Any good online physics degrees? Bachelors or Masters

[twofish-quant]

Thank you, thank you.

Also, you should get the guides from John Bear. One thing that you should be aware of is that online degrees is one area in which there is (unfortunately) a large amount of scams and outright fraud.

The universities that I mentioned are legitimate so you will get an proper accredited degree from them, but I have no information about quality beyond that, and I'd be very interested in people that have tried to go through the programs to see what they think.

Also the field of online physics degrees is something that I'd like to help develop. It's both exciting and frustrating because all of the pieces are there. It's just that no one has put them all together... yet...

One of the missing pieces is that really important is the "inspiration" and "motivation" part of the equation. Education is more about books, it helps a lot to have teachers that inspire and motivate you do to things, and that's something that is one of the key missing pieces here.

 

[m73m95]

Also, you should get the guides from John Bear. One thing that you should be aware of is that online degrees is one area in which there is (unfortunately) a large amount of scams and outright fraud.

The universities that I mentioned are legitimate so you will get an proper accredited degree from them, but I have no information about quality beyond that, and I'd be very interested in people that have tried to go through the programs to see what they think.

Also the field of online physics degrees is something that I'd like to help develop. It's both exciting and frustrating because all of the pieces are there. It's just that no one has put them all together... yet...

One of the missing pieces is that really important is the "inspiration" and "motivation" part of the equation. Education is more about books, it helps a lot to have teachers that inspire and motivate you do to things, and that's something that is one of the key missing pieces here.

I'm sorry, I don't have the time for a proper reply right now, so I'll edit this later.Anyway... I couldn't agree more about the problems with finding a reputable online school/program. I was getting very frustrated, until I saw the link for OU. Just a very small amount of research shows that not only is it a reputable school, but its also a very good school. The only problem (hopefully the ONLY problem) is that its not in the US.

Other schools either seem to only want your tuition. The "counselors" that call ask, within the first 2min of the conversation, When I would like to sign up, and how I will be paying. Seems to me that there would be a fair bit of actually talking about the school, the program, etc etc etc, before the "When will you be signing up" question. It makes me, almost immediately, lose interest in them as a school I would like to attend. So far I have been contacted by 3 schools, and they are all very pushy. The girl from Penn Foster calls me 3 or 4 times a DAY!

 

[twofish-quant]

Other schools either seem to only want your tuition. The "counselors" that call ask, within the first 2min of the conversation, When I would like to sign up, and how I will be paying.

Yup, and if you look at how things are organized the counselors are usually essentially used car salesmen. They don't have much in skills, and get paid commission to read from a script. They are interested in getting you to sign on the dotted line because that is how they make money.

If you look on the web, there is a lot of talk about how student loans are going to be the next big financial disaster.

So far I have been contacted by 3 schools, and they are all very pushy. The girl from Penn Foster calls me 3 or 4 times a DAY!

One thing that is a little scary is to see how much those schools spend on admissions counselors and how much they spend on instruction.

Let me tell you what doesn't make sense to me...

When I taught at University of Phoenix, I made $1000/month. You have ten students that pay $1000/month, which means that $10000/month goes into the system. If you look at the annual report for UoP you see where that money goes, and a lot of it goes into sales and marketing.

The logical thing for me to do is to get rid of the middleman. It would be nice if I could charge $500/month get ten students, so with 20% overhead, I end up with $4000/month income teaching the same thing that I did at UoP. The problem is that UoP can issue accredited degrees, whereas if someone takes an Algebra I class from me, there is no obvious way that they can get a piece of paper that they can then turn into cash.

I'm not sure how to get around this problem, but some time in the next five to ten years, someone will figure out how to get around this in a big way.

As luck would have it, there is an article in the NYT about this...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/education/25future.html

 

[kishaw33]

The University of Washington in Seattle has a part-time evening program that allow you to obtain a M.S. in Physics. Although its not an online program it is one of the first to offer a p/t evening program for working adults. http://www.phys.washington.edu/emsp.htm