Online College Course Forum

Well, my ex student who was looking for a suitable online computer science program has finally made up her mind. She's going to take an online graduate diploma in computer science, designed to update her computing skills, and to give her some new areas of interest in data analysis and database systems.

She says that she can study it as a series of online courses, and she can take each of the courses when she is ready. however, once she has started one of the courses, she is tied into a timetable for assignments and tutorials. It's quite good for her because she can organize childcare for a number of weeks using some student friends of hers plus a kindergarten.

The college offering the computer science course is also helping her to find work that will suit her situation. It is possible that she could get some work to do at home; actually computer programming is particularly suited to this, as you can download all the materials and compilers you need, and become part of a VPN with your employing organization. However, it will be interesting to see what the college comes up with. With any luck, she'll get a job before she finishes the program, although I would think that finishing the program and working may be a little difficult for her. We will see.

As I was looking at programs in computing for my ex student, I noticed how many online compuer programming courses there were available for Java and HTML, and how few for the older languages. Computer programming has radically altered in the last ten years, but as I've been out of the industry, I had not noticed how radically.

I started to look at Java as a matter of personal interest, and I'm struck as to how syntax remains the same. Although it's much easier to manipulate data with very high level languages such as Java, and you can access network functions etc very easily, at first glance it doesn't look that different from all the Basic family or the C family of languages.

That's my muse of the day.

Well, my student's saga continues.

Another computer science school answered her queries, and came up with another online option. They have designed a refresher program for people such as her, who have had a career break and want to go back to the computer science industry, but are not sure whether they want to take up the same job. This computer science program also caters for people who simply want updating in the skills they already have practiced. The computer science school awards college graduate diplomas, so she will have a recognised graduate qualification after she has successfully completed the course, and the computer science school helps students to gain places in industry after the program is complete.

Actually the computer science school offers the same program both online and in traditional classroom mode, but they say that students who have heavy domestic commitments find the online program very much more convenient. Certainly my ex-student cannot find the time or the resources to leave her young family for a day a week, which is what she would have to do, so the online program is a real plus for her.

My former student got a response from two of the colleges she contacted about online computer science degrees. In fact, both of them came back with similar answers, and suggested that she considers studying a Master's computer science degree, taking the program course by course. She can select with relative freedom from a reasonably wide selection of computer science options; this is a reasonable strategy as both colleges offer programs that specialise in software engineering options such as operating systems, some systems engineering language options, database theory and software engineering.

Interestingly this is prompting her to consider a change in career paths. Both colleges include courses that pertain to systems analysis and information engineering, and she says that she thinks this might be a direction that she could be very interested in. I pointed out that taking this kind of program was a great opportunity for her to find out what she thought of this, and she could start off with these options and then decide whether she wanted to pursue this line further - both in terms of what further courses she chose to study, and to what jobs she started to look at. She is going to talk to a careers councellor today to examine what opportunities this avenue may open up to her, so I think she's on the way to putting down the foundations of a new career in computer science.