For college-age adults starting (or restarting) their degree: Here’s an affordable way to earn transferable credit
 
A lot of people here ask how to start college affordably, especially if you’re just trying to knock out gen eds or work toward an associate degree without committing to huge tuition bills upfront. I’ve seen a lot of beginners use this approach successfully and wanted to share what’s been working well for them.
 
Study.com’s $95/month, plan gives access to ACE-recommended courses and the model makes it doable for college-age adults starting from zero. You can move at your own pace, chip away at requirements and avoid the cost and schedule commitments that usually make school feel overwhelming for new students.
 
Here are the biggest advantages I’ve seen:
 
1. $95/month for ACE-recommended college credit
Instead of paying $1,200+ per class at a university, you get access to general education courses for one flat monthly rate and enroll in 2 at a time. If you're motivated, you can complete multiple courses in the same month and save thousands as you work toward an associate degree or transfer pathway.
 
2. Large course catalog
Study.com has more than 220 ACE-recommended courses, including upper division courses you can take later on if you keep going. For someone starting their education, this means you’re less likely to hit a dead-end mid-degree.
 
3. Designed to transfer to 2,000+ colleges
Credits are designed to transfer, and transcripts are sent within 2 business days, so you can roll courses into a degree program smoothly. Just be sure to check with your school to verify they’ll accept a course before you get started.
 
4. Faster progress for beginners: no proctors + 48-hour assignment grading
This is huge if you’re balancing work while starting school. Study.com removed proctored exams and returns assignment grades within 2 business days, which means you’re rarely waiting around to move forward.
 
5. New mobile app = study wherever you are
Since coursework is now accessible in a dedicated mobile app, students can make progress in small pockets of time (lunch breaks, downtime between shifts, evenings), which is often the biggest barrier for new or younger adult learners.
 
Who this helps:

• College-age adults who want to start a degree without debt
  
  
• Anyone working part-time while beginning college
  
  
• Students who want to complete an associate degree affordably
  
  
• First-gen students who need structure, speed and flexibility
  
  
• Learners who want a smooth transfer path with minimal friction
  

I do apologise if this question has been asked before. What is the assesment like for MS in Business program? Is it pretty heavy? How many courses realistically can you complete in a term if you do it almost full time?

Came across https://cbitorg.co.uk/ Which also offers various level 5 to 7 qualifications similar to OTHM and QUALIFI, but much cheaper.

Has anyone completed a master’s degree at a U.S. university with an OTHM or Qualifi Level 7 Diploma and successfully received transfer credits?

Since U.S. universities generally don’t offer “top-up” master’s pathways like some universities in the U.K., I’m wondering whether it’s possible to transfer credits from a Level 7 diploma when applying for a master’s program in the U.S like MBA or MS . 

The issue is that most U.S. universities require transfer credits to come from regionally accredited institutions and usually require a letter grade of B or higher. Because OTHM/Qualifi grades are typically pass/fail, I’m not sure how NACES evaluators assess them.

Hey, good morning. I utilized this website to get my own bachelor's degree so I appreciate your help and assistance with that. My little brother is in the military and he’s looking to get an associate's degree but not a bachelor's at the moment. What would be the fastest way for an individual in the military to get a degree? He just wants a piece of paper basically for continuing promotional pathways. I told him he should make a post, but he’s silly so I’m just trying to help him… Ps on my phone I apologize for any mistakes 

Your Location: currently Missouri
What kind of degree do you want?: just a fast associate's degree doesn’t matter what it is
Current Regional Accredited Credits: he has nothing with any colleges minus what he’s done in the army which I can get a breakdown list of his training classes
His budget doesn’t matter. He just wants to get one as quickly as possible
Commitments: is commitment. Time is very random so we need to be self-paced
Timeline: He wants to get it as quickly as possible

I did a Master's in Education at WGU and graduated within 2 years. I'm keeping the degree title a secret here to attempt to preserve some privacy. Here is the summary of my experience:

I could complete an average of 1 CU a day. Meaning my entire degree, sans the required student teaching, was completed in less than 6 months. If you're going for a degree without student teaching (clinical experience, as they call it), there's nothing to worry about.

The WGU staff is really nice and knowledgeable, I had no issues with them. The curriculum was the same as at other universities, but WGU's is reworded and summarized so you don't have to read in circles to wait for the author to get to the point. I appreciated that. Once I actually "got on the job", there was quite a few things that were important to know at an actual school that I felt the WGU degree was lacking in its curriculum, but to my knowledge no degree teaches that.

The only difficult course I had was one that requires you to know kindergarten through 12th grade math. Math is taught very differently these days, and k-12 math also now contains things I was never taught in school at all. I used Khan Academy and YouTube tutorials to get through it.

Everything went fine until student teaching at a physical school.

The course information once you start doing student teaching (your responsibilities, who to tell what, what to upload where, etc) was confusing and felt like a maze of documents and links, with too many different contact people. The titles for those contact people were sometimes wrong between what staff or paperwork said and what the current WGU website said. 

The entire student teaching process also takes a minimum of 11-12 months. You have a minimum of 2 placements (1 observation, 1 actual teaching) and each placement typically takes at least 3 months to get, so that is 6 months or more total of just waiting for placements. You then have the several months of actually doing the student teaching, which gets stretched out between holidays and (if applicable) summer vacation. A Bachelor's degree may have a longer student teaching placement, I don't know.

Student teaching is full time, entirely unpaid, you are not really allowed to take days off, and you still need to pay WGU tuition during it. If you have a substitute teaching license prior to beginning your student teaching, you can substitute for your mentor teacher during your placement and get paid for it, but can't substitute for anyone else. So you may become very stressed about money, your house will get messy, etc. You may also be placed an hour or more away from your home.

Once I got in, I realized it had been too long since I'd been in a public school. Schools are run entirely differently now. At the school I was at there was no homework, no detention, no failing a grade, etc. In an upper elementary class, many students were still at preschool and kindergarten level, but the school was not allowed to fail them. So you were supposed to do things like teach 5th grade math to a class where 30% of kids are at 1st grade level math. This means most students are messing around instead of paying attention, because the material is always over their heads. They also can't catch up via homework because you can't issue homework. I was told not to correct grammar or spelling on any assignments, so the kids weren't learning how to spell. It felt as if my entire day was managing children's behavior instead of teaching, when what I actually wanted to do was teach. I witnessed a lot of bad behavior from students, which would have called for suspension or detention in my days, but I was told that it was normal behavior today. I also witnessed how extremely stressed most of the teachers were -- this was generally due to student behavior, not lesson planning. Students in late elementary school still didn't know what a sentence was or where to put a period or capital letters. For every instruction I gave, I had to repeat it orally at least six times even though I had also written it on the board, and at the end of each lesson I would still get kids who raised their hand saying they had done nothing for an hour because they didn't hear or read what they were supposed to do.

I was not allowed to comment negatively on anything. If a student was refusing to do any work, we couldn't say something like "Why are you ignoring instructions? You need to do the assignment properly, stop messing around". Instead we had to praise them, for example if they were at least holding the pencil but hadn't even written their name then we would have to say "Thank you for picking up the pencil" or "Thanks for getting started". If we were negative in any way, we were written up, because it went against the district standards of behavior motivation. I'll withhold my comments on that. Despite the many studies on how food affects behavior and attention span, the school also gave the kids sugary cereal, desserts, and so on for breakfast, lunch and snacks as a way to entice them to come to school, and it negatively affected their behavior throughout the course of the day. They got more than 100% of their daily sugar recommendation in just one school meal.

The whole student teaching process was severely frustrating and emotionally draining. I was so tired each day I effectively went to the school, taught, came home, fell asleep. I felt like I didn't have enough time awake and alert to properly plan for teaching except for on the weekends, and I spent the weekends trying to earn money to make up for the massive loss of income. I was too tired to be able to self-reflect enough to make fast improvements. My health suffered, I was drinking 4-5 coffees just to stay awake throughout the day and I still felt tired. I expressed my feelings to WGU and other teachers, and everyone told me that what I was experiencing was "a normal classroom these days" and that if I wasn't a natural at handling it, then teaching in public schools wasn't for me.

After several months of student teaching I decided to switch my degree to one where I would NOT get state licensure, and to teach adults instead of kids. Two days after making that decision my health bounced back, I easily cut down to half a cup of coffee a day, I was much more productive, I stopped being so negative... I hadn't realized how depressed being in the classroom had made me.

Without a license, you can teach at:
- Private schools (this can include religious schools, tribal reservation schools, and private schools in foreign countries)
- Daycares, preschools
- Most schools for adults, including community colleges, correctional facilities (which, btw, pay double the salary of a public school teacher!), and corporate teaching positions such as staff training
- Teach English online
- Be a teacher's assistant instead of a teacher

At this point I believe a non-license Education degree is the smartest option for almost everyone. If you get a non-license degree and want a license later, you can either get an emergency teaching certificate from a desperate school district (available to anyone with a degree and clean background check) and eventually convert it to a real license based on years of experience, or you can go through a separate, non-university teacher training program that PAYS you a full salary to student teach and get your license, in which case the student teaching is also going to be longer (1-2 years) and thus you get more training out of it. In some cases or some countries you can also apply for a license after you have taught for 3 consecutive years at a private school while being unlicensed. If your local district allows hiring via emergency teacher licenses, you can "preview" the school and students by being a substitute, paraeducator or volunteer before you take on an actual teaching job there.

If anyone wants to do student teaching for licensure, I highly recommend you go through all paraeducator training you can find at a minimum, as it is more comprehensive than what WGU teaches. I also recommend you begin planning out, in detail, lessons for your classroom for every single day you're in student teaching, as far in advance as possible (before you even get into the classroom) for every subject.

In recent times, the University of the People has been bombarding all social networks with advertisements about a new alleged partnership with Coca-Cola, which would supposedly involve distributing scholarships left and right "so that the University of the People can help the progress of humanity yadda yadda yadda". And then come the usual self-congratulatory fanfares about UoPeople's international achievements etc. The funny thing is no one knows whether this "partnership" actually exists: in fact, there is no trace of the University of the People in Coca-Cola's documents or official statements. However, in the meantime, UoPeople is raking in tons of clicks thanks to people searching for Coca-Cola on social media. Regardless of whether the partnership or the scholarships exist, this stunt is therefore a way to attract clicks. Mind you, there's nothing surprising about this, because in the past UoPeople had already used tricks of this kind: from a partnership with "Harvard Business School" to "our famous student Simone Biles", the University of the People never misses a chance to make itself look ridiculous.

For those who want or need it or are interested in something new:

https://learning.respondersafety.com/ has several free traffic safety related videos for EMS, fire, LE, and more that come with certificates (I believe all courses CAPCE accredited).

https://www.boundtree.com/education has a few free CAPCE accredited courses with certificates of completion. 

https://app.guardian-you.com/ has free CAPCE accredited courses with certificates of completion.

https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/safety-in...d-training has pediatric education resources - I don't know if they're CAPCE accredited, but they're approved in MI for CEU's.

https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/inside-md...department again unknown if they're CAPCE accredited, but they're approved in MI for CEU's.

https://www.ndlsf.org/ offers basic, advances, and core disaster life support as well as other courses. Some may have a cost. 

https://americancme.org/ offers paid CAPCE accredited courses as well as free courses - website has state details.

*I'm not affiliated with any of these. Just used them in the past and hope this information can help someone*

Hello everyone, I have recently found out about the offer by Campus Unviersitario Europeo (CUE) which offers a Título Propio DBA for the reduced price of 1500€ entirely online (I confirmed the price via email inquiry). Expedition of the Title and Apostille cost another 695€ (according to email). That's a DBA título propio from Spain for a bit more than 2000€. The UniAthena Ucam DBA is 11.000€ for reference. I also inquired how much the double titulation would cost, since I'll have to do research on how the CUE is registered. Seems like a DBA título propio from a Mexican University for likely less than 3000€ (assuming double titulation is 500-1000€ish). Any experiences with them so far? Sounds way better than Selinus, Gambit Business School, EIU Paris and other not so officially registered universities.

Does anyone know if Nexford MBA in Finance is also IACBE accredited? 
I don't see it listed here : https://iacbe.org/memberpdf/NexfordUniversity.pdf