A Master's Degree in Astronomy

Perhaps you have seen the advertisements in Sky and Telescope. The offer is for an academic program leading to a Masters of Science degree in Astronomy. The advertiser is Swinburne University of Technology. In 2005, I started taking courses from Swinburne and I’m on schedule for getting my Masters degree in 2009. Here is how it works.

Swinburne University is in Australia in the greater Melbourne area. The Masters program is part of Swinburne Astronomy Online (SAO). SAO has been around since 1998. All of the course work is done remotely. And it is a lot of work. Each of the normal classes lasts 14 weeks and consists of these parts.

E-mail - really a newsgroup. Every two weeks of the course you have to ask at least one question and answer one question in the newsgroup. Obviously, your grade will be better if you do more than the minimum. In addition, during the class you pick 3 of your answers to be graded in detail. This e-mail portion of the class is probably the most like a real classroom because of the give-and-take among your classmates and the teacher. To keep up with this e-mail requires reading 50-150 e-mails per week.

Text - most classes have a textbook which is highly recommended. It might be possible to pass the class without the textbook but I doubt that I could. For each two week segment of the class there are readings. Many of the questions in the newsgroup will be generated from the text but answers are supposed to involve more research.

Essay - early in the class, you have to submit a 2000 word essay on a topic chosen from a list of 5 subjects relevant to the particular class. This essay is expected to be somewhat like a professional astronomical article. References are required and you lose points if they are all Wikipedia pages. One very nice thing about being a student at Swinburne is that you have access to the full articles of many journals including Science, Nature and the Astrophysical Journal.

Tests - since the students and the teacher are remote, all tests are open book. Twice during the class a test will be open for one week. A typical test will consist of 10 questions and each answer must be less than a specified word count – say 20-60 words in most cases. The questions might be from the PowerPoint slides or the text. or it might require some research.

PowerPoint presentations - the replacement for course lectures is a set of PowerPoint slides. In each two week segment of the course, you will view 5-6 presentations averaging 40-50 slides each. Some presentations include short animations, optional background information and several Internet links.

Project - 30% of your final grade is the last assessable item in the class. The project is a 10-12 page paper that is similar to the essay in terms of tone and references. The project can be one chosen from a list or you can pick your own project if it gets approved. You actually choose this project just a couple of weeks into the class so that you have about 3 months to work on it – at least in theory. You are assigned an advisor for the project and they are supposed to help you complete the project and they will grade it when you are done.

What does it cost? Each class currently costs 1100 Australian dollars. The U.S. dollar’s recent slide has raised the actual cost to about $950. Add the cost of the textbook and it’s about $1000 per class. You will receive the PowerPoint presentations on a CD-ROM once your fee is paid. The Masters program requires 12 classes. I have completed 8 classes but I will probably take only one class per semester from now on. Most of the people reading this article will find the early classes fairly easy but they will get harder.

How much math? Some college level math is assumed. You don’t have to do a lot of calculus but you should at least know what differentiation means. Some classes involve almost nothing but math in the tests but that’s just about the only place will you have to use it.

What are the other requirements? To start the Masters program, you will have to show that you completed your bachelor’s degree. Hopefully your transcript includes some Math (see above).

What classes are available? The first three classes you take will probably be a sequence that discusses the Solar System, Stars and the Milky Way, and Galaxies and the Cosmos. These classes are the prerequisites for many of the other courses. Other early classes are on Relativity and Astronomical Tools. Certainly relativity is a mind-(and space-) bending subject so it’s kind of nice to pretty much have one whole unit on that. The unit on tools was a lot more difficult then it sounds and it one of the first units that had a lot of math. The History of Astronomy course was great. Stellar Astrophysics was a ton of math. Next up for me is Radio Astronomy and SETI. Other units are on astrophotography, space exploration (easier if you lived during Project Mercury), astrobiology and particle physics. A few other units are “major projects” which means the class is mostly the project itself. Currently there are 17 possible units.

So how does it work? This seems to be as effective a method of learning as traditional classes. I wish the class included a few lectures. Most of the learning is in writing the essay and project. You can decide on your own way to tackle the course.

Drawbacks? All of that e-mail checking, text reading, and PowerPoint presentation viewing is a lot to complete in each two week segment. You have to work on the tests, essay and project at the same time. If you take more than one course at a time then you have to multiply accordingly. There is a lot of variation among the instructors and project advisors. Some are very helpful while others actually worry about helping too much. Although each of the assessable items contributes a specific amount to the final grade, Swinburne recently added an additional requirement that every major item has to have a certain minimum value. As a result, your project advisor (not your instructor) can flunk you out of the course.

Is it worth it? What you really want to know is, does a Masters degree from Swinburne have the same weight as a masters degree from a normal, accredited, American University? I don’t know. I have no illusions that I’m going to start a new career as a college professor in my late 50’s. There aren’t a lot of programs like this. There is another university in Australia offering a Masters degree but the course options are more limited (http://www.jcu.edu.au/school/mathphys/astronomy/paged.shtml). The only American program that I found offers a Masters degree through remote learning but it is oriented toward space policy rather than astronomy (http://www.space.edu/distance.asp). It appears that one program at the University of Western Sydney has become defunct (a cautionary tale, perhaps?) or it may have moved to James Cook University.

For more information about Swinburne see http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/sao/