Getting an online masters degree
From BluSkyPedia
An online masters degree could be very beneficial way to increase your education. Online degrees allow you to continue to meet your social and work commitments while still pursuing a degree. There's a huge advantage in not having to quit your job in order to continue your education–to clear the master's level. The workforce is constantly changing and your ability to stay currently educated will determine the salary you are able to earn over your lifetime.
Online education allows you to continue this process of learning new things continually over the course of your career. The recent growth of online masters degree programs gives you options that no one has had before. You can get actual degrees with very little geographic difficulty. You can take classes from the best school possible no matter where you live. And you can find degree programs that best matched with your needs in which your career goals without having to relocate to do it.
Getting an online masters degree can be very difficult for some people. It requires a level of concentration that goes well beyond what you experienced in the traditional classroom. We often overlook how much social support there is in a traditional college setting. With an online degree program you have much less of the social support. That isn't to say you have none. You can get the social support if you actively work on networking with other students but this requires discipline and intentional effort on your part.
Keep in mind that an online masters degree is going to involve a lot of you sitting at a computer doing work when you traditionally had free time. It may be difficult for your family to understand this or even your friends. Fortunately most programs offer a degree of flexibility. You can get up early in the morning and do your coursework or stay up late at night. He's endured during the week or on the weekend. This is one of the biggest advantages of an online masters degree. You can shift things back and forth to meet your own schedule. That you can't wait till the very end and try to do all the work. But usually if you want to work a little early or little bit later it's very doable and very much within the scope of the degree.
The technology for presenting coursework has gotten dramatically better over the past few years. He used to be the online degree programs were simply correspondence courses where coursework was e-mailed back and forth instead of simply the mail. Now many schools offer full video feeds of lectures. Other schools have interactive components where you are able to learn by experimentation on the course webpage. Other schools offer a high degree of interaction with other students through forums and chat.
The ideal situation is for an online masters degree to be as close as possible to the physical degree. In fact it's one thing to look for when choosing an online masters degree. You may want to look for a school where the online degree program actually tracks a real live on campus program. In these type of setups you can often attend classes in person if your schedule permits. This ability to go back and forth can be very valuable because it helps make sure that your online experience will be as close to what works in an actual classroom as possible. Even if you never take advantage of it and never attended class in person the idea that it is possible means that things will be structured in such a way to give you this advantage.
When trying to choose an online masters degree program, you have to take special care to choose a reputable school. Online masters degrees get a high degree of scrutiny from employers. Online degrees are fairly new so they tend to get a lot of extra thought as to whether you actually have a degree or whether you have a masters degree from a diploma mill. One of the best ways to alleviate this problem is to make sure that your degree is from a school that is well recognized and well respected. You need to have it from a school that your employer has heard of. You don't want them to have no idea where the school is and to assume it's some little rinky-dink operation out of the Bahamas.
Not only do you want them to have heard of it, you want them to have heard good things about it. Their number of for-profit schools that have bad reputations. Some of them aren't extremely bad reputations that are not people who have had a problem with them that they may not help you on your resume. You never know what experiences the person who is entering and leaving you have had with a particular school.
Ideally look for an Ivy League school or well-known state school with an online masters degree program. This helps ensure that you will have little problem explaining the quality of your degree. Ibid. three came from her beautiful school you will probably have no issue with it. If they came from a for-profit university that's known for making some major missteps in the past you may have a more difficult time showing the value of your degree. Keep in mind this doesn't mean that the for-profit schools aren't offering a good education. Education can be very good but the reputation around the schools can decrease the value of your degree.
When a for-profit school that's only been around for 10 years makes a small misstep it forms a large part of what people think of it. When an Ivy League college has been around for hundreds of years makes a misstep it becomes almost insignificant compared to everything else people have heard about them. That's what you really want to make sure you get an online masters degree from a review or institution. You want to make sure the institution has a very solid strong foundation for their reputation–something they can't mess up very easily if they do something wrong.
Also keep in mind the for-profit universities may change their focus at any point. Even if they have a great reputation now a new Board of Directors may try to squeeze more profit out of them and in the process ruin their academic experience. So if you get a great degree from a for-profit university today, five years from now it might not look so good to know what they've done. Traditionally in non-profit universities, state schools, and Ivy League schools have had less of a problem with this. They have more momentum headed in a particular academic direction so it's likely that they have a lot of safeguards in place to help prevent changes that would ruin the academic environment. Even if they don't they have a lot of reputation inertia. Basically what I mean by this is that it would take a very long time for a yield to completely ruin their reputation–even if they were doing all kinds of things wrong. However it won't take very long for University of Phoenix to ruin their reputation even if they're doing a lot of things right.
In the process of getting your online masters degree make sure you keep careful notes of exactly what needs done when. They're all kinds of different requirements. They vary from school to school and sometimes they change often as many of these programs are extremely new. You need to keep good records of everything you've discovered that you need to do. For example if you read about a residency requirement that means you have to be on campus for one whole semester, make sure you keep part of that in your documentation file. If they suddenly say that you need to be on campus for two semesters you need to have something go back to to show why you only believe it's one semester.
Some schools have rules regarding the order in which you can take classes. If you're pursuing a degree program you have to take certain classes in a certain order–but if you're just taking classes for the fun of it they don't care what you do. You need to make sure you have all these things documented as well so they change at a later point you can show that what you were doing qualifies you for graduation.
Also it's good to keep track of the cost of your education. Some schools offer low tuition but they have all kinds of extra fees all over the place for each class. You want to make sure you know how much something is going to cost. The class is supposed to cost $1000 you want to make sure that there's not an extra $1000 and course fees that you weren't aware of. For many people who are looking at getting an online masters degree the cost is a very important part of what they're looking at. This is particularly true if you have an employer who's going to pay for it. So make sure you understand everything involving the cost before you move forward.
Beyond just what you see on their website, you may want to do some Google searches in order to find other people who are going through the program. If there are a lot of complaints about extra chargers then he gave you the idea that you need to look really hard and long to make sure you understand exactly how you will be billed.
One technique that I've seen some schools use that I don't agree with his pre-paying upfront for the entire degree. Oswego school has an incentive to do this because they get all their money up front whether you finish or not. However this is in the model that most academics institutions have used over the years. Usually you pay for classes when you enroll in them. That seems like a much better model. It also gives you the opportunity if you discover that a particular course of study is not for you to stop without taking the remaining classes.
There may be some instances where paying for the entire degree upfront would be valuable. However I would make sure I was being a significant discount off the cost of the courses before I would be willing to pay tens of thousand dollars upfront for something I haven't actually tried using it.
Most of the schools using the prepaid technique are also using some high pressure sales techniques to get people to sign up for their programs. Many of them have run into trouble for the way they compensate their salespeople. When the salespeople have incentive to lie and trick people into signing up for a degree that isn't in their best interest of the prospective student he gets them into trouble. They will sell people on expensive degrees that will not ever help them in their career.
Review was to douche and are not going to be high pressure to get you to sign up. Think back to the Yale example. You can yell cares if you sign up for their class or not. No they don't. They're established and are not trying to talk people into coming to their institution. They expect but if you want to go to Yale you'll come the ale. If you're not interested they aren't interested in you. There may be something of an overstatement and there are recruiters. However for the most part you're not going to have high-pressure tactics to get you to sign up to go with to an Ivy League institution because it's in such demand.
If a little-known online University is having to use high-pressure techniques in order to get students, there may be something wrong with their academics. If they are not in demand it may not be a great place for you to go. They may not give you academic reputation that you need on your resume to succeed and do well a new job in the future.