I tried University of the People for 2 terms and 4 courses for the Master's of Education, here are my thoughts.
Pros:
- Diversity of viewpoints in the "textbook" materials and student body.
- Unlike what others are experiencing, I noticed no blatant use of chatgpt by students or instructors.
- You only need to read 1-2 articles per course per week to get passing grades on the assignments
- Did not have any rude instructors. One instructor offered voluntary weekly Zoom sessions to help struggling students, but they were outside of my timezone.
Cons:
- The course layout hides vital information, so every group assignment has several people who do not see the majority of the instructions. See my attached screenshot.
- Professors do not grade evenly. An assignment that gets an A in one class will get a D- in another.
- Course deadlines only make sense for someone who lives in Israel (where Fridays and Saturdays are the weekends). I live in California's timezone. For a California or US based school, having assignments due and the course week ending on Thursday at 11:55pm Eastern Standard time (a 3 hour time difference from California!) is really weird and easily forgettable.
- Course instructions are not updated, sometimes not coherent. The instructions AND rubric will REQUIRE you to use Evernote, then the professor says Evernote is not required after you turn the assignment in. The instructions or rubric will cause your group to do your group assignment in the wrong way because none of the 5 people correctly assumed what the professor wanted for the assignment. Sometimes assignments require you to use a source that is a dead link that can't be found elsewhere or accessed by the Wayback Machine.
- With essays: 15% or more of your assignment grade is already attained if you just have no spelling errors. Another 15% is obtained if you have 2 double spaced pages. 35% is attained if you just insert one or two sentences relevant to the essay prompt. This is regardless of the number of or relevancy of the citations, the actual content of your essay, the essay following APA formatting, etc. None of those requirements are even at a Bachelor's level of work, let alone a Master's. So the majority of students are turning in essays that are nowhere near the Master's level, or that don't even answer the prompt, and they are still passing with, say, a B. You may say "Well I wanna become a student, that's easy!". Don't forget the headaches and frustration involved in you having to read 12 or more of these assignments from your peers every week in order to grade their work, and then being unable to even take points off because out of 6 paragraphs every paragraph they wrote was exactly the same, or being unable to take points off because the citations they used were 500% irrelevant to the essay content, etc. In contrast during my Bachelor's, you would fail an essay for even one period wrong in your APA citation, if you had no citations or your citations were irrelevant, if your essay was incoherent, etc.
- I have no idea why Uopeople doesn't summarize the relevant information for every week and put it into a single PDF. Most of the materials are written incoherently, as a ramble, unprofessionally, or are supposedly written about modern times but are actually several decades old (it is 2024, an article on China's "modern" education system is no longer accurate if it was written in 2001 - and they should not be using sources about Education written by travel agencies). So you read 50-100 pages and only around 2 of those are actually useful. You can usually just google and get a ONE SENTENCE explanation that is just as good and lets you pass the assignment. Additionally, you click on 20 or more separate links per week per class to access the reading material. This is made more annoying by that you have to then click through a bunch of pages to access the actual file to download, click past all the "accept my cookies". There will occasionally be dead links and WayBack Machine does not have the page archived.
- How much each type of assignment is worth is not the same for every course, nor does it often make sense, so it's hard to remember this for each course. As an example, in one course your portfolio assignments are 45% of your final course grade, in another they're 10%. Even if all the portfolio assignments are worth 45%, it may turn out that the discussion posts which are worth 10% are more labor intensive than the portfolio assignments.
Major cons:
- None of the course assignments are relevant to real life and none of the assignments that go into your "portfolio" would help you get any jobs. As an example, in the Curriculum class we did not have to create a curriculum for an imaginary situation, nor did we have to analyze the curriculum (syllabus or tools used) of a sample course or school. Despite being a US-based school, we did not ever read a list of curriculum requirements for US public schools for example. In the Assessments course, we did not have to ever create a sample assessment, nor did we have to analyze or improve the assessment shown in a video or the reading, etc.
- The Website layout is not disability friendly. If your text size is too big or screen resolution is too small it cuts off buttons, makes parts of the site or notifications inaccessible and unreadable, etc. I also experienced several bugs over the course of my 2 terms in general.
- No way to submit late assignments, regardless of if you have an official medical diagnosis, had a multi-day power and internet outage, etc which interferes with your work. This led me to getting a D- in a course due to not turning in all my assignments, when the ones I did turn in all got As and Bs. Some classmates in my same class said the teachers had let THEM turn in late assignments, but when I messaged my professors none of them answered.
- My official academic advisor for the Master's, 1) didn't know a C- is a failing grade for Master's students, so told me I had passed a course I'd gotten a D- in. 2) told me Uopeople can't send digital transcripts to any other institution, and thus that I needed to send my unofficial transcripts, myself, to the other institution so they could accept them for credit transfer. I don't know about you but I have never heard of a school that accepts unofficial transcripts in their admissions, nor do most schools accept transcripts submitted by the student and not coming directly from their previous school.
- If you fail a course, you have to pay another $300, take that course again from scratch, and originally you were not allowed to reuse assignments because it's "self-plagiarism". So you could have gotten an A on all assignments but failed the course just because your group project failed - then you were not allowed to reuse any assignments that had already been graded as As by the professor earlier. Now you can supposedly get special permission to reuse assignments.
- Uopeople told me in big red text in several places that I had to get a WES USA report ($300) for my Bachelor's. When I did, they replied saying my Bachelor's had already been accepted, I did not need the WES report and the text had been "a mistake" and that I should "ask for a refund from WES". Obviously WES does not give refunds.
- They advertise that a Master's can be finished in 7 months. In reality they restrict most students to 2 courses per term so it will take at least 1.5 years. If they just improved their reading materials, fixed all assignment rubrics, and required all students to take a Academic Writing course before taking a real course, students would perform better.
- Uopeople doesn't give scholarships to Master's students. Period. So you can have an income of less than $300 a month, be officially diagnosed as mentally and physically disabled, and they are still not going to give you a scholarship. Meanwhile they usually don't even require proof of anything for Bachelor's students to get full scholarships. And Uopeople is not in connection with anyone else who you can get a scholarship from, including FAFSA.
- Professors wanted a recorded presentation of a PowerPoint project (this was not in the grading rubric or assignment instructions, which only said to turn in the PPT file itself). The professor accepted a presentation done entirely with text to speech, where the student's head was also entirely created by AI. So there is no proof the student themselves even did any of the work, nor does their submission prove the student's presentation skills (which was also not a category on the rubric).
End result:
A Uopeople Master's of Education was originally going to cost me $5,300 (including WES USA) and take at least 1.5 years. After 2 terms it was going to cost me $5,600 (because I'd gotten one D-) and still take at least 1.5 years. Eventually I found out I could get a Master's degree in the same subject with essentially the same courses from WGU for $4,000 or less within 6 months - unlike Uopeople, WGU has grants, FAFSA and even a "rural living" grant and "new year's sale" if you don't qualify for anything else - and at WGU you can retake any failed exams and resubmit any failed assignments immediately, instead of taking another 8 weeks and $300 to do the whole course over again from scratch. So I decided to switch to WGU as at this point, even 2 terms at WGU done with any one grant is going to be cheaper and faster than the Uopeople degree in the same subject of the same credit length.
WGU having regional accreditation and UoPeople having national accreditation status was not a factor in this decision, because my state judges DEAC accreditation as equal to regional accreditation for getting a teacher's license, so both Uopeople and WGU would have gotten me a teacher's license after graduating.
Pros:
- Diversity of viewpoints in the "textbook" materials and student body.
- Unlike what others are experiencing, I noticed no blatant use of chatgpt by students or instructors.
- You only need to read 1-2 articles per course per week to get passing grades on the assignments
- Did not have any rude instructors. One instructor offered voluntary weekly Zoom sessions to help struggling students, but they were outside of my timezone.
Cons:
- The course layout hides vital information, so every group assignment has several people who do not see the majority of the instructions. See my attached screenshot.
- Professors do not grade evenly. An assignment that gets an A in one class will get a D- in another.
- Course deadlines only make sense for someone who lives in Israel (where Fridays and Saturdays are the weekends). I live in California's timezone. For a California or US based school, having assignments due and the course week ending on Thursday at 11:55pm Eastern Standard time (a 3 hour time difference from California!) is really weird and easily forgettable.
- Course instructions are not updated, sometimes not coherent. The instructions AND rubric will REQUIRE you to use Evernote, then the professor says Evernote is not required after you turn the assignment in. The instructions or rubric will cause your group to do your group assignment in the wrong way because none of the 5 people correctly assumed what the professor wanted for the assignment. Sometimes assignments require you to use a source that is a dead link that can't be found elsewhere or accessed by the Wayback Machine.
- With essays: 15% or more of your assignment grade is already attained if you just have no spelling errors. Another 15% is obtained if you have 2 double spaced pages. 35% is attained if you just insert one or two sentences relevant to the essay prompt. This is regardless of the number of or relevancy of the citations, the actual content of your essay, the essay following APA formatting, etc. None of those requirements are even at a Bachelor's level of work, let alone a Master's. So the majority of students are turning in essays that are nowhere near the Master's level, or that don't even answer the prompt, and they are still passing with, say, a B. You may say "Well I wanna become a student, that's easy!". Don't forget the headaches and frustration involved in you having to read 12 or more of these assignments from your peers every week in order to grade their work, and then being unable to even take points off because out of 6 paragraphs every paragraph they wrote was exactly the same, or being unable to take points off because the citations they used were 500% irrelevant to the essay content, etc. In contrast during my Bachelor's, you would fail an essay for even one period wrong in your APA citation, if you had no citations or your citations were irrelevant, if your essay was incoherent, etc.
- I have no idea why Uopeople doesn't summarize the relevant information for every week and put it into a single PDF. Most of the materials are written incoherently, as a ramble, unprofessionally, or are supposedly written about modern times but are actually several decades old (it is 2024, an article on China's "modern" education system is no longer accurate if it was written in 2001 - and they should not be using sources about Education written by travel agencies). So you read 50-100 pages and only around 2 of those are actually useful. You can usually just google and get a ONE SENTENCE explanation that is just as good and lets you pass the assignment. Additionally, you click on 20 or more separate links per week per class to access the reading material. This is made more annoying by that you have to then click through a bunch of pages to access the actual file to download, click past all the "accept my cookies". There will occasionally be dead links and WayBack Machine does not have the page archived.
- How much each type of assignment is worth is not the same for every course, nor does it often make sense, so it's hard to remember this for each course. As an example, in one course your portfolio assignments are 45% of your final course grade, in another they're 10%. Even if all the portfolio assignments are worth 45%, it may turn out that the discussion posts which are worth 10% are more labor intensive than the portfolio assignments.
Major cons:
- None of the course assignments are relevant to real life and none of the assignments that go into your "portfolio" would help you get any jobs. As an example, in the Curriculum class we did not have to create a curriculum for an imaginary situation, nor did we have to analyze the curriculum (syllabus or tools used) of a sample course or school. Despite being a US-based school, we did not ever read a list of curriculum requirements for US public schools for example. In the Assessments course, we did not have to ever create a sample assessment, nor did we have to analyze or improve the assessment shown in a video or the reading, etc.
- The Website layout is not disability friendly. If your text size is too big or screen resolution is too small it cuts off buttons, makes parts of the site or notifications inaccessible and unreadable, etc. I also experienced several bugs over the course of my 2 terms in general.
- No way to submit late assignments, regardless of if you have an official medical diagnosis, had a multi-day power and internet outage, etc which interferes with your work. This led me to getting a D- in a course due to not turning in all my assignments, when the ones I did turn in all got As and Bs. Some classmates in my same class said the teachers had let THEM turn in late assignments, but when I messaged my professors none of them answered.
- My official academic advisor for the Master's, 1) didn't know a C- is a failing grade for Master's students, so told me I had passed a course I'd gotten a D- in. 2) told me Uopeople can't send digital transcripts to any other institution, and thus that I needed to send my unofficial transcripts, myself, to the other institution so they could accept them for credit transfer. I don't know about you but I have never heard of a school that accepts unofficial transcripts in their admissions, nor do most schools accept transcripts submitted by the student and not coming directly from their previous school.
- If you fail a course, you have to pay another $300, take that course again from scratch, and originally you were not allowed to reuse assignments because it's "self-plagiarism". So you could have gotten an A on all assignments but failed the course just because your group project failed - then you were not allowed to reuse any assignments that had already been graded as As by the professor earlier. Now you can supposedly get special permission to reuse assignments.
- Uopeople told me in big red text in several places that I had to get a WES USA report ($300) for my Bachelor's. When I did, they replied saying my Bachelor's had already been accepted, I did not need the WES report and the text had been "a mistake" and that I should "ask for a refund from WES". Obviously WES does not give refunds.
- They advertise that a Master's can be finished in 7 months. In reality they restrict most students to 2 courses per term so it will take at least 1.5 years. If they just improved their reading materials, fixed all assignment rubrics, and required all students to take a Academic Writing course before taking a real course, students would perform better.
- Uopeople doesn't give scholarships to Master's students. Period. So you can have an income of less than $300 a month, be officially diagnosed as mentally and physically disabled, and they are still not going to give you a scholarship. Meanwhile they usually don't even require proof of anything for Bachelor's students to get full scholarships. And Uopeople is not in connection with anyone else who you can get a scholarship from, including FAFSA.
- Professors wanted a recorded presentation of a PowerPoint project (this was not in the grading rubric or assignment instructions, which only said to turn in the PPT file itself). The professor accepted a presentation done entirely with text to speech, where the student's head was also entirely created by AI. So there is no proof the student themselves even did any of the work, nor does their submission prove the student's presentation skills (which was also not a category on the rubric).
End result:
A Uopeople Master's of Education was originally going to cost me $5,300 (including WES USA) and take at least 1.5 years. After 2 terms it was going to cost me $5,600 (because I'd gotten one D-) and still take at least 1.5 years. Eventually I found out I could get a Master's degree in the same subject with essentially the same courses from WGU for $4,000 or less within 6 months - unlike Uopeople, WGU has grants, FAFSA and even a "rural living" grant and "new year's sale" if you don't qualify for anything else - and at WGU you can retake any failed exams and resubmit any failed assignments immediately, instead of taking another 8 weeks and $300 to do the whole course over again from scratch. So I decided to switch to WGU as at this point, even 2 terms at WGU done with any one grant is going to be cheaper and faster than the Uopeople degree in the same subject of the same credit length.
WGU having regional accreditation and UoPeople having national accreditation status was not a factor in this decision, because my state judges DEAC accreditation as equal to regional accreditation for getting a teacher's license, so both Uopeople and WGU would have gotten me a teacher's license after graduating.
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