For me a good test on the utility of specific institutions is to see who has been studying at University X from a very remote location. North Korea (censorship) Outer Mongolia (yak delivery of texts) Antarctica (infrequent mail) One advantage of online education is few delays. But most of the good value institutions I am considering are still in the dark ages of correspondence studies - which of course has its place.
During my 7 years involvement in marketing the Edinburgh Business School MBA there were some interesting challenges in exam logistics. One was a student who worked at the Chevron facility in Kyrgystan. We found an English-speaking priest in a nearby village who could proctor, but that wasn't good enough for the university. The hospital ship Hope was operating nearby in the Caspian, and Chevron agreed to fly this man to it, by helicopter, where an American doctor would be the proctor. Doctor proctor. One legendary case, not ours, was a student who lived so remotely in Africa there was no one within a 3-day trek. The university actually got a professor there by plane, horse, whatever. In retrospect they decided it would have been easier to pay for the student to come to Scotland.
