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Help finding an online school for an Education degree
ChillyWilly
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm an American currently living in South Korea. I can do my student teaching back in America no problem.
However, I'm trying to find a school that does it's regular courses 100% online so I can do everything but the student teaching on my computer.
I'm looking for Bachelors degree programs or MAT (Master in the Art of Teaching) programs that can be done in this setting. Any help would be much appreciated.
However, I'm trying to find a school that does it's regular courses 100% online so I can do everything but the student teaching on my computer.
I'm looking for Bachelors degree programs or MAT (Master in the Art of Teaching) programs that can be done in this setting. Any help would be much appreciated.
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Usual advice in the current teaching environment is to get a bachelors and masters in your focus area field rather than in pedagogy for best chance of employment (you want to teach math, get a math degree, etc.). The exception here is in early childhood due to the certifications you generally get in those programs, but most certifications are statewide and online programs do not grant such credentialing.
(I'm an academic advisor at a public university and do a lot of research into this topic).
Did you mean 'Online only' or 'Online for-profit' schools? Because there's several online programs out there that are just the recorded version of an actual class held a few days prior on the school's main campus. If the program is tied to a real university, public or private, with a good reputation, I've found them to be pretty good.
Unfortunately I'm only familiar with the engineering degree ones; I have no idea who would offer good teaching oriented degrees.
So, plenty of public, fully accredited institutions offer online bachelors and masters programs in higher education. Nearly every public institution of size will offer such programs, so finding an accredited one is not hard at all. Many are quite good, using a combination of forum-style discussion groups, live professor lectures through adobe connect, recorded lectures, and lots of other tools to offer a competent educational experience. As far as them existing and being interesting and useful, that's a non issue. You can learn that way easily and find programs as plentiful as stars in the sky.
As far as using those degrees, thats the problem. The market in most teaching disciplines, both in the US and abroad in many markets, is so flooded that most disciplines will simply not consider a student with an education degree rather than the discipline as the prevailing perspective in both K-12 and college education is that you can teach pedagogy on the job, but you can't teach discipline based knowledge. Many education programs try to counter this philosophy, especially over the last 5 years or so, by adding 18 or more credit hours in discipline as part of your career in order to give you a bit of both. Most search committees don't care, though.
Look at it this way: I'm hiring an English teacher for my community college. An average posting (at least in Flordia) for an introductory instructor position at ~$31, 500 for a 9 month faculty will have somewhere between 100 and 300 applicants and probably 60 qualified candidates, pessimistically. For tenure, add another hundred to the pool total and probably 50 to the qualified total. When looking at those candidates, I have the luxury of really drilling down on my credentials. A student who came from an English program, has an English live Teaching Assistant position, some undergrad research, and strong GPA is going to get the job. I'll probably have 4-7 candidates in that range, at least, and will be able to pick the chosen candidate based upon personality and other factors.
An education student does have some to offer the English candidates don't, but almost always that's going to be directly from actual teaching experience in field through the design of the BA or masters program. Online programs do not offer TA positions and rarely have undergraduate research opportunities. You will easily end up qualified in credentials, but getting hired in field will be extremely difficult. Usually the only draw for an online MA in education are for the already employed (which are who those programs are designed for). Generally the target student for those programs are established High School teachers of 5-10 years in field looking for a pay raise at their current job based upon getting an additional credentialing. Online programs of this nature are not looking to place new teachers into the field. If this is what the OP is looking for due to his circumstances (which could be the case given that teaching opportunities are apparently no problem), then really any MA from an accredited public institution would work. If he is looking to start into the field, it won't be hugely helpful in most cases.
Again, the exception here is in Early Childhood Education, which is a whole separate beast.
EDIT: @Enc
Early childhood (K-6) is actually the area I was going to focus on getting my degree in. Probably Interdisciplinary Studies. What makes EC a different beast?
Credentialing. You will want to get an early childhood ed degree from an institution in the state you want to work in and make sure that the program gets you your credentialing internship and facetime hours along the way. A good program should get you all, or nearly all, of your mandatory in-classroom hours for state credentialing built into the program. Online probably isn't the best way of doing this as well for similar reasons. As a general rule, early childhood education jobs only go to those with degrees in early childhood education (or a boatload of experience).
Interdisciplinary studies programs have a lasting stigma of being the "5 year senior" program, which is really uncharitable and is a product of how most were run back in the 90s and early 2000s. Most are now really solid programs straddling multiple disciplines, but not every administrator will see it that way. If you do IDS majors, make sure your focus area is highlighted on the diploma or make sure you focus on that area in your interviews and CV.
Most universities have a Faculty Center devoted to teaching teachers pedagogy, so it's not really that big of a problem. There are some perks to the education degree model, but more downsides than upsides in actual practice. A lot of education teachers run into the instructor wall (get hired as an instructor but can never make tenure) since education degrees rarely promote enough mastery in field to get published in anything but education pedagogy and psychology (which itself is a pretty flooded field).