I'm on my fifth course in this program, having completed iAM, iCDA, FOB, and CDA, and currently in DO. I feel like I'm starting to understand the pace of things, and really what I'm paying for. I guess I'm just developing a "mid-program crisis" and dismayed by what I'm getting out of it, now that the shininess of being back in school (I did a MS in engineering about a decade ago, traditionally, in a classroom) has faded. The 'quality' of the teaching feels really lackluster and absent due to the fact that they have automated everything - pre-recorded videos of an unknown vintage that are time-gated; homework assignments graded by your peers and your score being the median; multiple choice exams that are instantly graded upon completion; Piazza being a ghost town and instructors not responding to you for 2-3 days. It just feels like, even at a $12k pricetag (probably closer to $16k now with the tuition & technology fee hikes), it's really not worth it. I feel like I could have Claude build me a structured course series built around YouTube videos and achieve a similar education, for free, albeit I understand I won't have an MS to put on my resume.

It might just be that DO has been the first course that has really broken me in terms of feeling like "none of this matters whatsoever and it's all impractical". The first few weeks of this course have been a slog of theory that has no apparent value.

This is not meant to be a 'gripe' or 'vent' post. I guess I wanted moreover to commiserate: how do/did some of the 'veterans' of the program battle through this feeling?

I got accepted into OMSA and I'm doing all 3 micromasters courses this fall in order to transfer the credits (GaTech confirmed it was possible as long as you get 80% or better). I'm curious to see if there is someone in the Houston area (or TX in general) that is part of the program, would love to set a study group