Educating yourself on the web!
Educating yourself on the web!
The most common degree earned through online universities is the masters degree, in fact this is the degree that made online learning popular. An entire industry of online universities has been created to offer masters degrees to working professionals. The working professional is the target market of the online education industry, and the product they demand is a online masters degree.
A masters degree is normally earned after you have received a bachelor's degree. It is intended that a holder of a master will have mastered the subject matter, that is he should know all that there reasonably is to know in that field. According to InternetEducation.ws, a masters degree can be earned in preparation for earning a doctorate or it can be used as a terminal degree in order to enhance your career. Broadly speaking there are two types of masters degrees, a research masters and a taught masters. Research masters degrees will require the production of an original dissertation, a taught masters is normally earned through course work. The overwhelming majority of online masters degrees are taught masters.
There are a few reasons that most online masters degrees are of the taught variety, the primary one being that it is difficult to arrange a research supervisor for the online student, according to the Internet Education Guide. When doing the research for your dissertation a student is normally supervised by one of the professors who will meet with the student on a regular basis. This is hard to arrange for an online student. The other reason that taught masters degrees are more common online is that they are primarily intended for working professionals. These are not students who are intending to move onto study for a doctorate they are getting a masters to improve their career prospects. They aren't really interested in doing research.
The other problem with a research based masters degree is that the people who pursue them are usually doing it because they intend to become professors. Although online learning is becoming more and more common the one place where it is still not widely accepted is academia. It is quite unlikely that you will be able to become a professor with an online degree. This means that there is little demand for research based online masters degrees.
An online masters degree can normally be completed in a year, it is a more specialized degree than a bachelors, you will only take subjects that are related to your degree. They are ideally suited to online learning and in fact are what made it so popular. When working professionals need to return to school to upgrade their qualifications it is usually by getting a masters degree. There are a number of advantages to doing it online, the biggest of course is that you don't need to quit your job.