The Unexpected Pedagogical Benefits of Making Higher Education Accessible

Abstract

Many ongoing efforts in online education aim to increase accessibility through affordability and flexibility, but some critics have noted that pedagogy often suffers during these efforts. In contrast, in the low-cost for-credit Georgia Tech Online Masters of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program, we have observed that the features that make the program accessible also lead to pedagogical benefits. In this paper, we discuss the pedagogical benefits, and draw a causal link between those benefits and the factors that increase the program's accessibility.