SCS Colloquium - Zvi Galil

Abstract:

In January 2014, Georgia Tech launched an online Master of Science in Computer Science for under $7,000 — a fraction of the $40,000 charged by comparable public universities and $70,000 at private institutions. What began with 5 courses and 380 students has become, by every measure, the largest academic degree program in the world in any subject: 52 courses, 19,000 enrolled students, and 16,500 graduates — more than 7,000 in the last three years alone. Applications doubled in the last 4 years to over 11,000 and are still climbing after more than a decade.

Harvard researchers concluded that OMSCS is the first rigorous evidence that an online degree program can increase educational attainment, projecting it will raise the number of annual MS CS graduates in the United States by at least 7%. The program has catalyzed more than 50 similar programs at over 30 universities worldwide. In November 2023, Forbes called it the best degree program ever.

This talk describes how OMSCS came about, what Georgia Tech has learned from twelve years of running it, and what it reveals about the future of higher education — a future in which online learning plays a far larger and more consequential role than most institutions have yet imagined.