ZapperZ said:
By nature, both Physics and Engineering degrees require laboratory work and courses. I don't see any accredited universities offering purely, 100% distance learning for a full undergraduate Bachelors degree.
Open University has been able to deal with getting labs. There are a number of ways of doing this, and it's hardly an unsolvable problem.
Furthermore, I haven't found any kind of statistics on how many of these "distance learner" who managed to enter physics/engineering graduate school, or what kind of successes in employment that they have had upon graduation.
Neither have I, but I think that's because of small numbers. In any case, it's not clear how useful statistics are because the landscape is changing radically, so what is impossible in 2008 can become routine in 2012.
Something that I'd like to do is to make contact with someone that has *tried* to get an undergraduate physics degree through distance learning, to see what problems they have run into.
Part of the problem frankly is that there is a "perceived glut" in physicists, and so anything that makes it easier to train scientists and engineers so that there is more of them is considered a bad thing. The selling point of online education is that it makes things faster and easier, but suppose we double or triple the number of scientists and engineers. Then we have a problem because the economic system as it is is doing a lousy job of handling the number of people that are getting trained for those fields right now.
If I'm an employer, or if I'm evaluating candidates for admission to a program with such a background, I would be very hesitant to consider someone with such untested educational knowledge.
I am an employer, and someone that got the ability to be a guinea pig for this sort of thing is someone that we want to hire. Technical ability is pretty straightforward to test. Attitude is harder, but if you figure out how to get yourself an accredited physics degree, then in my company, that's the right attitude.
In any case, among the reasons that "it doesn't work" employer acceptance is not one of them. Corporations have been driving a lot of the interest in online education, because they want to be able to train workers cheaply and efficiently. If you get interviewed, there is a very good chance that the HR person has a degree from the University of Phoenix and their bosses boss is working on some online degree or certification, and a lot of the money that UoP gets is from corporate reimbursements.
There are a ton of continuing education and compliance training that I have to deal with, and that's all done online.
