University of the People: Tuition-Free, Accredited Online Degree Programs
I&#x27;m taking this Uni in my free time. I am a full-time at a large IT company, and when I started, I had too much free time. I thought, I don&#x27;t have a degree, I learned everything myself, let&#x27;s see what the rigorous side of CS is.<p>Well, UoPeople is both good and bad, as everything in life.<p>On the bad side, some teachers are not only useless, but actively making your experience worse. This is mostly cultural, but teachers coming from Africa and some Asian countries really make you want to stick to the tiniest details of rules and assignments.<p>For example, if you have to write a learning journal (and you will), and the example of an LJ contains entries starting with date such as &quot;DD&#x2F;MM&#x2F;YYYY HH:MM&quot;, African and some Asian teachers will ask you to correct it from any other format. I found this infuriating. What&#x27;s more, when I had questions, most often, I got no help from these teachers. Some teachers would be amazing, most teachers would give me a non-helpful question, some would ignore my question outright.<p>I also feel like there&#x27;s a ton of hoops you have to jump through. An associate CS degree consists of a number of health&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;econ classes that I have zero interest in. This is, again, cultural, as UoP is highly US-centric. If you&#x27;re coming from other country, you&#x27;ll realize how many assumptions you had (and how silly the UoP&#x2F;US system can be).<p>On the good side, however, I do feel like I&#x27;m learning a lot. If you really spend time in reading the materials, I have found the exercises in courses quite useful. I&#x27;m 100% sure it&#x27;s not as rigorous as a brick-and-mortar university, no. They will let pass students who have learnt nothing as long as they put in work.<p>But, if you want, you can surprisingly learn a lot. Even after being a number of years in IT (engineering and now architecture), I found something new (especially their Database and other specialized courses are quite good). I haven&#x27;t done math since high school (my brick-and-mortar degree was not in CS) and some of the math courses were really kicking my ass, which is great.<p>It&#x27;s also insanely flexible in that it&#x27;s online. You decide when to do stuff. You decide when to read. There&#x27;s only deadlines for every week. Other than that, it&#x27;s up to you.<p>Overall, I think my experience with UoP is quite good, but it takes a very specific mindset. If you&#x27;re from a poor non-US and non-EU country, I&#x27;d say UoP is great for you (provided you can pay for it, since it&#x27;s still not free). If you&#x27;re from US or any EU country, UoP degree will have almost zero value in terms of having a degree, but might provide you with a lot of new knowledge. If you&#x27;re in for the knowledge, I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s nice. If you&#x27;re in for the degree, I&#x27;d say go for Georgia&#x27;s Tech OMSCS.<p>Feel free to ask any questions if you&#x27;d like. I&#x27;ll be checking replies to this post for a day or two.