I’ve seen lots of press about the Udacity + Georgia Tech = Credentialed Online CS Masters announcement.  The thing that excites me is that we now have a top-10 computer science university leveraging their reputation to get into credentialing.

As I’ve said before, online learning is the easy part, getting recognized (credentialed) is the missing piece.  The official announcement doesn’t mention how the learning is assessed and the student authenticated, but the FAQ indicates they will use proctoring partners, which the chronicle of higher education indicates is Pearson VUE:

All exams are proctored using national proctoring standards. We have access to 4,500 physical proctoring facilities and are working with online proctoring institutions.

It looks like they will not be piggy-backing on existing MOOCs that are hosted by Udacity, but Georgia-Tech will develop and manage their own curriculum:

The curriculum in the pilot OMS CS will represent a subset of the on-campus curriculum, allowing for a full MS in computer science but with only some of the specializations available in the on-campus program. The OMS CS curriculum will then expand as more courses come online.

It doesn’t look like general enrollment will be open until Fall 2014.  I can’t wait to see how it goes with this program.  This could be the start of affordable accredited online degrees from top-tier universities.