<p>Stanford, Illinois, Michigan, and Purdue have M.S. & M.Eng available for professionals through online. </p>
<p>Has anyone taken any distance classes from these schools? How is it?</p>
<p>[for those completely unfamiliar with what I'm talking about, these schools video tape their graduate course lectures live on campus and then post them the same day for professionals off campus, exams are proctored i.e. public library or something. Some schools i.e. Stanford, give u the choice to be on campus or video or mix. U get the same degree and have all the same access to other schools as another student, if u didn't catch it the idea here is if u don't get funding for M.S. with an engineers salary u can fund urself or a company will often pay for it]</p>
<p>Looks like an interesting opportunity, but it seems to me that it would be very difficult to get as much out of a masters’ program online as it would be if you were on campus getting your degree. It seems like many programs within those schools feel the same way… Illinois only offers an MS in Mechanical Engineering or Computer Science online. You can’t get the masters’ degree I have from UIUC (structural) online. It also seems that you have to track down a faculty member who’s willing to be your advisor when it comes time for your thesis, so if you want to do research in a particular area, you’d better be darned sure that the professor whose specialty you’re interested in is one of those profs who are okay working with a distance-learner.</p>
<p>The degrees that <em>are</em> offered look comparable to what you’d be in for if you were on campus, but it definitely seems geared towards the part-time student who is also working, which would be logical. (There’s even an option to bill your company directly for your tuition.) Might take longer to get. Might investigate as to whether there’s a limit to the number of credit hours you can take, whether a healthy selection of online courses are truly offered on a consistent basis (just because they say they offer it doesn’t always mean that they do… same as the course catalog at a bricks-and-mortar university), and what the cost differential is.</p>
<p>(Does spelling out “you” really take that much longer…? You kids and your new-fangled text-speak…)</p>
<p>Now someone can correct me, but of course those M.S. distance programs will not be funded research. More likely, it will be a M.S. non-thesis or MEng degree. You also will not have access to all of the grad courses possible for the school either.</p>
<p>The distance degrees are more for folks (like myself) who wanted an M.S. more for corporate advancement reasons than for actual research and learning.</p>
<p>The Illinois MS Mechanical Engineering degree I perused allowed a thesis or non-thesis option, so research was involved. It surprised me, too. I would imagine that this program is in the minority, though, and I’d guess that the non-thesis/MEng degree is more prevalent for distance learning opportunities, like you said.</p>
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<p>This was kind of what I figured.</p>
<p>(Plus, if I’d done my masters’ degree online, I would never have gotten to take that cool welding class and accompanying practical lab…!)</p>
<p>I think it’s a great idea for structural engineers to take a welding class! My husband did and enjoyed it. I want to! I should see if it’s still offered in our area.</p>
<p>^^^It was fantastic! (Really gave me a sense of why you always want to specify shop welding… it’s like performing surgery from the confines of a spacesuit.)</p>
<p>i checked the Dist. courses available at those schools and couldn’t find any I would like to take… kinda ****t/disappointed ; ) their marketing made it look like a sweet idea on the surface</p>