Georgia Tech to offer an online Computer Science master degree

Andy Nguyen

Andy Nguyen

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The degree will cost $6,600 compared to $45,000 for traditional on-campus degree. It will be offered via Udacity in January. The school hopes to attract 10,000 paying students annually.
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That's cool. I am wondering if the degree has any difference from the normal degree.
 
I don't expect it would. It's in the school's best interest to treat them as equal.
Somebody told me that the reason the online degree tuition is much cheaper is because it was subsided by AT&T who has a big presence in the area and recruit many of the engineering/programming grads there.
 
not only that.... delivering courses through Udacity also lowers their cost, because that means they don't have to produce the video lectures at their own cost. (they say they'll give 40% of revenue to Udacity)

the biggest problem I have about this program is that their admission standard is much less stringent than the on-campus program. Although you have to be formally admitted to the degree program after taking two courses, all you need is the minimum requirement (bachelor degree with 3.0 GPA from accredited university) for provisional admission. You don't need GRE. Their on-campus program has 15% or so admission rate, I wonder how much higher would they have to raise the acceptance rate in order to reach their targeted 10000 students? It seems to me like they're running the risk of diluting their on-campus program.

check out their proposal of this program: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/703594-mooms-proposal-2-28-13.html#document/p11/a103918

they chose to not have the same graduate application as the on-campus program because they're afraid of large workload on admission staff in case of large number of application... that's a pretty awful reason for not requiring a formal application for admission. I wonder how their alumni with the same MS-CS degree would react to this...

i would recommend these Georgia Tech online programs instead: http://www.dlpe.gatech.edu/dl/
 
this program can be very good for working professionals like me to gain more cs skills.
at about $6000 for the full program, its hard to beat
 
from their program proposal, it looks like the degree designation on transcript and diploma will carry a different name than the on-campus MS-CS program. So this is definitely something to think about before anyone jumps into the $7K tuition offer.
 
The faculty will have less but more flexible time to interact with the students of online program, and the school won't need to worry about any job placement issue for an online program. The management cost is much lower when outsourcing the online platform to a more experienced third party(Udacity). So the expected tuition should be lower.

But if the actually master diploma is different from the on-compus one, it will become relatively useless, since a discrimination cannot be avoid... And more importantly, this kind of program may not attract the (massive) international applicants who simply want to finish a master degree and find a job in US.
 
I am close to completing a Masters in Computational Finance at the University of Washington. Although the program is on-line, my professors have almost always gone out of their way to interact with their students, even holding sections on Saturday and on work day evenings, in addition to commenting on the discussion boards and responding to email. One of my professors has supported me in independent study projects.

There is no way that students will get this level of interaction if the program admits 10,000 students a year. This will very much be an automated education. One of the attractions of graduate school is that you are a graduate student: you study at a higher level than you did as an undergrad. I'd rather pay more and get more.
 
While Gtech doesnt have a full FE program online, it does have a Computer Science Engineering program offered online that can be tailored to financial applications. This program, however, does not fall into the $6000 dollar degree--it is the normal $30K+..........
 
Does anyone know how a non-CS major can prepare themselves for this kind of program? Exactly how much programming does one need to learn to be able to keep up with graduate level CS coursework?
 
Hey @systemtrader, I was wondering the same thing and I asked the head of the Master's Degree in Comp Science at my undergraduate school and he gave me this list as pretty much the core of the undergraduate degree:

COP2210 Programming I (Java, at my school)

COP3337 Programming II (Java)

COP4338 Programming III (Java and C++)

COP3530 Data Structures

CEN4010 Software Engineering I

MAD3512 Introduction to Theory of Algorithms

COP4610 Operating Systems Principles

COP4555 Survey of Programming Languages

COP4710 Database management

Also, the Georgia Tech site has a section for courses offered and it lists the pre-requisites so you can take a look at that.

http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/program/ (Scroll towards the bottom of the page)
 
What will be the relevance of this program? For people who don't have a programming background but a strong mathematical/engineering + finance background , will it be beneficial to fill the gaps? Will employers see it as an added value? I am also wondering if it will help in career progression. I guess the most relevant specialization would be Machine Learning. What are everyone's views?
 
Fer Carranza said:
Hey @systemtrader, I was wondering the same thing and I asked the head of the Master's Degree in Comp Science at my undergraduate school and he gave me this list as pretty much the core of the undergraduate degree:

COP2210 Programming I (Java, at my school)

COP3337 Programming II (Java)

COP4338 Programming III (Java and C++)

COP3530 Data Structures

CEN4010 Software Engineering I

MAD3512 Introduction to Theory of Algorithms

COP4610 Operating Systems Principles

COP4555 Survey of Programming Languages

COP4710 Database management

Also, the Georgia Tech site has a section for courses offered and it lists the pre-requisites so you can take a look at that.

http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/program/ (Scroll towards the bottom of the page)
Click to expand...
Lot of Java and a wee bit of C++?

One point about university CS education in general is that the emphasis on programming and engineering skills tend to get lost in action.

Something that you should know and be prepared for.
 
Daniel Duffy said:
Lot of Java and a wee bit of C++?

One point about university CS education in general is that the emphasis on programming and engineering skills tend to get lost in action.

Something that you should know and be prepared for.
Click to expand...
Modern tech startups more and more de emphasize low level optimization (read C++) in favor of rapid prototyping and iteration (read dynamic interpreted languages -- Python, JS, Ruby). So I don't see "Lot of Java and a wee bit of C++" as a bad thing, or as programming/engineering skills getting lot in action.

But one thing that is true, programming and engineering skills are hard to teach in a pure classroom setting. You need to work on real projects and see how design decisions play out over days/weeks/months. You need to encounter the problems eg TDD, CI, OO, were designed for to really appreciate why they exist.
 

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