Do you consider distance learning degrees to be comparable to those earned on a campus (assuming they're from...

Do you consider distance learning degrees to be comparable to those earned on a campus (assuming they're from accredited institutions and not for-profit diploma mills)?

Other urls found in this thread:

functionalcs.github.io/curriculum/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

not even slightly. perhaps such a diploma would land you a slightly better job, but it certainly would not prepare you for graduate school.

if you are not interested in going into a master's or PhD then maybe it is worth it if you have a guaranteed salary increase. otherwise i would say that diploma is pretty worthless

>if you are not interested in going into a master's or PhD
I am not.
>if you have a guaranteed salary increase
I'm currently a self-taught, self-employed code monkey. The few times I've dared to send off CVs locally, I've never had a response. I have no school-leaving qualifications either, and a CV with no education section and only basic freelance webdev in the experience section is not very appealing. I do think I need something formal to prove I'm not a complete fraud.

Besides, I'm well aware that all self-taught devs have huge gaps in their knowledge. I currently have only the vaguest clue what time complexity is, have no idea how to solve the travelling salesman problem, and never even learned basic calculus. The course I'm looking at covers all the essential maths and algorithms from scratch (almost certainly not to the same depth as a normal degree, but it's named "Computing & IT" not "Computer Science"), as well as programming in Java et al (which I would breeze through since I'm doing it already).

I have enough existing knowledge that I think I can do it "full time" (3 years) while also still doing a lot of freelance work. I also want a degree so that I would have the option to live and work in Australia, SE Asia, etc. The provider is actually relatively well respected in the UK but I want the international perspective so I know if I would be laughed out of the building or not.

Feels bad man

I've been thinking of going into Penn State's Master of Acoustics distance learning program after I finish my MS in Aerospace Engineering.

Would that be brainlet-tier? Should I just kill myself instead?

Maybe I'll just kill myself.

Well, hello there. I am also doing MS in Aerospace Engineering and of killing myself.

thinking*

The problem with them is that you won't gain the """"social""" benefits of on campus learning. Knowledge won't give you a job in the industry or in academia, you also need connections.

Pretty much this, although you can teach yourself enough rigor in order to apply directly to a graduate program skipping bachelor's a few people have done this, notably Jacob Applebaum from Tor who's now doing a PhD in cryptography in the Netherlands even though he dropped out of college.

If you want to cover everything from scratch here you go functionalcs.github.io/curriculum/ like doing Judgements logic on programming languages, advanced complexity lectures and real analysis on algorithms.

This is true, but right now I have neither the qualifications nor the connections. A remote degree would at least solve one of the two.

I don't plan to get a master's, although it's worth noting that people have successfully used the degree I'm talking about to get into real-brick-and-mortar university master's courses. So it would at least in theory be an option.
>functionalcs.github
Thanks and I very much approve of free learning resources, but if I'm going to do this I want to dedicate myself to it as much as possible, and if I'm going to do that, I definitely want a formal qualification at the end of it. After I have a qualification and some good base level training, I would be happy to freely learn some more advanced topics on top of that.

It's better to do the free stuff first, make sure you are good/like the material, build mathematical maturity then go get your accreditations as you can coast through them stress free. There's a lot of school in Europe too where you can challenge the course and just write the final exam to essentially bypass almost entirely a BSc except for a bunch of humanities requirements

Lets do it

I do have a lot of relevant knowledge and experience already. If anyone cares enough to read it, this is the course structure, with abridged content summary by year by module:
>Year 1 module 1
>A piss easy overview of making a webpage, making some simple apps with babby drag and drop tools, and computers vs society blah blah
No problem, sounds boring actually
>Year 1 module 2
>What a motherboard is
>How a filesystem works (broad level)
>Analyse some stats with Python
>Infosec
Also not going to be a problem, a bit less tedious probably
>Year 1 module 3
>Literally play with toy robots
>Networking (option for some kind of CCNA cert? I think? Not sure)
>Linux
Won't be an issue
>Year 1 module 4
>Maths starting from revision of basic algebra, and going up to three units of calculus, complex numbers, etc
I'd have to actually study for this one but I'm not really concerned. I found PDFs of some of the material and it seems to be well written with the first couple units of it starting right around my current knowledge. The only year 1 module that would actually teach me anything probably.

>Year 2 module 1
>Java programming
Used similar languages a lot, not concerned
>Year 2 module 2
>Algorithms, data structures and computability
Requires study
>Year 2 modules 3, 4
>

>Year 3
>Databases and various further software engineering
>Dissertation

tldr it will teach me things but it would also require a lot less dedicated time than I would need if I went into it knowing nothing. So it would be pretty manageable and I don't think I would be overwhelmed by workload.

>ITT: BK Randy tier universities catch another group of suckers

lol, i look forward to seeing you guys posting in the "I have a STEM degree and can't get a job" threads a year from now.

go to a real school. it matters.

I did say
>accredited institutions and not for-profit diploma mills

>everything is filler
>everything that could be learned for no extra charge with the thing you are sitting in front
Yeah, you NEED that diploma to get dolla brah, sign up right away. You'll be really happy with life then, no debt no satisfaction, right?

>everything is filler
>everything that could be learned for no extra charge with the thing you are sitting in front
I could probably learn most/all of it myself but I wouldn't be able to prove it to employers or emigration boards. Besides, when self-teaching it's very easy to skip anything that bores me, or pass over something I'm stuck on promising to come back to it and not doing so... etc. A formal arrangement with assignments, deadlines, tutors and exams prevents that and ensures I get a solid grounding.
>You'll be really happy with life then, no debt no satisfaction, right?
My government will fund the entire tuition (not a loan) since I don't already have any degree. They would fund me for a physical university too, but I don't have the entry requirements for those and it would be very arduous to get them now. I won't be eligible for any student loan for living costs, though, so I would need to keep working at nearly my current semi-fulltime pace.

>I could probably learn most/all of it myself but I wouldn't be able to prove it
If I was an employer, a few interesting, relevant code projects >>> BS,MS,PhD 'classwork' from MIT, proof is in ability, not a piece of paper cert.
>when self-teaching it's very easy to skip anything that bores me, or pass over something I'm stuck on promising to come back to it
This is a bad thing today?
>A formal arrangement with assignments, deadlines, tutors and exams prevents that and ensures I get a solid grounding
You've sipped too much kool-aid, man. Snap out of it.

I remain convinced that they could be, perhaps in some hypothetical future utopia free of markets, but the established academic cabal will never allow it. Academics are """""""""""""""living, breathing beings""""""""""""""" who (((have to eat))) after all.

take your quotations marks and parenthesis back to /pol/ newfaggot

I just think their quotationrentheses attract attention to operative terms and hence are quite useful

are you lost?

do you know where the fuck you are?

I get what you're saying user, but it is very difficult to believe that watching some Khan Academy videos and reading some ebooks with no timeline and no hard targets is equivalent to a degree course with curated coursework, regular tests and exams, and high stakes for failure. Even if I think I know most of it, having to sit regular real exams, and knowing that flunking means wasting years and my one shot at state-sponsored education, would damn fucking sure I do. And at the end, I would have proof.
>code projects > degree
I've heard this said but I don't think it's true to as wide a degree as you think. The vast majority of non-codemonkey positions list a degree as a hard requirement. It's very difficult to even get a CV in their inbox since it just gets filtered out.

Yeah, we're on /pol/ right?