Anyone Familiar with Full Sail University?

I looked into Full Sail and found, on paper, their courses looked exciting, but when I didn't apply, I began receiving an endless amount of advertizing, letters, and notices that made me suspicious of the quality of this school. I would recommend looking into Emerson College (in Boston, Ma), Boston University, and Northwestern U. (in Illinois) for similar options.

My son graduated from Full Sail. We toured the school before he began and were very impressed with the facility, equipment, and learning objectives. It is a fast-paced school, and is not appropriate for everyone. Several of his friends did not finish, including one who was a team member WHILE they were working on their final project. That proved to be a useful lesson in a real-world problem, however.

If you or your child have an interest, I would recommend touring the site. You receive your Bachelor's in about 22 months, but it's probably not possible to work a side job while attending. That makes it harder to afford. The total cost when my son attended was about 60K for tuition & books (which works out to what most 4 year public institutions cost for 4 years).

Good Luck!
Linda in northeast Iowa

That program was added right after my son graduated. However, I imagine it's similar in quality. Hope, my comments are still useful

If you ever want to do work at another school, you need to see if the accrediting institution is acceptable to graduate schools.
Schep down to the relevant section:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Sail_University#Accreditation
Other schools nearby accredited by ACCSC offer degrees in holistic medicine and auto electronics. ACCSC is intended to accredit industry training, not academics. So it depends on how much you value the professionalization of teaching. Not to say that other universities value it in any way higher. Some are toxic and poison the school districts around them, facilitating horrid management practice.

I'm not sure about holistic medicine or auto electronics, but I do know that Full Sail is fully accredited to confer both bachelor's and master's degrees.

Full Sail does not offer teaching degrees per se. It is a university dedicated to the disciplines of video game design, recording (all aspects), video and/or animation. People who graduate from this school go to work in the movie or music business, become video game designers, or lighting and sound specialists. My son works for a company that designs video games to teach soldiers how to fire artillery and fly aircraft.

Many of his classes were science and math based. He had a lot of training in physics, trig, and calculus. There was not a lot of emphasis on the liberal arts, although he had classes on technical writing and business communication. It is rigorous in the areas specific to the speciality the student selects, but it is not a traditional liberal arts college.

As I said earlier, this school is not for everyone. However, the person who started the topic was interested in information on the school's quality because she wanted, I believe, education in technology. Full Sail is on the forefront of technology.

If you want schools that are on the forefront of technology, look at the CS programs at research universities. Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, U Pitt, MIT, U of Toronto, Ga Tech, Cal Tech, UF, Google the TerraGrid and "virtual observatories".

I can see where Full Sail's curriculum is headed. I can see that it should be effective. But my warning that course credit may not transfer is valid, no matter how nice the program is. And if you are interested in where technology is headed, you need to attend a university where collaborative research tools are being developed.

I teach Art at the HS level and we have sent several students to Full Sail the last several years.
Its a tough and fast paced program, and the feedback we have received from our students is that you get out of it exactly what you put in, but all of our students who have attended (or are attending) have had great success and enjoy the school and programs.

You are dead on that the future of education is going to be integrated very heavily with technology - I am one of those that firmly believe we need to educate students for the world they will be graduating into, not the one we grew up in or are even currently teaching in, and that world is going to be heavily integrated with technology in ways most of us who have been teaching for years can hardly imagine.
Exciting and scary at the same time!