I wrote this summer about enrolling in the Online Master of Science in Computer Science program at Georgia Tech. Here's how this new experiment in online graduate school works:

A few things have changed since the last time I was in graduate school. For one, there's this thing called the "Internet". It has the potential to change the way college education is delivered, and only one top-10 school has taken the plunge in a big way with a cheap ($8000 for a degree), complete and fully-rigorous graduate-level curriculum. Some interesting statistics about students in the Georgia Tech's OMSCS program:

90% of us are over 25, vs 18% in the on-campus program >25% of us already have advanced degrees, including PhD's in other fields Currently, about 79% of the students are from the US, which is the inverse of the on-campus student body. For a long time, most graduate STEM programs have been majority international students. 90% of the students are also working fulltime

This week, OMSCS is graduating its first cohort. And the diplomas say "Master of Computer Science", not "Online Program". So it's a real thing now. But I'm often asked, How does this work?

The Classes

Lectures are delivered via Udacity, which is an online class delivery system targeted at University-level subjects. Udacity's bread-and-butter are things like "nano-degrees" in Ruby or IOS programming, but they're partnered with Georgia Tech on the OMSCS courses. Lectures are a combination of a small amount of "talking head" discussion from the professor, virtual whiteboard lecture, and interactive quizzes. The real-time feedback of the quizzes is one of the best parts. That and the fact you can go back and review lectures in your pajamas.

Figure 1: Online Quiz Time

It is evident that a lot of work goes into course production. These aren't recordings of a random class -- they are heavily produced lectures tuned for online, and tend to be densely packed with information. They have animations, diagrams, code, professor's notes, etc. The lectures are available 24x7, and it's up to the student to set some sort of pace. In addition, in my course there was a textbook (available online, but I rented a physical copy), as well as about 30 more up-to-date readings from journals and papers. And yes, the contents of the readings showed up at test time.

Fig 2: Caution- Readings May Induce Drowsiness

The "classroom" is a an online forum called Piazza. That's where student's ask questions, other students answer, the professor or TA's provide updates or feedback. It's also where we commiserate the difficulty of the midterms, subtly brag about our implementation's relative performance, or bat around ideas for dealing with lab problems.

It's strange how normal-seeming the remote interaction with classmates is. I'm now so very used to working with team members in different cities/countries, and this is no different. Besides, I know from my prior masters degree that STEM Grad School isn't the touchy-feely Paper Chase bonding experience that I observed at a certain law school my wife attended. It's all about the facts.





Fig 3: Your questions will be made into statistics (Piazza.com)



And oh yes, there's homework. In my High Performance Computing class, for example, there were five labs, each of which were programs that had to run on a campus compute cluster (kind of a shared supercomputer). They are hard problems, requiring tricky data structures and run on big sets of data. And the grade is not just correctness, but how fast it runs -- so lots of tweaking and tuning the code. Students reported about 30-40 hours to complete a typical lab. Because this was high performance computing, no wussy GUI programming -- good old bare-metal C. Thank goodness this kind of coding is like riding a bike. It comes back quickly.

The Future of Education?

OMSCS has been what I hoped for -- making real, credentialed graduate education available in spare time for, relatively speaking, spare change. This is just one of the first ripples of the wave that will wash over and transform education. But that's another whole topic...