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Yes my husband got laid off and he went back to school online! It works well because he can do school work around his new job/our lo but it requires a lot of planning and him staying on top of his homework. So I think you can do it!

This is going to sound so discouraging, but DH started a master's program online and shortly after I became pregnant he decided not to continue it. He works FT with a brutal commute & puts extra hours in at home so as he says it the online program was getting in the way of work. LOL. Plus he didn't want to spend the next 2-3 years spending his nights and weekends holed up in his office doing work work and school work when there was a cute LO he'd rather spend time with.

After completing a few courses and using outside resources to do so he realized he could achieve his ultimate goal of earning a professional designation on his own without the grad school curriculum. He's disciplined enough to do the self-study with the resources he found. Is there another means to the end?

I completed my masters before DH & obviously children. I much preferred the classes that were taught in a classroom vs the few online classes I did.

I echo everything @Mrsjazz: said. It's doable, but it depends on the program's requirements, their flexibility, and your ability to manage time and complete tasks independently. It also depends on your learning style - online programs focus heavily on reading and writing , which are two of my strengths, so I love that style of program. For me, I feel like the traditional college class style of slow discusion and lecture is a waste of time bc it's not how I learn.

My background: After graduating with a 7-12 teaching certificate and major in social studies education, I took a full time job teaching 5th grade language arts social studies and thus had to complete a 2 year online program to get K-8 certified. I completed about 9 credits per semester and in the summer. Then, a year's worth of those credits transferred into my masters program, which took another year to complete. That program was one 3-credit course every 8 weeks, with the option of doing 1 class at a time, 2 classes at a time, or staggered.

Both programs allowed me to work at my own pace, as long as I finished everything by the course end date. However they also had a guideline that I could only turn in one assignment at a time, & I had to wait to get feedback on it before I could turn in the next one. Depending on the busyness of my life, sometimes I worked ahead, sometimes I didn't. I lesson planned on Saturdays and did my grad school coursework on Sundays and school breaks.

All of this was done without a LO though.

When looking into programs, I would definitely ask what their procedures are in case you need to take a semester off, and what their expectations are in regards to working at your own pace. I would also ask them what a typical weekly workload is. For example, in most classes, I had 5-10 page research papers due every week.

My DH is a teacher and got his MA for this reason, too--but he did brick and mortar school before LO was born. The salary increase was definitely very nice once he finished!

DH is finishing up an Executive MBA that's 18 months long. He's graduating this spring and his classes started a month after DS was born. He has online/phone lectures Monday and Wednesday nights for about 90 minutes each night and then he goes in all day every other Saturday. The classes are in quarters and he has 2 weeks break between each quarter.

I'll be really happy when it's over mostly because him being gone all day Saturday was annoying but it hasn't been the worst thing ever (granted we both went to law school). We eat dinner early as a family and then DH does bath with our son and then he goes into his office for class.

As for managing the workload, I guess he's sorta working smarter not harder? He usually tries to just say something early on in the phone discussion to seem engaged and then works on the next session's homework while the lecture is ongoing. He speed reads so he skims his reading during his lunches. Biz school is a lot of group projects so he tries to sorta comandeer them early on and assign the tasks and "facilitate" them with deadlines and what not so they get done quickly. His team mostly really likes that because everyone is working full time and they just want discreet tasks to do instead of brainstorming junk.

When he's at the in person sessions, he has his laptop out and his professor mostly thinks he's taking notes but in reality he's working on assignments. If the professor has a syllabus up early, he tries to do the homework assignments as early as possible. Sometimes he does them before the class even starts during the 2 week breaks between quarters.

So, probably not the same as your program, but he really thinks he couldn't have handled anything more involved than that. He wasn't interested in a fully in person program and this was the best fit program for him.

@simplyfelicity: that sounds like a great program and price! Wish I had known about it before I did my program!

One more idea.... you could Google search for reviews of the program.