Unaccredited degree assembled from courses at accredited schools

So, we all know my stance on unaccredited degrees: most of the time, a bad choice.

Unless you're learning something like a language where it's more important that you know it than having the piece of paper, or it's a subject that you are interested in but don't plan to ever use career-wise (e.g. the formerly-unaccredited programs we've seen on this board in Buddhist Studies from the Institute of Buddhist Studies [now RA], Financial Engineering from WorldQuant and Philosophy from Newlane [both now NA DEAC]), it's best to stick with accredited, recognized programs.

I recently stumbled upon a "school" called World University, URL https://www.worlduniversity.london. A one-man operation, they claim to offer 5 degree programs for free.

1. MBA in Finance
2. MBA in Marketing
3. MS in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
4. MS in Computer Science, Data Science
5. MA in Economics

Each of these requires 10 courses. They provide a set of 40 options, all of which link to a Coursera-like platform called Class Central I'd not heard of before. You complete the 10 courses at the partner schools and provide proof to World University. Once you have, your diploma is delivered.



It appears the courses lists have not been updated because many of those courses are no longer offered through Class-Central. There also don't seem to be any fees involved, except whatever the partner schools charge for their certificates. The Course-Central links are not affiliate links so I don't think any money is changing hands.

It seems like an interesting model for low-income education if it were done more professionally. They are explicit about having no accreditation. Obviously I wouldn't advise anyone attend this particular "school" (if you can even call it a school, it delivers no learning itself), but the model is interesting to think about.

Thoughts?

 

If it's being done from UK it would look like a clear violation of the 1988 Higher Education Act, i.e it's an offence to award a UK academic degree if the awarding school doesn't have degree-granting authority.

The owner has a clearly Turkish name - Muvaffak Gozaydin, and I thought possibly he might be going around British regulations by operating from Turkey - but I found no evidence to support that theory. He has a Twitter (now X) presence and lists his own educational attainments, including two MS's from Stanford University in the 1960s and a later graduation from Caltech.

Accredited schools have been helping people put degrees together from other accredited sources for many years - e.g. the Big 3 and Athabasca. I think we need them - not this guy's school. Unless he studied Alchemy at Stanford. Then maybe he could transmute courses from lowball "schools" into degrees from an accredited one. And maybe some lead into gold, so he'd no longer have to fiddle with "degrees."

I have no faith in this dude whatsoever. I think these "degrees" are what Turks call "kullanişsiz" - useless.

 

We are - mostly - competent people here and we should make something similar. An unaccredited but degreeinfo.com - approved "degree". Yeah, that would hit the spot.

 

Muvaffak Gozaydin told me in 2019 that he had "30 years of professional life as General Manager of the biggest electronic firm in Turkey ." He said he was
educated in USA, at Caltech, Stanford, at Hewlett Packard Co by Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard from 1962 to 1970 and that he was a Board Member of Babson College European Executive Board from 1995 to 2007.

 

And I note his "sample" diploma lists the courses taken - all at 100% accredited institutions - mostly of very high standards, e.g. Stanford. Not like the "courses" Mr. Gozaydin is dealing in!

Perish the thought! There are people here who would approve Propios from Mars or degrees awarded by extremists and bombing conspirators, or healthcare degrees in complete WOO - e.g. Natural Proton Therapy. We've seen all of that! Be (more) careful what you wish for, Mac!

 

Right now, I'm listening to Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" from around 1959. I remember my feelings when it came out - I was 16. Ray had (and his spirit - and recorded artistry still have) a LOT more to say than this discussion offers. I'm out - gonna listen to the Bedrock Truth for a while. That's my kind of "natural therapy."

 

Menno... as we say on this side of the ocean.

 

OK, he said it. And is it true?

 

Right -- I had to look it up.

 

Mix/matching ANYTHING into an unaccredited degree sounds like a pretty foolish proposition, in general. Whatever you mix into one of those, the whole thing is generally pretty useless. No? What can you do with it, then?

The ingredients are usually worth more on their own. That way, they have individual value and whatever respectability is generally accorded - quite a lot, if they're from known good sources. Lumped together in the blackened, unaccredited cauldron of the witches ---- БЛЯТЬ!

 

The authentic Coursera professional certificates/specializations (as a compilation of single source MOOC courses) have way more value than the "MOOC Master's degree" compilation issued by the one-man operated worlduniversity.london.

 

As I have pointed out many times on this board, you go to a university to get an education and a degree.

I'm not interested in evaluating the content that leads to this award.

The degree is spurious and could cause one great harm in its use.

If you have to do the equivalent learning normally found in an accredited degree in order to obtain this one, why not just do that?

 

Good to know on both points! I'd assume that someone who actually attended top schools as he claims would understand that the material they received there isn't significantly better than that at lower-ranked schools.

Obviously there's a qualitative difference but it's not so significant that it justifies closing 23,000 schools and shifting the burden to 200.

 

Price, for one. But more than that, I thought it was a novel approach to awarding a degree, even though it's obviously unaccredited and unrecognized. I wasn't advocating anyone "attend" there, but rather entertaining the thought experiment of what a degree earned in such a way might look like.

We see in other countries the idea of validating a degree, where one school delivers the learning but the degree comes from a second school.

We also see competency-based education, where (one way of evaluating students) is exams that assess and award credit instead of assignments throughout a term.

I could see an accredited school offering course materials for free (similar to EdX), and allowing you to work through them. When you want to earn a recognized credential, you pay fees to take the exams for those classes and earn the credits. Athabasca offers exactly that on a course-by-course basis called Challenge for Credit, but you need to get approval for each course you wish to challenge and it's just as expensive as taking the course outright so I never took advantage of it even when I had the prior learning, because for the same amount of money I got a professor to grade me throughout the course instead of only on the basis of the exam.

 

Okay, so here's an educative argument against. At the master's level, the degree should have a pointed purpose. What are you mastering? An effective master's program will have courses that are linked, meaningfully designed with each other in mind, creating the desired coverage of the major area of study. (With some flexibility, of course.) But amassing credits in a particular area across multiple platforms? No.

 

I had this thought as well. 10 courses out of 40 gives you a lot of chances to pick a set of courses that don't really flow together.

Quantic requires everyone take courses in sequence with no variation.

Eastern did at first, but now have a model where you must take 4 required courses and then can take 6 electives out of a possible 10 courses offered.

At the same time, if the courses were chosen more selectively you could move closer to the curriculum found in a master's program.

 

I’d be interested in seeing how this thread turned to consider getting an NA degree from assembling various RA credits.

Especially at the graduate level.