ACE Thought

[High_Order1]

May be the wrong sub forum, apologies...


Another thing I was doing gave me a thought.


I typically trawl ACE every so often looking to see if anything new that applies to me is in there.


I realize ACE is not going to pay a programmer to add a search agent functionality to their site (or, maybe it does exist and I missed it), but how hard would it be for them to generate a mailing list and ping me, say, once a month when new things are approved?

It would generate business for them, because I'd be more likely to load a new course on if I knew about it, and it would save me some time and effort.

I bet they listen to fora such as these, but I thought I'd solicit some input before trying to email their Department of Good Ideas. lol

[jsd]

It'd certainly be a useful feature for us, but...

It would generate business for them

it wouldn't generate business for ACE. ACE doesn't make money when you take a course/exam at a provider they approved.

[cookderosa]

May be the wrong sub forum, apologies...


Another thing I was doing gave me a thought.


I typically trawl ACE every so often looking to see if anything new that applies to me is in there.


I realize ACE is not going to pay a programmer to add a search agent functionality to their site (or, maybe it does exist and I missed it), but how hard would it be for them to generate a mailing list and ping me, say, once a month when new things are approved?

It would generate business for them, because I'd be more likely to load a new course on if I knew about it, and it would save me some time and effort.

I bet they listen to fora such as these, but I thought I'd solicit some input before trying to email their Department of Good Ideas. lol

I'm going to guess, and I could be totally wrong, but they probably don't think people search their database for new ways to earn credit. If I had to guess, they probably think people take classes because they need them, and that they are providing value-add to the company offering the class.
Frankly, I think it's a fantastic idea. I would absolutely sign up to have my email notified whenever they added / updated a course.

[dfrecore]

Yeah, I'm not sure that ACE is the kind of company that would do this, as they seem to be a customer more to the course provider than to the student. They don't get anything if you take a class, they only get something when a course provider wants to add a class to the database. So for them to offer services like this seems like a bit of a stretch. I would imagine they don't have anything set up like this.

Also, most of the courses in their database don't seem to be courses you can take just anywhere. They are not available to the public at large. A lot seem company-specific. So you couldn't take them even if you wanted to.

You'd be better off getting the course providers like SL, Study.com, Ed4Credit, Shmoop, etc - to notify you when they add a new course instead.

[High_Order1]

Does ACE not charge an institution for querying their database? I've had to pay for transcripts to be sent; I assumed a portion of that went to ACE.

[jsd]

Anyone can search their database for free. They get the $15 bucks for your transcript, but that's not exactly big business since most folks will only have to do that a couple times at most, and most people wait until they've done all their ACE sources and send it at the end, not every single time a new course pops up and the student takes it.

In other words, they get your same transcript fee regardless if you have one class on there or 100 classes. There's no sense of urgency for them to improve their search feature on the student side.