Southern New Hampshire University Online Reviews of Bachelor's in Video Game Design

I attended SNHU for a while to earn a degree in game development. The online classes were very poorly put together and a complete waste of money, especially for the extremely high rates. Most of the instruction and answers to questions essentially amounted to "go look up info on YouTube." After I quit attending, they then tried to bill me for funds that were already covered by student loans. They have since sent the account to collections, so not only do I have student loans from them, but also collections... Read More and bad credit for already loaned funds. This school was a complete disappointment and completely unhelpful in preparing for any sort of career. I feel as though I was scammed of my money and credit history.

I have heard great things about this school, however my experience was overall lackluster. Not to say the entire school itself was bad, but just my self experience. On one hand the Online environment is easy to adjust to, is very balanced and is completely fair with your balance between personal life and degree, SNHU tries their best to want their students to succeed and really do try and make sure that chances are given to reach that goal. The learning experience itself was also a treat, even though... Read More I barely got to explore much with my degree I did enjoy the structure of their modules and online environment. However I do have a problem with how their rubrics are written, as most of the time they feel disconnected to the actual content learned and even when calling instructors or tutoring services for help they agreed the way rubrics and instructions were layed out lacked proper info or were poor with explanation. For a University advertised for its online experience I also feel the school doesn't do much to accomadate resources for people with learning disabilities such as myself. While I find the tutoring services to be nice and each tutor does give a postitive experience I feel the amount of time spent with a tutor can be too little, especially during subjects one may not pick up on (this becomes very problematic when someone like me had to take a Math course, and coming off from not experiencing it a few years prior on top of Math not being a subject that should be explained in doses the tutoring services, while effective at their jobs, don't offer nearly as much help given the short time spent with them only amounting to solving maybe a single issue) and if you don't have outside resources and have to be stuck with limited help and limited tutoring, well good luck then! Youtube is all you have outside of your instructor.. And the alternate ones like Smarthinking were not useful enough resources to help, especially for those who benefit more from visual learning experience. I feel like their Academic Support don't offer enough services to balance out everything else. Could use a bit of tweaking in my opinion. Thankfully my experience with the instructors were always a positive one and I never felt like any were ineffective or didn't do their jobs, I had postitive interactions with them and they were all reasonable with time management and work throughout the 8 week terms. I feel if one has to pick Southern New Hampshire University the overall education experience is a good time you'll get what you need out of it, although any help resources are decidedly limited or don't have enough compensations for their limits. Where my bad experience with the college truly came was the financial services, and let me just say it was easily THE WORST PART about attending this university. Beware that if you fall behind for any reason you will be forced to pay a large balance and if you struggle with money (something I'm going through) they will simply not care and cut out all your resources until said balance is paid off, even their "Payment plan" still requires lots of money to truly pay off the balance, with their lowest cost being the equal amount of paying a total light bill. With my struggle in financial situations the services have been a real pain for the past year and a half until they decided to finally cut me off from any classes until the balance is payed in full, which is a total of $2,743.25 dollars.. This school is greedy and will take away your resources for so much as failing a single class, you even get denied official transcripts if you wish to withdraw from the university.. Good luck if you have trouble or don't understand anything. SNHU maybe be an affordable school, but their financial department is the worst thing about this school and have had nothing but bad experiences with them and they utilmately kept me from truly enjoying this school. Everything else was fine, flaws and all. But when it comes to money they are just so inconsiderate. While my SNHU experience was a bad one, I can't say it will be bad for everyone else, like I said the environment was nice, the instructors were nice and I did enjoy the education for all its flaws, but I HATE their financial services and have now withdrawn to another university to avoid their drama.

It's hard to mess up traditional pen and paper courses. All the prerequisite traditional studies I did were flawless. Once I got into the focal classes for my video game development degree, however, it was apparent that this school has no idea how to deal with changing technologies, or properly teach them. This is especially true with their online courses. It's like their online programs are ran by luddites. The instructors were very hands off for the most part. Teaching the class pretty much included... Read More sending students to freely accessible Unreal Engine tutorials, and YouTube tutorials that weren't even affiliated with SNHU. The course learning instructions typically had the student copy broken undocumented code, teaching next to nothing about what it does. This code is always broken or buggy, so not only do we not learn anything from the code, it doesn't work in the first place. We're left scavenging the internet for solutions. After that, we would have our actual assignments, where we had to take what we (didn't) learn and make something on our own. May as well just not bother at that point and just say you took our money and pointed us at YouTube. That would have been a lot easier. Why don't students ask the instructors to fix it? We did. Apparently the instructors don't control the coursework. They just hand it out. They can't make any changes, nor do they seem to care enough to make anything change. A decent instructor will post bugfixes to the code in the announcements and have Google Hangouts face time with the students to help, but that was extremely rare. Most just acted like virtual babysitters and did nothing but post grades and introduce the next week's work. When we would ask for help, we'd be told to ask our other peers. It's like the instructors couldn't be bothered to help. Shameful. If you want to have a pleasing learning experience and actually leave the school with any sort of working knowledge outside of debugging C++ code? Look elsewhere.

I am a new student working through my third term, and I have nothing but great things to say about the school. I had a lot of trepidation about starting college at 32, and while I consider myself a reasonably capable person I never pushed myself to make excellent grades beyond middle school. Getting into the school was actually a breeze, and the counselors and financial aid department allayed all of the fears I had of applying in the first place. I am currently taking two courses per term (six terms... Read More per year) while working a full-time job, and there is certainly enough challenging work to keep me busy, but it isn't overwhelming. I have found that you will get back what you put into these courses. You have to be highly self-motivated and self-disciplined to get through your coursework during the week, and this is especially true if you're looking to excel. The school seems to focus far more on learning and applying concepts rather than rote memorization of facts just to pass an exam. I have been able to maintain a 4.0 GPA so far, and this is especially shocking to me because I had zero confidence in my math abilities coming into this program, but the courses are excellent. I also can't say enough good things about the professors and the technology the school uses. The professors have all been quick to respond to any concerns I have and help me through any issues, and their ability to distill a lot of core ideas into relatively short courses is impressive. They really want you to master fundamental ideas instead of memorizing as much as possible to make it by for the week. The foundation of the whole course beyond the professors is the learning environment and supporting systems, and they are top-notch. I work as a system administrator for a large hospital system, and I am extremely impressed with how well their environment works and what resources are available to me; I know how challenging deploying and maintaining a lot of these systems are. Buying books has been easy (they've all been e-books so far), they're not majorly expensive, and since most people won't be taking more than two to three courses per term you don't have to factor in a lot of extra cost all at once. Most - not all - of the negative reviews I've seen give me the impression that the person writing them was expecting to have their hand held or simply be able to purchase their degree. I won't try to dispute horror stories with financial aid or just having a bad fit with a professor, but this is the kind of school where you are given all expectations clearly and repeatedly, and if you follow them to the letter you should be able to manage a decent grade. With that said, there is a big difference between thinking you're following instructions and actually following them. They might not have understood a direction and done something wrong, they might have put in the bare minimum and been shocked when that didn't get them a good grade, or they honestly might not have the aptitude to do college-level courses at this point and need to work on some fundamental educational issues they have. You can really get a sense of when a few of your classmates are these people from their discussion posts. Some of them don't follow the prompts at all - like seriously, not even remotely related to the topic - and they will do the absolute bare minimum to get through an assignment. If you review your syllabus for a course and follow all of the rubrics for your assignments you will succeed, and some people just don't put in the effort required. I will probably write another review at the end of my degree, but.. TL;DR - Great school, check it out.

I was an online student until I dropped out yesterday. While looking for another school worth being associated with, I found this site. Here's what my experiences at SNHU online have taught me. - Good grades are easy to get, learning not so much. - Online courses do not cater to any learning styles other than reading/writing. Just because someone learns better with visuals does not mean they're dumb, but you will feel it if you're a visual or hands-on learner taking online courses at SNHU. The school... Read More won't think you're stupid, just lazy. - Seems like most of the schools focus is on campus, some online courses are still being tested. You still have to pay for these courses though. - Tutors offered for online students are only knowledgeable in so many areas. For instance, if you need help with a programming related class, you will only be able to rely on your teacher (more information on teachers below). Visual learners will be utilizing YouTube. Your instructor will provide you with a link each week. The author of the video is not associated with SNHU, so you can view these videos for free. Ask in the comments and I'll post the link to the authors homepage and save you some money. - There are no teachers, only instructors. Teachers teach, instructors give instructions. You'll be given an assignment and told what is expected. As far as learning the material goes, you are on your own! Honestly, I can't figure out the logic in changing the way people learn when what they're used to works. From first grade up until my senior year in high school I learned so much thanks to my teachers, who valued education. Even the little advice they would give, the little tricks they would teach you to help you remember things. Just all the things that have been proven to work, you will not receive from your instructor. You would honestly think that, the less like a sponge our brains become, that learning environments would become slower and more helpful to accommodate our decreasing ability to learn new things. I swear psychology should be mandatory, equal to English and math, at least. - One teacher, many students. I had one class with over 60 students. I only know because the instructor was stressed and told me she can't take the time to help me because she had over 60 other students to attend to. Okay, so you can't attend to me? Thanks, glad to know I'm not worth the time. - Accelerated course. Every course. I have a full-time job, no kids, no pets. I spent, on average, 3 hours a workday on school work. not including, very weekend, I dedicate 1 day to school work (from when I wake up, til I go to bed minus about 1.5 hours of me-time and obvious eating and the like), and 6 hours on the other day(s). There's a lot to learn in 1 week. As I stated earlier, it's still easy to get good grades, but college isn't about good grades. If you're just looking for a piece of paper that says, "This person knows what they're doing!", then go to SNHU. If you're serious about learning something, take the extra time to find a better school. Find one that can and will cater to your learning style. For people like me, that's tough. Not only am I a visual learner but I'm also a perfectionist. I want the best education I can possibly get and SNHU can't give me that.