A couple of years ago some research was
done in the Provost's office about
people in Alabama and what kind of
demand there might be for online
undergraduate degrees of course we've
done an online graduate degrees for
years and years and years to graduate
outreach program but we haven't done an
undergrad degree so we were looking at
what kind of demand there might be and
found a million people in Alabama with
some college but no degree so we've got
just right in our backyard there's a
large market so we hired a market
research company that did some
investigation and found that of all the
degrees we might offer computer science
was one for which there was significant
demand this degree is really very
focused toward practicing professionals
who will be writing software and we
developed a curriculum we believe that
it's appropriate right now for online
students to succeed in learning how to
write software you will learn the same
kinds of things in terms of the
fundamental theory behind software
development as well as application
design you'll learn how to develop PC
applications web applications
applications for mobile phones we're
really trying to target all the same
kinds of development that our on-campus
students have learn to do an online
course really never stops people often
are doing this in addition to full-time
employment or to family responsibilities
so they're working it in in their
schedule whenever they can sometimes at
night and sometimes on weekends and we
have to be responsive to people's needs
those ways and so it really is not
restricted just to the 8:00 to 5:00 work
day there's just too many people who can
be served this way who can't be served
by a traditional program for us to pass
up that opportunity current plan is to
start the program in January of 2018
this program is organized into sort of
small terms not traditional semesters
that students take courses over the
course of a seven and a half week term
they're five seven and a half week terms
per year and if you take two courses per
seven and a half week term you will
finish in two years
