Is this a scam? Laureate Online Education & University of Liverpool MSc programmes

It is natural to defend the programme you’ve completed, although you could be associated with the university too. In a nutshell the reality is that Laureate have a lot to improve and equally University of Liverpool can be more involved in ensuring academic quality of their online programmes (assuming they are not present in classrooms and I’ve not seen evidence to suggest they are).

In answer to my original post at the beginning of this thread, from my own personal experience, University of Liverpool Online programs are obviously not a scam and as of last year their IT postgraduate programmes were awarded British Computer Society accreditation, which is a positive sign for those in doubt.

I think there is a common misconception about online programmes when it comes to substance and value gained during the process. My programme for example is much more intensive than anyone would expect an online programme can be and having shared the structure of an academic week with my friends and colleagues – the prevailing reaction is that it is intense and that it is a very big commitment, yet nevertheless worthwhile. I also enjoy the research element of the programme and have never experienced any outages or performance issues while using the University of Liverpool Library for Online Programmes.

Regrettably the library is one of the few things provided by University of Liverpool directly, to my knowledge that is, and anyone enrolling in their online programmes should be painfully aware that they are Laureate students. Also the 10% are misleading and inaccurate as all people we interact with including instructors are not from the University of Liverpool plus we don’t spend 90% of the time in the library.

The most problems I have had are to do with billing and to this day Laureate are still struggling after the LENS migration. To give you an example I’ve taken 3 modules last year – in contrast the billing system has issued 9 invoices; the outstanding balance displayed is often wrong; invoices never show which module they refer to; you pay balance on time then the system cancels the invoice and your payment is gone; last but not least any interaction with bursar team is infuriating at best and I have been fairly patient and accommodating when having to submit credit card statements in the past as they could not allocate payments properly etc. So yes they have a lot to improve and the five step complaints procedure is engineered in a way preventing you to voice your concerns to University of Liverpool, which is a shame.

The other big issue I have is related to discussions in class, which are not adequately moderated. Verbatim copying is present almost in every class, which defeats the purpose of the discussion and decreases the value of the whole experience. In my last module for example I flagged two obvious cases of plagiarism to the instructor and although I should highlight that a large percent of the course instructors have PhDs - it is perhaps necessary that their research assistants or someone less senior moderates the forums or simply every response is submitted via turnitin to alleviate the issue above. For programme conducted online and asynchronously it is imperative for this issue to be addressed, while you should note that students are unlikely to complain about plagiarism.

Also support for mobile clients is essential for online programmes and it’s a shame that no tablets or smartphones can be used with the learning environment especially when you need to follow up a thread and respond. Laureate have even blocked the use of the blackboard client for iOS or Android and those ought to be addressed – we are not moving away from smartphones or tablets, on the contrary the sales of computers are dropping and not the other way around.

Last issue that comes to mind is how often content is being updated. My last module had its content revised in 2008/2009, judging by the time stamps on lecture notes PDFs that is, and let’s face it for a computer security programme this is too long considering how threats landscape for example changes much more rapidly. I suppose this can be covered using “this is fundamentals” argument.

Overall if you pay your programme in advance so that you don’t have to interact with Laureate – the experience will be much more positive. In my case these interactions over billing issues have at times overshadowed anything else, but as you can see there is a margin for improvement (a rather large one).