I'm in a similar situation. Left school early because I ran out of money and started working. Did several (10) years hard time as an SA (actually dug it, but quite tired of it now) and slowly moved into writing more and more code. I'm now writing software for a living. It's quite nice. However, when I was job hunting after getting laid off it was fairly apparent that not having a degree (and not currently working on one) was quite detrimental.

Luckily I have a job that I love. I have a strong desire to make sure that I'm in as good of a position as I can be to always have jobs that I love. (for the most part I have, I consider myself extremely fortunate) As a result of my recent experiance job hunting (and much prodding and poking from my fiance) I am taking classes again.

After much thought about work and life schedules I realized that spending 3 nights a week in class would not be practical. So I started taking classes at Uo Phoenix. The classes are reasonably challenging (have not taken any techincal classes yet) and the format is fantastic. I'm fully aware that a deg. from UoP is not going to carry nearly as much weight as a deg. from a more traditional school but I figured that with my experience would get me past a lot of the roadblocks.

The amount of work needed for the classes is by no means less than the amount of work needed for "traditional" schools. You just get to do it when you have time to. The classes are condensed into 6 weeks and you will cover the same amount of material that would be covered in a normal 16 week semester. I would work an average of 4 to 5 hours a night 4 nights a week on the class I was taking. I expect that will change depending on the class but that's been my experience with the 3 classes I've taken so far.

I've heard of UoP (hard not to) but hadn't really considered them before. A compressed schedule certainly has it's benefits: receiving my degree before I'm 80 is nice. :-)

One of the things that I enjoyed while going to school was the interaction w/ fellow students. If I was having a hard time wrapping my head around a calculus problem I could consult w/ other students to help me understand. How does UoP address this? Are there chat rooms, mailing lists, etc? IMHO There is absolutely nothing wrong with distance learning, but you do lose out on the personal relationship side.

The interface to the classes is a private nntp server that UoP maintains.

All of the classes I've taken so far have broken the students into small "learning teams" (their term not mine). Each team has their own newgroup under the main class news group. Each week there is an individual assignment and a team assignment. The interaction is quite good actually (depending on the other students, but you get that with traditional classes as well)

There is also a general newsgroup for the class. You are required to post at least one message to that group 5 out of the 7 day week. Some of the discussions have been quite good actually. Much like here in some cases.

One thing that UoP did that I really like is that their week ends on wednesday instead of friday. This causes fewer conflicts with deadlines at work which are nomally on friday or monday and coursework which is almost always due on the last day of the week (wed.)