Eastern Illinois University

[wildebeest]

I thought I had read on here that someone was attending a grad program at Eastern Illinois University. I was wondering what their online programs are like - 7, 8, 10 weeks long? Tuition? Types of assignments? Are textbooks required? 

Thanks!

That's me! Fall and Spring are 16 weeks. Summer is 10 weeks. 

I believe you can take up to 16 credits per semester without approval, and most of their master's degrees are 32 credits, so you could complete one in two semesters. You can only take 13 credits in summer, however. I did 9 credits this semester and, though I occasionally felt overwhelmed, it was less work than when I did 42 credits at UMPI over two terms. I think 12 credits would probably be the work-time equivalent of about 7 UMPI classes per term.

EIU uses Brightspace, and it's formatted similarly to Strut, so past UMPI students will find it pretty intuitive.

Classes have weekly assignments and, in my major, are either a discussion post and two comments on peers' discussion posts or else a 3-5 page paper, very occasionally longer. Every once in a while you do a discussion post and an assignment, but usually they alternate. Every class I took was taught by the professor and the professors were legitimately involved. The finals were papers in all my classes and in two out of the three you essentially built your final out of prior assignments, which was pretty nice, if I'm honest. Made finals week a breeze. In all of them you did also have to create a 5-10 minute PowerPoint presentation of your final, but since the papers were already written, this amounted to banging out 10 or so slides and bullet-pointing the major points of the paper, maybe a couple hours' work.

Books are required, but you don't have to buy them. They automatically send you the required books and you send them back at the end of the semester. This costs a flat fee of $10 per credit, regardless of how many books the class requires.

Graduate tuition is technically $329 per credit, in state or out, if you're doing an online degree, but with fees plus book rental costs it comes out to $419. The only fee on top of the $419 per credit that I'm aware of is a $40 fee to apply for graduation. Together, this makes most of their master's degrees come out to $13,448-$13,867.