Looking for Words of Wisdom

[ss20ts]

Last night I stumbled upon this forum and I have found a great deal of information so thank you everyone for sharing! I am currently enrolled at CSU Global working on my BS in Organizational Leadership and have applied to EC for my BPS in Business and Management. I have a few gen eds left for CSU Global and have the option to take them outside of CSU and I plan on it especially since I read on here last night that Sophia is currently 100% FREE. Like seriously? How does that happen? I have student loans up to my eyeballs from my AAS and AS degrees from years ago. 

Can you tell me what the format is like on Sophia? I have done one lesson of a course on onlinedegree.com and holy cow that first 45 minute lecture was torture and the quizzes are kind of rough. Not knowing what you got wrong isn't very helpful. Thank you!

[Clepking100]

From the classes ive taken (religion, project management) the format and class was outrageously easy. Both completable in a few hours without prior knowlege. These classes were actually woefully easy to a point where i can see certain schools not accepting these credits in the near future

[P226mem]

Format of sophia courses I've taken:
open book, start when you want, self paced.
Read the tutorial material with or without video instructor.
answer multiple choice questions as you go along (these are called Challenges) in each concept. some courses it is 3 tries on same question to get points, other courses it is 3 different questions on the same concept.
several "concepts" make up a section (sometimes it has been 10 or more concept questions (aka challenges) to make a section.. Several sections make a unit.
at end of Unit you take test (milestone) on material covered in several sections to make that unit
repeat for 3-4 units. (most courses I've done are 3-4 units. exceptions can happen)
take a "final milestone" to complete the course.
a few courses have "touchstones" which are written assignments to be graded.

opinion:
material is similar in content to 100 level intro classes from my community college experience. questions and challenges reminded me of how an online Cengage textbook works with questions about your reading.
tests seem to cover the material with no surprises.
some people can read the "challenge" questions and just look for the answers and move on quickly and pass (just like some people only show up for tests and finals after cram session and get by) Others take their time to learn some material. your mileage will vary.
always check that your school will accept their courses for transfer in your degree pathway.
free until end of july just because of covid 19 stuff. don't know why they did it. just thankful they did in order to get a few lower level electives.

[rachel83az]

Don't listen to Clepking100; for whatever reason he dislikes Sophia and doesn't think the credits are valid. Yes, some courses are super easy. Others, not so much. I'm personally having a hard time with Project Management. On my most recent practice milestone, I only just barely got above 50%. So, as I have said elsewhere, the "ease" of a particular course depends on the individual.

Sophia is usually about $330 per course. Since they're free, just go ahead and sign up. You do not have to complete a course by July 31st, simply have to sign up for it. Put the start date a couple months from now; it doesn't matter. As long as you've registered before July 31st, it'll still be free.

[Clepking100]

Don't listen to Clepking100; for whatever reason he dislikes Sophia and doesn't think the credits are valid. Yes, some courses are super easy. Others, not so much. I'm personally having a hard time with Project Management. On my most recent practice milestone, I only just barely got above 50%. So, as I have said elsewhere, the "ease" of a particular course depends on the individual.

Sophia is usually about $330 per course. Since they're free, just go ahead and sign up. You do not have to complete a course by July 31st, simply have to sign up for it. Put the start date a couple months from now; it doesn't matter. As long as you've registered before July 31st, it'll still be free.

Where have i said anything about the validity of the credits? If his school accepts them they are valid. Am i not allowed to state ab opinion ( that its easy) on the courses ive completed?

[rachel83az]

Where have i said anything about the validity of the credits? If his school accepts them they are valid. Am i not allowed to state ab opinion ( that its easy) on the courses ive completed?

You've stated in other threads that the Sophia courses are too easy and shouldn't count as college credit. Just because you found certain ones easy does not mean that others also will.

[ctcarl]

Last night I stumbled upon this forum and I have found a great deal of information so thank you everyone for sharing! I am currently enrolled at CSU Global working on my BS in Organizational Leadership and have applied to EC for my BPS in Business and Management. I have a few gen eds left for CSU Global and have the option to take them outside of CSU and I plan on it especially since I read on here last night that Sophia is currently 100% FREE. Like seriously? How does that happen? I have student loans up to my eyeballs from my AAS and AS degrees from years ago. 

Can you tell me what the format is like on Sophia? I have done one lesson of a course on onlinedegree.com and holy cow that first 45 minute lecture was torture and the quizzes are kind of rough. Not knowing what you got wrong isn't very helpful. Thank you!

The Sophia experience is smooth and polished from start to finish.  They seem to have spent a lot of time and effort on the interface, it's simple and clean, with a short learning curve.  Signing up is easy and non-intrusive, they don't ask for a lot of personal info and they don't zoom in on your school enrollment or graduation date in a baldfaced effort to sell your info to spammers.

There are no barriers to keep you from starting a course, completing it, taking an exam, or getting your transcript.  If you've dealt with other providers, you may have seen roadblocks at every step, including being told "not until we see the color of your money" in response to a simple query like "can I just look at the course materials?".  I've had to wait more than 24 hours to get access to courses that I've already paid for, I've had to deal with loathsome providers like ProctorU (or ProctorFU, as I like to call them) in order to schedule exams, create additional logins to view my grades, and been shunted off to yet more providers like Parchment to get a transcript, for an additional fee, of course.  And beside the cost is the annoyance of dealing with a whole new bureaucracy...Parchment, for example, demanded personal info I didn't want to give them with no way to opt out.

With Sophia, you can sign up for a course, complete it at your own pace, take the exam whenever your like (using their non-intrusive biometric proctoring), see your final grade instantly, visit ACENet and with a few mouse clicks, add the course to your ACE transcript.  Creating an ACE account costs $20 and includes the cost of your first transcript, additional ones are $15.  It can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or so for Sophia to confirm your course completion, but that happens behind the scenes with no input from you.  If you're the patient sort, you can wait until you've banked all your ACE credits before requesting your included transcript.

Even when Sophia was charging for their courses, they would let you try out any of them for free...not a "satisfaction guarantee" where you have to fork over payment and can ask for a refund if you don't like it, rather, you just jump in, no credit card or contract to pay, and start working on the course.  View and/or download the materials, start working, etc.  You can't complete the course but you can take a pretty thorough test drive.  And they had two completely free one-credit courses, Building Effective Teams and The Essentials of Managing Conflict.  I think most folks would start with those to get a feel for the way Sophia works, because they were free and relatively short, so you could get a pretty good sense of the process.

As far as the courses themselves, I liked the fact that everything was included and there were no surprises.  You never have to hunt for materials, they're all right there in the course menu.  View the course materials, download them as a pdf, watch a video (some are offered with a choice of instructors), then complete the chapter quizzes (Challenges) and eventually the final exam (Milestone).  You are given more than one opportunity to answer a Challenge question correctly, for a total of either two or three depending upon the course.  Interestingly, your final grade is only based on the Challenges, you only need a passing score on the Milestone to complete the course.  If you get stuck at any point, tutors are available, either via online chat, telephone, or email.  My experience was that they are responsive via phone and chat, but less so with email.

I've noticed that some complaints of early students, such as exams that don't match up well with course content and small, blurry illustrations in the Art History courses, seem to have been resolved before I started there.  There are occasional typos, grammatical errors, and so on, but not the comically bad stuff I've seen at other providers.  The overall presentation of the course material is generally professional and well thought out.

There are a total of five courses; Public Speaking, Foundations of English Comp, College Readiness, English Comp I and English Comp II, that have assignments (Touchstones).  I suppose because grading those assignments takes human intervention, there are delays which have become worse with the COVID pandemic.  You should expect about a month lead time for each assignment at this point.  That's going to make completion of any but the Foundations course and College Readiness take a minimum of about two months, no matter how fast of a learner you are, because each of those three courses has at least one assignment that is based on revising a prior assignment after it's been graded by staff.  Take that for what its worth.

Now that all the content is totally free, it sounds like you're looking for a horseshoe in the proverbial glove.  I'm here to tell you that if there is one, I never found it.  I'd advise you to jump in and try a course or two, before it all goes away.  If you don't like it, you're only out some time.

[rachel83az]

Also, the College Readiness one also has a brief essay requirement. It's relatively painless (write up some goals for your academic & regular career). I think it only needed to be 500 words or something like that. Otherwise, that course is mostly common sense. Should you cheat? No, of course not. Should you plagiarize? No, you shouldn't. Should you set goals and do your best to complete your assignments on time? Yes, you should. For the essay, because it's so short and they're not looking for the next great novel, grading only took 3 or 4 days, IIRC. If you want to see what the Sophia touchstone experience is like, that's a good way to go about it without having to deal with the long grading times of public speaking or English comp.

[ShotoJuku]

PLAY NICE EVERYONE.....

[natshar]

Also, the College Readiness one also has a brief essay requirement. 

Correct. I did it and received a grade back from that in 3 days. So I can't speak to the slow grading. But I have not done any of the other assignments requiring touchstones. You are probably right that because it is so short and straight-forward it doesn't take long to grade.