Physics Bachelor's online program?

I would appreciate information on any online Physics B.S program that might be available at a legitimate college or university. I know of a few graduate programs, but nothing at the undergraduate level.

 

A few ideas (I'm not sure all of these schools have the program you're looking for, but most should):

The University of London
Excelsior College
Thomas Edison State College

Other folks will have useful suggestions to offer, I suspect.

Good luck!


Cheers,

------------------
Tom Head
www.tomhead.net

co-author, Bears' Guide to the Best Education Degrees by Distance Learning (Ten Speed Press)
co-author, Get Your IT Degree and Get Ahead (Osborne/McGraw-Hill)

 

I do not think you will find something completely online. I completed the Excelsior degree in physics. However, I did mostly coursework through a traditional university combined with independent study.

I would think that the easiest route would be to complete the GRE subject physics exam scoring high enough to earn practically all of your credits in the discipline. You would still have to get in some courses somewhere to get your lab requirements completed. There may also be independent study and online physics courses available too which can be researched through Excelsior's DistanceLearn database at:
http://www.excelsior.edu/ls_dstln.htm

John

 

As John Wetsch says, a problem will be that many of your major courses in physics will be lab courses. That will probably make your physical presence necessary, somewhere.

Have you considered a BS in applied mathematics? It shouldn't be too hard to tailor such a program to address physical problems, and you could signifantly reduce the number of labs that way. Add in a good physics GRE score, and I suspect that you could get into at least some physics graduate programs by that route.

Of course, that raises the question whether there are any suitable DL applied math bachelors programs. Tom Head's suggestions probably work here too.

 

Thanks very much for the suggestions. I wasn't asking for myself, but rather for someone else who lives in new Hampshire and who complains that there seems to be no legitimate institution offering an online BS in Physics. He realizes that the lab requirement is a problem, but wonders why there is no way around it. "At first glance, it seems that the labs could easily be reproduced in ones' home or through an affiliation with a local university to use their lab facilities. Also, a TA or instructor could be available online or via the telephone for Distance Learning Students if help with a lab is absolutely
necessary at some agreeable time of course.

I for one would purchase all the lab equipment, especially since we are
talking mostly Newtonian Physics here. The equipment is not that complicated from my recollection and is often very aged at most universities anyway. I mean we are talking about a scale, some weights, other measuring
devices and some other props of the like to help perform the basic labs of an undergraduate Degree."

 

Your intro course will require some equipment for Newtonian experiments but I remember a lot of equipment that would be expensive to purchase with some used in other intro labs and others in upper division labs too:

Liquid Nitrogen
Pyrometer
Laser
Spectrometer
Ellipsometer
Radioactive Material + Counter


and there was a large variety of electronic equipment too. By finding out what courses are available you may find an introductory lab or two -- Penn State used to offer an introductory distance optics lab. I do think you will be very hard pressed to be able to find any advanced lab work online or by distance.

John

 

I encourage your friend to explore the options outlined above. However, I have to agree with the comments about the lab requirements, especially the equipment. The "Newtonian physics" you refer to and the associated equipment relates to mechanics, which is usually a freshman course. After that there is electricity and magnetism, optics, dynamics, some atomic physics, modern physics and perhaps thermodynamics, advanced electromagnetics and relativity. There is lab equipment associated with all of these topics, some of it relatively simple but still specialized and some of it way out of reach of an individual student.

Good luck.

Ted Cooke, BS Physics, Loyola Marymount 1977
MBA, UCLA 1979
DBA, Cal Coast 2000