I have a more mixed experience with the OMSCS. Overall it's a good program, and if the choice is between Udemy or OMSCS then it wins hands down. For me the central issue is online vs. in-person.
Education is an interactive experience, the value of a good professor and classmates is helping to identify issues when you are stuck and nudge you just enough for you to connect the dots. As an undergraduate I liked attending study groups and office hours. I learned as much from my peers, both me helping them and them helping me, as I did from my professors. This spirit was difficult to replicate this in OMSCS.
The problem is that high tough, in-person communication is very effective but this doesn't "scale" well. I can only imagine how different the world would be if Plato was teaching online. :)
Also I was in the 2nd cohort, there were certainly a lot of "bugs" and issues they were working through. Additionally, the culture of video conference and zoom was also less a few years ago, which could make an impact.
I second this. I attended OMSCS for a few semesters and ultimately dropped out because I felt most of the courses lacked any interactive component. Another factor that led me to drop out was that one of my biggest reasons for enrolling in a masters degree was to strengthen my research skills. Although I did manage to do research in a couple of courses and assist a professor, I found it very hard to juggle research, a full-time job and the demands of a part-time OMSCS course load (which is very time-consuming due to lack of interaction with instructors and faculty since it requires a lot of autodidacticism). Right now I am trying to determine the next steps in my educational journey. I am taking some online extension course with a synchronous lecture component and am finding it a lot better for really learning the material than OMSCS courses without synchronous learning component. However, it doesn't seem like full masters programs are offered in this manner. Has anyone found such a program in Computer Science that is geared towards people who already have a bachelor's degree in CS and are working full time in industry.
If lack of peer interaction was your main hangup, I think it has been addressed. The OMSCS Slack workspace has become a kind of 24/7 office hours, study group environment.
But there is still little to no interaction with the professors.
The best part of my experience was trying to form a study group (Google Hangouts at the time). Most people dropped but I made a very good friend. We still stay in touch to this day.
Slack and other conferencing tools are game changers. People getting used to these tools is one silver lining to the pandemic.
Agreed, while I completely agree that in person is not the same as virtual, Slack makes it so that it's not as bad and I've made some good connections on slack. I check it every day and very much feel like I'm part of a community.
OMSCS alumni here. Almost all my classes had student organised study groups over video chat. But it does require you to seek them out and participate in class slack usually. Overall I had far more class related interaction than I did in my on campus undergrad.
I had near zero interaction in (physical) college regarding learning while we spent an awful lot of time on coursera dedicated irc rooms on (now dead) freenode, it was really vibrant, good spirit, no cheat, just sharing some hints at times, discussing the ideas. I preferred it to my IRL class memories.
I was in the second or third cohorts, and I dropped out during the first course because the assignment was to write their registration system for them for free. They had specific requirements for Java, MySQL, etc. If I'm going to work, I'm sure as hell not going to be paying to do it.
I'm sorry, but this doesn't sound credible. You wouldn't let potential newbies write an important part of your infra. Plus a credible school has more than enough software developers. Might it have been the other way around, that the people who actually wrote the system have designed assignments that are based on their experience? That's something I sometimes did when I held classes: nothing gets you closer to a realistic real-world practice problem than the one you just solved yourself
Education is an interactive experience, the value of a good professor and classmates is helping to identify issues when you are stuck and nudge you just enough for you to connect the dots. As an undergraduate I liked attending study groups and office hours. I learned as much from my peers, both me helping them and them helping me, as I did from my professors. This spirit was difficult to replicate this in OMSCS.
The problem is that high tough, in-person communication is very effective but this doesn't "scale" well. I can only imagine how different the world would be if Plato was teaching online. :)
Also I was in the 2nd cohort, there were certainly a lot of "bugs" and issues they were working through. Additionally, the culture of video conference and zoom was also less a few years ago, which could make an impact.