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by nsomaru 2725 days ago
The University of South Africa is one of the largest correspondence universities in the world. Also, the course material is quite good but the support not so much (teachers and profs might take some time to respond, YMMV).

Also about 5x cheaper than the equivalent in the UK.

2 comments

My missus does her Master's degree through UNISA and it seems to be quite good in terms of quality and course material. As you say, the only issue is the support but so be a bit patient on that. I believe Nelson Mandela also studied at UNISA when he was imprisoned at Robben Eiland.
I went to look at their curriculum and fees and their website and programs are so hard to make sense of. You pay by module and the module consists of 12 credits to take to complete the module.
For an example the calculated UNISA fees for COS3711 Advanced Programming (Part of the Math & Comp Science program), when you include the 'Foreign Country Levy' is total 4110rand, which is $300usd. There's prob other smaller fees, like exam fees.

UNISA accreditation, seems they let their DETC (US National) accreditation lapse in 2004 but they're still accredited under commonwealth/UN IHU https://iaci-canada.com/accreditation which they claim qualifies as recognized by the US Dept. of Education though I have no idea how accreditation in the US works, so I would look into this more.

It’s actually simpler because the modules each grant you a number of credits, that’s it. Passing means you get the credits.

Yeah the main website sucks but they use Moodle to manage courses and it’s okay.