St. Scholastica aims to reach return adult students by counting free online coursework toward degree
November 26, 2012 at 6:00 pm in Duluth News Tribune
Students at the College of St. Scholastica can now apply education from free online courses toward completion of their college degrees, with the potential of saving thousands of dollars.
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Meh. I hate to say it but this sounds like little more than a clever way to bring in more students (and more revenue) but not a great way to improve the quality of education AT St. Scholastica. While it might be cheaper for an individual student to get a degree, St. Scholastica stands to make more money too by cranking out more degrees.
I think they might want to check their “ethical compasses” again – is it really ethical for St. Scholastica to give a degree with their name on it when a student might have only taken 32 hours at St. Scholastica, which might be the only 32 hours of traditional college level work a student has had? Granting 96 hours of nontraditional credit and calling it a degree from St Scholastica is likely to lower the value of a traditional degree from St. Scholastica, which means fewer student pursue that, which means St. Scholastica turns into a sort of online degree mill within about a decade. You heard it here first.
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I think this is starting to be a significant improvement over the “traditional” model.
The traditional model has failed for a long time. I have 2 BS degrees from the traditional universities, and I received my graduate. Most classes are tremendous wastes of time, where the professor focuses very little attention on the course and the rest of the time is filled with people relating to their own experiences or spewing back information from the text. Or the dreaded current event talks where the professor spouts of their own personal beliefs. Or, for large undergraduate courses, some assistant reading off a power-point. It is a horrendous waste of time, effort, and money.
I recently went back to school online, and I have been loving it. It is significantly better then anything I experienced on campus.
I would say outside of Lab courses, this is the way of the future, and I look forward to it. I’m kind of excited to look into their program offering.
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