Considerations for a distance education BA in CS

Question

I am considering working towards a BA in CS. What are the disadvantages of going with distance education? I am willing to work hard and do what it takes to succeed. What do employers generally think of a distance education degree? What schools would you recommend?

I am 22 have about two years of self-tought experience in VBA, have done several large projects in MS Access with 10,000+ lines of VBA code while working for a company. I was the only developer and had no one over me to go to with questions (other than Google). I have tought myself all that I know so far. I also know some SQL, worked with PHP and JavaScript some.

Answer 1

The main disadvantage is that you have no (or very little) personal contact with teachers and other students. A five minutes talk after a lesson can help tremendously to clarify an issue that will give you lots of trouble otherwise.

As for the reputation of those degrees, I think that depends more on the reputation of the university than on the studies being done on campus or remotely. This means you have to balance two criteria:

1) How good is the schools reputation (will it help you get your future job)

2) Does the curriculum cover the subjects that you need to improve in (will it help you do your future job)

Since you have quite some experience in Access/VBA, I recommend looking for a curriculum that focuses on other tools/languages. If you are already familiar with one technology (and from your question I infer that you know quite a few nuts and bolts in VBA), try to expand your expertise into other areas. That could be another language like Java, C# or Ruby; or a different plattform (of course Linux comes to mind, but also consider MacOS, or Android); or something other than databases.

Answer 2

I second Treb's answer and suggest one further thought - the big thing I see lacking in many remote degrees is team work. When I do software engineer interviews as a hiring manager, I look for someone who can work in my team. The way I do that is to talk to the person about their prior experiences working on hard problems, under stress, within teams. When I hear stories that suggest that this person is good at learning from others, mentoring, listening, and explaining his thoughts -- then I know I have a winner.

If your prior experience is in very solitary positions, I would suggest you think somewhat about how to get some technical team experience. On-site college education is a way to do that -- most of the leading tech colleges these days have numerous (often required) team-focused courses. That gives you a lot to talk about in that next job interview.

If distance learning is the only feasible option for your current life situation, check with the school and see if they have classes that allow remote teams to work together -- after all, with software there's no requirement that everyone be in physically the same location!! (although that is easier) And being able to work remotely as part of a team would be a really good skill to have -- even with our whole team in one place jobs, my company has needs for people who can work with remote engineers.

Failing that, look to be part of some sort of extracirricular effort - a job, an open source project, a startup or any other volunteer work - that is both technical and includes a team of technical people.

As a manager, I don't care where you get your team work skills -- only that you have them!

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For a point of reference - I did my undergrad in the traditional way from an institute of tech. And my grad work was done all off-site (although in a classroom format) - I stepped on campus 3 times - once to grab a hard to find book, once to pickup cap & gown, and once to attend graduation. Both schools offered both distance and on-site degrees. The diplomas and the paperwork look exactly the same, and there would be no reason to specifically call out the distance aspect of the graduate work on a resume.

Answer 3

You should consider Computing and Information Systems (CIS) at the University of London’s External System

Answer 4

I'll second the disadvantage of the lack of personal contact. With distance learning, you do not get the tangible "experience" of being with your classmates and professors like you would in a face-to-face classroom situation. Besides not being able to meet people and network, it's also a bit weird and awkward if you need a letter of recommendation from your professor who you only "know" via email and/or IM. This is a pretty significant disadvantage. Even though you've invested a very real amount of time and effort into completing a college curriculum, the only thing you take away from the degree work is the actual book learning, and this can be sort of isolating. It's almost like taking an advanced online tutorial for a couple of years, and then getting a "certificate of completion" (your degree) when you're done. (I completed my BS in CS from UIS entirely online. I honestly don't think I would have done it that way had I known all of this.)