San Jose State University

Although I would not immediately recommend this program to just anybody that is interested, it MIGHT be an ideal program in a particular situation depending on the student's career path and what they want and expect from this degree. However, my impression of the curriculum in this online graduate degree program is that it is more of an OVERVIEW or SURVEY of informatics in general. Each semester is divided in half with courses being 9 weeks in length. This time frame worked out fine for some courses,... Read More but other courses, the more technical ones requiring the downloading, understanding and use of software, should have been full length semester courses. Case in point: the course Big Data Analytics, a fantastic subject with a fantastic instructor, but we students were simply overwhelmed with information and the course felt very rushed. Again, the course was more of a SURVEY of Big Data, without going too far into any one subject for very long, simply because there was not enough time to do so. We had to move along. The same can be said for the course Human Centered Design, which was an overview of designing and developing user-centered knowledge structures for the Web environment. Although this was a two-unit course, it was one of the most difficult courses in the program because it involved learning a number of software tools, forming groups to work with, and developing a group presentation, all online, and all in the span of half a semester. Again, it should have been a full semester course. The career pathway (specialization) courses were overall very good, particularly the health informatics courses. The cybersecurity courses were good, but we spent far too much time using the same software program doing repetitive tasks as instructed by the software, and it just went for far too long in this manner. The lectures were excellent, however. The saving grace of this program for me was that it was still relatively inexpensive for a 30-unit graduate program when I signed up and started in January 2020 through my graduation in 2022. However, I understand that the tuition at SJSU has gone up in 2023. So, I feel that this program is great for someone already working in health informatics or cybersecurity and who wants to reinforce the knowledge that they already have in order to advance their career. For someone with no experience who wants to get that knowledge from a graduate degree program, this program will help, but falls short in certain areas. Ultimately, I can recommend the program to some, but not to all.

Avoid the UW Data Science master's programs at all costs! The professors didn't really teach anything at all. Normally i would be fine with this, if they would just give us books to read or other sources to study from. But the material they provided did not actually cover what we were expected to learn. They prided themselves on their website & chatsite to give information, but they still didn't use it to teach anything, and the sites were not as impressive as other free options elsewhere. All they... Read More did on the sites was answer ad hoc questions irrelevant to the material that we were supposed to be learning. The sole exception to all of the above was the one marketing class they require you to take, which was decent. All of the other courses were bogus. The professors didn't really know what they were doing. You could tell the university was just trying to jump on the bandwagon of providing data science degrees without actually thinking through what would be necessary to teach within such a degree.