CU Boulder Masters on Coursera

[spohara]

Thank you for your report! May I ask, do you have a background or undergraduate in Engineering? And will the ME-EM serve your professional purposes better than pursuing an MBA?

I'm planning on doing the upcoming MS-CS from CU Boulder as well, but I imagine tt won't be as easy to accelerate as how you're currently finding your program. I hope to be able to do 2 courses per 8 week term as I imagine 3 may be pushing it and 4 would be too much,

My background - Academic: just what is listed in my signature.  Professional: I did telecom network stuff a long time ago, and about 7-8 years ago I worked as an electronics tech in a reverse engineering lab.  For the last 7-8 years I've mostly been doing data analysis, but I've moved over into the business side of software development and just started a new job as a program manager.

I think the ME-EM curriculum looks a bit better than an MBA for my purposes.  It touches on project management, some agile development, and soon they should have a course on product development, which is really in my wheelhouse.  It also centers on managing technical teams rather than just general organizational leadership.  There is room in my overall subject matter expertise to do work in Software, engineering, ML/AI, Robotics, etc so I think it gives me flexibility to go into those areas.  I think the MBA designation is much more well known and will be accepted in the business community, but I don' think that will matter for me.  I also considered an MPA since I work in the public sector.  What sold me was the try before you buy - I was able to get 90% of the course content knocked out before I even enrolled which gives me better odds of getting high grades, and the 1-credit chunks which gives me flexibility with a small kid and another on the way.

I haven't looked closely at the MSCS, but I was strongly considering the MSDS before I moved into the program management side of things, and that curriculum looked a lot tougher than the ME-EM. Three hours in 8 weeks is like 6 in a full semester, 9 is usually considered fulltime. There is a long enrollment window and you can always start non-credit and upgrade mid session (I recommend this to ensure success).  You can always hold off until next session and finish a class in the first week or two if you want.

---

Basically, It's going to take at about 24 months and cost $20K as per their webpage: https://www.coursera.org/degrees/me-engi...nt-boulder

$20k for this one, but I think 24 months is just something they slap on there.  You can go at any pace and I think even pacing yourself it would be possible to do this in 20 (that is 3 hours per session, equivalent to 6hr in a traditional semester).  I really expect to be finished this in about 18 months and I have a lot of other obligations coming up.

And an FYI, some of their other ones on Coursera are $15k.  Still not cheap, but manageable.  I'm not paying for mine so this isn't a huge deal for me, but the tradeoff is the flexibility this program offers.  If these were all $10k programs I'd say they'd be a front runner for almost everyone.