Yeah, thinking about waiting until both the kids themselves are in school and then 1 course a semester for me. Not sure if that will be easier or harder than doing it while they are young
OMSCS grad here. The awesome thing about the program is its flexibility. Some of the courses are definitely more time intensive, but I think if you took only one class and dedicated about an hour a day to the course materials, you'd be in good shape. (I know that's still a lot to ask of someone with two young kids.)
That course was great, though, and I definitely learned some things I'm glad to have learned!
IMO the instructional materials are a small part of the value. The things that stood out to me were:
- the assignments
- the autograding of programming assignments
- giving and receiving peer feedback about written assignments
- learning some LaTeX for those assignments
- having an artificial reason (course grade) to persist in improving my algorithm and code [on the problems taught in that course, I wouldn't have been self-motivated enough if they were just things I came across during a random weekend]
* My fellow classmates. Had a small study group where we got on Discord to hang out and it was a blast
* The TAs - they were so dedicated to the students and fantastic. MVPs of the program