Took 6 Sophia Learning Courses in 2 months and passed them all, listing my thoughts

[lillingworth]

If folks are thinking that COSC changes its policies based upon forum postings, I would be afraid. For the college. It should be researching courses and their level of difficulty and determining whether to accept them or not. Our views should be irrelevant as none of us (?) are college administrators.

In the brave new world (nothing to do with COVID-19) we live in, colleges are getting more selective about what will transfer. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the purpose of SARAs. ( SARA – the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement – is an agreement between member states, territories and districts of the United States of America.  States apply to their relevant regional education compact for membership in SARA, and they agree to deal with the distance education offerings of out-of-state SARA-participating institutions in accord with SARA’s national policies, rather than applying the state-specific policies they used prior to joining SARA – policies they still apply to out-of-state institutions that do not participate in SARA.) It seems to me that if a school is regionally accredited, that should mean its courses are good to go. I wanted to take a course from a state whose out-of-state tuition was less than my in-state tuition, and the school told me I couldn't as it didn't have a SARA with my state. And my (current) plan is to get my degree from COSC, not a state school. Grr.

Wow, that sounds frustrating. I've never even heard of that. Sorry you had to deal with it.


Also, evaluating based on difficulty... I think a lot of people here are seeing that some of us are going through the courses quickly and assuming they're very easy and don't meet the requirements for a university course. I may be going through courses quickly either because I'm writing pages and pages of notes and basically memorizing the text and am therefore able to find my answers quickly, or it's a subject I'm already familiar with and I don't really need to study. That doesn't make it a sub-par course. 

The goal of university courses isn't to be as difficult as possible. It's to teach you what you need to know for your career. But I really feel like people get caught up in how worthy a credit is based on how complicated the course was. 

If a programmer without a degree had to take an intro to programming class and finished everything in a day, does that mean the class is somehow lacking in structure or material? Nope. 

If a course teaches you what you need to know and also how to apply that knowledge, I'd say it's done it's job. I think some people here are becoming alt-credit elitists. 

Anyway, I'm veering off topic   haha 

I suspect money is that main motivation for the majority of changes we see.