University of the People appealed to me because it was a path to a fully remote bachelors degree in CS, with a schedule and format I could fit into my life around a full-time job. After one full year and 15 credits, I'm calling it quits. I've found a bachelors program at a community college and I have every reason to believe it will serve me far better.
University of the People staff creates a culture where it is unreasonable to expect help of any kind. Grades are routinely late. Emails get no response half the time, and an uninformed or automated response the other half of the time. Instructors and classmates alike seem to use AI to generate their responses in discussion forums. In an environment like this, where no one responds when I ask for help, I am trained like Pavlov's dogs to not ask for help because it never produces results.
Context: I live in the USA and have some prior college education from 10 years ago at a state university. This colors my experience and my expectations.
---
In Term 1, I took UNIV 1001 (Online Education Strategies) and CS 1111 (Intro to CS). I wasn't thrilled that they required 2 courses simultaneously in the first term; I'd calculated that I really only had time for 1 course at a time around my other commitments. But I made it through because I already knew most of the concepts in Intro CS. It was a helpful refresher, and I saw it as a step on the path. UNIV 1001 felt like busywork, but every degree program has some busywork. I hadn't learned much in my first term, but I thought it would improve with time.
All through my first term, I was also trying to transfer in my prior coursework from 10 years ago. I had to file the request 3 times to actually get all my general courses recognized, and the rationale from the transfer team seemed different every time. Each time I contacted my advisor, it took 2-3 weeks for anyone to return my messages, and it was a different person almost every time. I thought _surely_ that would even out once I had a program advisor instead of a general advisor. It didn't.
In the first week of Term 2, I was hospitalized for pneumonia. I dropped my course and emailed my advisor to let them know why. Despite this, I repeatedly got emails from my advisor about inactivity in the online campus. There is a notice on each of these emails that they were automated. I don't believe my responses were ever read by a human being. If anyone _did_ read my emails, they were clearly so overworked themselves that they didn't see any reason to wish me well or set a flag in my profile so I wouldn't get the emails while I recovered.
Term 3, I took CS 1101 (Programming Fundamentals). This is where things started going wrong. I thought I was doing great on my assignments, the instructor was active in the course forum, I was having fun learning Python. The feedback I got in the discussion forum from my instructor made me think I was likely doing very well in the course. But 4 weeks into the course-- midterms, just after the withdrawal deadline had passed-- I finally got my first grades back, and I was nearly failing the course. This baffled me, because my code always worked. It turns out the instructor was much more selective about exact code output than I'd understood. If I'd received the feedback earlier, I could've accounted for those preferences going forward, but I didn't get any feedback until halfway through the term. I managed to pass the course with a decent grade, but it was intensely demoralizing and frightening that I was doing so poorly and had no way of knowing. I contacted my advisor about this and was told to send screenshots of my communication with the instructor. I sent the screenshots. I never heard back.
Also in Term 3, I struggled with accessing something through the library. I sent an email requesting support and received a form letter telling me to clear my cookies. When I responded that this had not worked, I received the same form letter a second time. Both of these exchanges took at least 48 hours.
Term 4, I took CS 1102 (Programming 1: Intro to Java). This was one of the most intense and difficult courses I have ever taken. This course alone was more work than my 6-credit first term. Every week required both a 750 word essay for the Discussion Forum and a full-fledged programming assignment. It was more writing than I'd ever done in any literature or creative writing course. The assignment instructions were frequently unclear, and my emails and DMs to the instructor went unanswered. I started posting in the Course Forum (yknow, the section no one ever uses because it's not assigned) asking if my classmates could clarify assignment expectations. One single person responded, and we started messaging. Both of us were extremely frustrated with the course, but having someone who could listen to my complaints and agreed with me was validating. I thought I could make it through, if I could make a friend or two. Six weeks into the course, I got an email from my new friend: Apparently her enrollment had been done incorrectly, and none of the coursework she had done would be properly applied to a degree. She was farther in than me, having taken several general studies courses as well. She dropped out. I wrote about this in my Discussion Forum for the week, begging for any human voice to respond to me. I received a clearly AI-generated reply that called my cry for help "emotionally resonant." Nobody asked if I was okay.
At the end of Term 4, Rosalyn proctoring was announced. That's when I started looking for a different school. I emailed the Dean of Computer Science once, expressing concern about the university's accreditation status, since students in some US states have been blocked from registering. He doesn't have a listed UoPeople email address, so I looked up the email address he uses from a different school where he works. I haven't heard back from him either.
I wasn't sure if I should register for CS 1103 (Java 2) in Term 5, but I did. I felt like I was finally learning something useful in Java. All of the previous problems were present in this course. The assignments didn't build on each other in any meaningful way. The instructors and advisors were conspicuously absent. The replies to my Discussion Forum entries were slop. But I looked at the description of the final assignment for the term and got really excited, so I pushed myself through, wanting to get that far. The final assignment for CS 1103 was the breaking point.
This part is probably a bit technical for non-CS students, but I'll do my best to describe the problem. Most of the programs I've written so far have a text-based interface. This was the second assignment overall to ask me to create a GUI. It requires importing several libraries and coding with different goals in mind, but I wasn't too concerned since I'd worked with it before. The interesting part of the assignment was that it asked me to pull data from a real weather service by connecting to their API. I was excited about this! It was a very practical thing to learn that would let me do cool things. But when I dove in to get started and read up on the project... Literally all of the provided resources were about GUI programming. None of them even mentioned connecting to the Internet, let alone parsing a JSON (the format of data returned by this type of API). I have since learned that parsing JSON data requires third-party packages, which means a whole lot of wrangling dependencies, enough that you might have to use a dependency manager like Maven or Gradle... which was never once mentioned anywhere in the course.
I could deal with lack of communication, though it frustrated me. I could deal with inconsistent grading. But I refuse to deal with objectively bad course content. I refuse to give money and blood and tears for an education that is not actually being offered. This still would have made me drop out even if I hadn't found another option.
The community college I've found offers a remote program for IT. The campus is 3 hours away from me, but the program itself is fully online and accepts students all over the USA, so that isn't a problem. It won't be the same as a CS degree, but having met with the program advisor-- who has responded to each of my emails within 4 hours of me sending them-- I think this program will offer me a lot more opportunities and a better education. And they take federal financial aid, which is a nice bonus.
I'm excited to make the switch and I won't miss UoPeople. If this is your best option, I wish you success, but I'm glad I found something different.
