The official guide to courses by Straighterline, Study, et al: We want YOUR input!

[jsh1138]

That's fine, I won't argue with you about it

[darthweezy]

Provider: TEEX
Course: Death Investigation (Online)
Course content: 49 Question pre-test, 9 modules without quizzes at the end, and post test.
Final exam format: 49 multiple choice and T/F questions.  You get three (3) attempts at passing (70%).
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: The final is very similar to the pre-test and aligns with the course content.
Time taken on course: Less than 3 hours.  
Familiarity with subject before course: I was very familiar with the material and had previous training.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: Pretty easy to navigate once you realize you need to click the same button multiple times at the top of page in certain sections.

This was a very easy course for me personally, however, I have previous law enforcement training in this field.  For someone without any previous training just follow the slides and you should be able to do well in this class within a single day of dedicated time.

1-10 Difficulty level: 1 with experience maybe 3 without any experience.

[suzycupcake]

depending on the grading rubric, some courses you can pass without submitting anything at all for the assignments/projects. in those cases, since Study.com is pass/fail, they give you credit for the class even if you didn't turn in a project

So like if you do the quizzes and the final and you get 100 on both, and the final project counts for 20% of your grade, then you're at 80 already without the final project, so they just pass you, because there's no way you could fail even with a bad project.

Now on some courses, the project(s) are 50% of your grade or something, so you can't do that. It just depends. But all of them pass you when you hit a passing grade, so if 3 projects are "required" you can often pass the course with just 2. You just need to check the rubric. For instance on the UL Study.com Civil War course, one of the papers counts for twice as much credit as the other one for some reason, iirc. So I would do that one first and then just see.

If you bomb the test and your quiz score wasn't so great, then you can forget all that.

The Operating Systems class in question has assignments worth 33% of the grade, so you can't just not submit those assignments even with a perfect score on the exam and quizzes. The same is true of every class of theirs I've seen that has assignments, including the UL Civil War course (and both assignments on that course are worth the same, though I know that part isn't true for all courses, e.g. the Holocaust course). They also didn't pass me on any of my UL courses until I had submitted all of the assignments, even though I always had more than enough points to pass after the first one. I think your information may be off here.

For classes that have multiple assignments, you do not have to do all of them. If you take the final and submit at least one assignment, you can submit a blank paper that says "I am not submitting this assignment". I just recently did this in English Comp at SDC.

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Provider: TEEX
Course: Death Investigation (Online)
Course content: 49 Question pre-test, 9 modules without quizzes at the end, and post test.
Final exam format: 49 multiple choice and T/F questions. You get three (3) attempts at passing (70%).
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: I feel like the same questions were on pre and post test and covered in the content. If you remember what was on pre test, it's what's on post test.
Time taken on course: About 8 hours
Familiarity with subject before course: Not very familiar unless you count watching every season of Forensic Files multiple times. I did take notes which came in handy post test.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: There are some pretty graphic photos in here and was really dreading the child ones that people had previously mentioned. The child ones are not graphic like the others so it was much better than I had anticipated. The class employs technology where there are a lot of pop-ups so if you don't see something, look behind the window you are in and also, you have to click on every single module and item within them to move ahead.

1-10 Difficulty level: 2-3

[jsh1138]

"For classes that have multiple assignments, you do not have to do all of them. If you take the final and submit at least one assignment, you can submit a blank paper that says "I am not submitting this assignment". I just recently did this in English Comp at SDC."

My experience has been that you don't even have to submit the blank entry. They will just pass you without it. ymmv though

[jsh1138]

Provider: Study.com
Course: Computer Science 110: Intro to Cybersecurity
Course content: however many quizzes. no project
Final exam format: 100 multiple choice questions
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: about the same
Time taken on course: A couple of weeks, in between other things
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: About half this course is just discussions of various things anyone with a computer should know. Don't click on links you get in spam mail. Use a firewall. Make your password complicated, etc. The other half is mostly technical information about ways to stop cybercrime. It's all pretty straightforward and basic.
1-10 Difficulty level: 1

[suzycupcake]

Provider: Coopersmith
Course: Drugs, Society and Human Behavior
Course content: Powerpoint file of about 82 pages (Crash Course notes). There are also assignments in the syllabus. You can rent/buy the textbook if you wish.
Final exam format: 32 multiple choice questions with some (about 6) open ended ones sprinkled in there. Total I think was 38. There is one final exam  - pass or fail and no practice exams.
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: I did not rent/buy the textbook. I studied the powerpoint and while the slides seemed random at times and no flow to the content, everything in the exam, besides 2 questions, were on those slides. 
Time taken on course: About 6 hours study time, maybe less
Familiarity with subject before course: Not that familiar but I think some common knowledge was in there about cigarettes, alcohol and opiods.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: Very interesting class - slides really prepared me for the exam. Will take more Coopersmith UL classes like this!
Difficulty level: I'd say 3-4

[jsh1138]

Cool to see a Coopersmith one in here. Thanks for reporting that

[suzycupcake]

Cool to see a Coopersmith one in here. Thanks for reporting that

I'm definitely doing another one. Everything you need is right there and they have a lot that come in as UL

[mysonx3]

Cool to see a Coopersmith one in here. Thanks for reporting that

I'm definitely doing another one. Everything you need is right there and they have a lot that come in as UL

Yep, it was a much better UL experience for me than dealing with Study.com assignments

[jsh1138]

Provider: Study.com
Course: Computer Science 310: Current Trends in Computer Science and IT
Course content: however many quizzes. 2 essays
Final exam format: 100 multiple choice questions
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: about the same but the coursework leans really heavily on the Internet of Things and data visualization and the final isn't quite so heavy on those two things
Time taken on course: A couple of weeks, in between other things
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: If you're pretty tech saavy you should be ok. There's material here on AI, cryptocurrency, the Internet of Things, wearables, etc. If you're older or not into tech it might be a struggle. There was a surprising amount of overlap with data as it's used in marketing so if you're into business that will help you. The essays are pretty short; 1 is 750 words, so no big deal there.
1-10 Difficulty level: 3