold though (more in the Master than in the BSc), so i am not sure how that would work out but could also see them being flexible and let you do it in english, since it's smaller groups and thus more personal mentoring. This is just a guess though.
Otherwise you'd need to try something like Internationale Medieninformatik at TU Berlin which is in english, but not remote unfortunately. Otherwise maybe the Open University Masters is something for you, or of course the GTech MSc which is quite a bit more expensive though.
How will this degree appear on my diploma and/or transcript?
The name "Online Master of Science" is an informal designation to help both Georgia Tech and prospective students distinguish the delivery method of the OMS program from our on-campus degree. The degree name in both cases is Master of Science in Computer Science.
The point stands that it would be relatively easy to know which version someone completed (you worked in New York but got a masters at Georgia Tech?). I personally believe the value to be roughly equal to a "real" degree.
I think the question is less whether the "online" part of the degree is problematic, and more whether the "masters" part is. Pay-for-play vocational masters degrees are kind of a known quantity in the field already. A BSCS from GATech is something! An "MS in Cybersecurity" is something else.
They aren't exactly the University of Phoenix, either.
Compared to the average cost for an online degree from a decent university, I can see a lot of people compromising over only 10K - even if some parts of the program aren't perfect.
They aren't, but, as someone who holds a non-academic Master's degree, I think I still support the distinction - MA and MS should be reserved for people who've defended a thesis. Conferring it to people who have completed a professional education program is muddying the waters.
Georgia Tech has a top tier CS program and I am not disparaging it. I'm talking specifically about vocational masters degrees like this Cybersecurity thing.
There’s a lot of money getting dumped into all things cyber, and its attracting waves of people like flies to a lightbulb.
It’s also a place where marginal people can burrow in or even thrive - either doing policy work (in the form of monk-like transcription of NIST documents), being a gatekeeper for exceptions and reviews, or doing threat intelligence. Figuring out how to measure and hire people is hard, and banks and Federal contracts need to fill thousands of chairs.
The racket of expensive certifications was restricting the talent pool, so these cyber security programs are sort of like a substitution for that. This isn’t going to ever produce real technical leadership — the smart people are ultimately engineers who do interesting security things. IMO it’s a waste of potential — smart kids are bypassing Computer Science or Engineering for a much less rigorous education.
> IMO it’s a waste of potential — smart kids are bypassing Computer Science or Engineering for a much less rigorous education.
There are some opposing forces at play that students and new grads may not quite understand: Computer Science and Software Engineering (boot camps by extension) are basically branching paths to the same entry entry level job, but where you go beyond that can have a stark difference.
I always ask our interns a few questions about their education when they start. One of the chief complaints for CS students is that they don't learn enough practical knowledge to enter the work force. They talk about people who went to a boot camp or were self-taught, and they always express that those people are much more prepared for a given position. Thus we have students who are looking for SWE courses but are taking a CS curriculum. In my experience, no one bothers to make the distinction until it's too late.
True story that drives this home: Our client hired an intern who didn't think a CS degree was practical. He clearly had gaps in his skill set, but I chalked it up to him being a college junior. He was given a small task to parse some text, and I suggested regular expressions (the programming construct) - something he said he had experience with. He came back to me a hour or so later utterly confused on how people could catch all of the edge cases and branching paths that a small regex can generate. Turns out he hadn't taken formal languages yet. I sat him down to build a DFA and talk regular expressions (the formal language concept) with JFLAP[0], and it blew his mind. That conversation changed his entire outlook on CS degrees.
I think it depends on how it's done and who it's offered by. Georgia Tech is one of the best US overall engineering programs in the US and I'd hope they would take this seriously and employers or other credentialists take it seriously.
I took a master's course in cryptography at a university as part of a job perk. The IRL aspect was lectures and office hours sometimes. The professor did not have a great grasp of the English language so I had to work with other students and do extensive internet research to understand things.
I also did one of Udacity's FEND program. It had a Slack channel and pretty cool feedback mechanisms for homework and tests. If the grad school class had that I think I would have enjoyed it more and had greater mastery of the subject.
I think it's past time for us to consider OMS legit instead of automatically second-guessing them.
The FAQ on EdX says the certificate is identical to the on-campus one, it doesn’t mention “online”.
In the UK we have had “distance learning” for a long time (Open University) and there is no stigma attached, OU is probably actually more prestigious than most ex-polys.
To the business world, open source is just a business calculation and HR really doesn't care about it except when it's useful as a recruiting tool. The same is true of hiring decisions and open education. Degrees from well known universities are part of a cost/benefit/cover-your-ass strategy in hiring decisions so when open education has proven itself to the degree that open source software has, then it will be as widely accepted.
It probably depends on the market where you’re job-hunting. In tech worker starved areas like the Midwest and South, it’s probably a sufficient credential. Either of the coasts, obviously less so.
I suspect that will be stigmatic, or is already.
If that is the case, then why waste $10K on a degree that is no more valuable than "self taught"?
Is an OMS from Georgia Tech more convincing than "I read some books and here's a good portfolio of personal projects" ? It's a hard sell.