Raymond Sewer said he had good reason to believe that the California Institute of Technology would be deeply involved in the cloud computing “boot camp.”

Caltech’s website touted the online program, and the school’s orange logo appeared on the promised certificates of completion.

“I was just like, ‘Ah, man, this has got to be legit,’” said Mr. Sewer, 46, who works in Denver and enrolled in the $9,000 program to try to leave the mortgage industry.

But after Mr. Sewer signed up, he said that Caltech was almost nowhere to be found. Mr. Sewer said his primary instructor, who sometimes vanished during class sessions, lived in Mississippi, not Southern California. A course facilitator, he said, was in India. Neither had any meaningful ties to Caltech, which Mr. Sewer had known as an academic powerhouse and a backdrop of the sitcom “The Big Bang Theory.”

The university, he learned, had largely outsourced the program to a company called Simplilearn.

“It was just a bunch of bogus,” Mr. Sewer scoffed in an interview. “They just wanted our money.”

Caltech, a private university in Pasadena, Calif., is a highly selective school, but some of its online programs make it merely part of the crowd. Colleges across the country are routinely offering online, nondegree-granting programs that they tout as avenues to offer more educational opportunities to broader audiences. But the programs are largely unregulated and may not feature university faculty members or their curriculums.