If you missed our Open Education Week edition of our occasional office hours, we focused on using open courses for college credit, with an intended audience of both students and educators. The archived video is below.
The main takeaways we hope we conveyed are these:
- We now have 22 courses recommended for over 60 credits — that’s over two years’ worth of tuition-free college credit (and some of our partner schools will accept a LOT of transfer credits.
- The most obvious benefit may be to US-based students who are in a degree program or planning to enter one soon, but our partner schools have extensive online programs that are often open to international students.
- Open licensing and open educational resources (‘OER’) really make this possible for us; they also allow us to more easily share these courses with others who might be able to make good use of them.
- We hope that the practical, working models we have laid out for how both individual students AND institutions can put our open courses to work for affordable degree completion inspire other schools to partner with us; we also hope, though, that we can inspire others to replicate these models even without using Saylor Academy materials. As a mission-focused organization, we subscribe to a “big tent” philosophy; the more the merrier! We just want to broaden access to education in creative and innovative ways.
- There is a moral case, we believe, for bringing higher education more in line with open education principles, but there is also a business case — schools partner with us because collaboration furthers their missions and supports their bottom lines, too. The result is that students win
- This business of getting credit for what you know without spending a lot of money on tuition is still one of the best-kept secrets in the higher education world. There is a solid vanguard of motivated students who have at this for years. Their trailblazing is helping to grow the affordable college credit movement and helping to educate non-traditional students and students concerned about student loan debt about how to achieve debt-free college. Want to help grow this movement? Spread the word!
Thanks for tuning in! If you want to know more about our college credit opportunities or just have a handy link to share with a friend, here’s our main college credit guide:
Earn College Credit through Saylor Academy
Photo credit: j.o.h.n. walker via Visual Hunt / CC BY