Job Discussion Forums

[sheikh yer money-maker]

[redsnapper]

[Cleopatra]

[redsnapper]

[helenl]

HCT will hire people with online degrees (and are fully aware they were online) - oooohhh - you said reputable employers didn't you?

[sheikh yer money-maker]

...oooohhh - you said reputable employers didn't you?

Nice!

[naturegirl321]

[sheikh yer money-maker]

I never EVER said that I'd lie about my degree.

Actually, you've said the opposite. It was some wordsmith who proposed that "a person could" do such a thing. But in NO WAY suggesting that someone SHOULD lie. Oh, dearie me, banish the thought!

I mean, I could put a gun in your hand and tell you that it's loaded, but should you take it that I'm proposing that you use it? Well, that's your poor reception problems!

[veiledsentiments]

Just to point out the Ministry of Higher Education accepts online degrees, so I expect that all of the universities in the Emirates accept them... with the experience actually being the key to being hired.

VS

[Zero]

OK, let me retract my earlier post and put it in terms of what I propose "will" happen. Universities will increasingly make it hard to tell whether the degrees they award were done online or in person. (Easier to enroll online students and make money that way.) Employers won't be able to tell by the name of the university, either, because the current trend is for very reputable schools such as Duke University and Johns Hopkins University to offer online-only degrees in various fields. Potential employees won't volunteer the information. If asked, quite a few will lie. (Possibly dooming their own souls to hell.) Middle East employers will eventually throw their hands in the air and say, "Short of hiring a private detective, there's no way to tell." Then it will no longer matter. In fact I'd say it's pretty close to that point now.

[redsnapper]

[Zero]

There's not a matter of "candidates like me." I do not happen to have an online degree. However, I do not share your disdain of degrees obtained via distance learning. I take offense to the notion that doing degrees in person is "the way everyone else did" and that doing the degree online is "because you were too lazy to do things the right way." Some of the best in the business offer degrees entirely online nowadays in quite a few majors. That includes the Ivy League. In the end the school either awarded the degree or it didn't, so I do not agree with your repeated use of phrasing such as "lying," "covering up" and "burden is on you not me." Some people will have completed degrees via distance learning while not employed -- trailing spouses, for example -- and the resume won't necessarily reflect where the person was living. Granted the ESL/EFL world is small and you may know it well enough to know the universities that commonly award degrees online and those that don't. By contrast, with MBAs the lines are currently so blurry it would be hard to tell indeed. But MA TESOL and applied linguistics are on the same path.

For resumes, I would advise people to be accurate and phrase the degree just as it appears on the certificate, whether that incorporates the word "online" or not. And whenever follow-up questions are asked, I would advise to answer them accurately. In the majority of cases, I doubt the "way" the degree was obtained will be spelled out explicitly, and I doubt that follow-up questions will be asked, and I do not consider that to be "covering up" anything.

In a few cases, hiring committees will take themselves quite seriously and may fancy themselves to be truly a part of academia. In that case, they may dig in a bit further and look down their noses at people who completed their degrees online. That's nice. They should offer tenure.

[justcolleen]

[naturegirl321]

[redsnapper]