Foreign Perspectives

Once I’d the modern languages degree nailed down I thought I’d have a look around for what was available to do next.

My first look was at what was on offer from the Open University and it’s a pretty substantial list of courses under just about every possible faculty. The only notable thing missing is an all-out medical degree though they seem to be working up to that as they’ve a range of courses covering a lot of topics in that area.

However I thought that I’d have a look around online to see what was on offer around the world and it’s a very mixed bag. A growing number of universities put parts of their courses online as a taster and a number of others offer full-blown degrees taught largely or completely online. Fancy a degree from Harvard? Well, you can pick up a range of liberal arts degrees via their extension school. Sadly, Yales’s contribution doesn’t currently come with course credit but I suspect that they’re working up to that.

But it’s not just the big names that are in this market. If you’re looking for courses that’ll give you credit I found: Athabasca, Atlanta, Colorado, Ellis, Harvard, Illinois, London, New York, Notre Dame, Open University, Oxford, Queensland, Penn State, Walden after a good trawl through those offering courses online.

By and large the big names offer a fairly limited range of courses and qualifications; notable exceptions to this are Harvard, London and the Open University. However, the range of courses on offer and the number of universities offering such courses is increasing all the time: given a few more years it seems likely that it’ll be the norm for universities to offer at least some of their courses online.

One big plus point is that, by and large, most of these online offerings are open access which means that you don’t need qualifications to get admitted to the various courses. Having said that, some do demand SAT scores and the like.