Study.com New CS Courses

[Merlin]

I'm working on my BSBA CIS AOS and my BALS NSM with mainly CS/CIS courses as well.  I have a question - With the new CS/CIS courses from Study & OD.com and the downgrade from SL/Saylor, which courses should I be taking and in what order from easiest to hardest, will there be any overlap so the courses would be easier?

Well, there are only two required courses for the CIS AOS, which are a programming language (any of the programming courses will work for that) and Systems Analysis & Design (UL), which you can take from Study.com.

Beyond those, pretty much any CS/CIS related course that comes into TESU as CAP, CIS, COS, or CMP should work for the AOS electives. The lower-level courses should all be fairly easy to find, and as long as they don't come into TESU as the same course number (or within 1 of the same course number) they should not duplicate. But you only need 6 credits of LL, and 3 of them will be your programming course, so that doesn't leave much room.

The hard part is the 12 credits (4 courses) you need at the 300-400 level. Luckily, there are several choices now. Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of them overlap much, if at all with any other courses. I don't know what you have now, but as far as upper-level courses go, the Study.com courses you should look at are:

• Systems Analysis & Design (CS 302) - required
  
• Database Management (CS 303)
  
• Computer Architecture (CS 306)
  
• Digital Marketing & Advertising (BUS 309) - not CS but applies to CIS AOS.
  

Difficulty-wise, it will depend on your current level of knowledge.

• Systems Analysis & Design isn't too tough but its riddled with content and mechanics errors which makes it hard to get through. The final exam suffers in the same way. The final project is also really confusing. Luckily, it is in review, so hopefully they will make improvements soon.
  
• I found database management to be the easiest (but I have a lot of experience in that area). 
  
• I haven't taken the Computer Architecture course, but I did look it over and it looks pretty challenging.
  
• Digital Marketing & Advertising was okay, but the final project is a pain in the butt. If ACE upgrades the Operating Systems course to UL as expected, then you should take that instead of digital marketing. However, there is no guarantee that will happen.