Virginia Tech

I graduated from this program in May 2008. Overall I feel it is an excellent distance Masters program. It is an interdisciplinary broad-brush program with courses coming from different university colleges/departments. Of the ten courses I took there was only one that I did not like. One of of 10 I will take. Courses varied in intensity (Internet Software was a killer but excellent). I felt I learned a significant amount from each course. The technology was (most likely still is) excellent. They used a conferencing system called Centra that worked very well. A great addition is student groups could sign up for time which worked out well for group projects. All the classes I had were "synchronous" with the lectures on a fixed time schedule but they were recorded so you could take the courses mostly asynchronously if you had too although I think you loose some of the "class" experience that way. All my professors were quite accommodating of taking their course asynchronously with the use of proctors for students not local to any of the VT centers. In 2009 I looked at returning to do the Networking Graduate Certificate (one of the area options for the degree) but it looked like they were phasing that out. I rated support down a bit because technical support was a bit bureaucratic but they did come up with solutions in a reasonable time. The actual academic support was quite good. Overall I feel it is a good degree program.

Great program overall. Though it is very expensive if you live out of state. In state tuition is good though. Overall, I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in instructional technology. The real benefit of the program is that it is from a well known university, the courses are fairly flexible, and covers a lot of topics in a wide range of courses. Other than tuition, the only drawback is having to work with TAs instead of the acutal professors. They also offer an Ed.S. option totally online.