The official guide to courses by Straighterline, Study, et al: We want YOUR input!

[RachelB]

Provider: Sophia
Course: Workplace Writing II
Course content: Text. Videos.
Final exam format: N/A
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: N/A
Time taken on course: 32 hours
Familiarity with subject before course: I’m pretty good at writing, but I’m not great at research.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: Each touchstone has to be graded before you can submit the next one, which slows down the process a lot! Double-check your citations. I found it easier to do them all manually. These assignments weren’t terrible, just time-consuming. Some of the grader’s comments were very nit-picky, and some of the things they mentioned weren’t actually in the rubric. I had to contact Sophia over it a couple times….
1-10 Difficulty level: 5

[wow]

Provider: Sophia
Course: Workplace Writing II
Course content: Text. Videos.
Final exam format: N/A
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: N/A
Time taken on course: 32 hours
Familiarity with subject before course: I’m pretty good at writing, but I’m not great at research.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: Each touchstone has to be graded before you can submit the next one, which slows down the process a lot! Double-check your citations. I found it easier to do them all manually. These assignments weren’t terrible, just time-consuming. Some of the grader’s comments were very nit-picky, and some of the things they mentioned weren’t actually in the rubric. I had to contact Sophia over it a couple times….
1-10 Difficulty level: 5

How long did the grading usually take? Are we talking days or weeks? (Trying to decide whether taking this course is worth it if I want to keep my membership to 2 months.)

[RachelB]

Provider: Sophia
Course: Workplace Writing II
Course content: Text. Videos.
Final exam format: N/A
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: N/A
Time taken on course: 32 hours
Familiarity with subject before course: I’m pretty good at writing, but I’m not great at research.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: Each touchstone has to be graded before you can submit the next one, which slows down the process a lot! Double-check your citations. I found it easier to do them all manually. These assignments weren’t terrible, just time-consuming. Some of the grader’s comments were very nit-picky, and some of the things they mentioned weren’t actually in the rubric. I had to contact Sophia over it a couple times….
1-10 Difficulty level: 5

How long did the grading usually take? Are we talking days or weeks? (Trying to decide whether taking this course is worth it if I want to keep my membership to 2 months.)

Usually 3 business days, so if I turned something in on Monday or Tuesday, it was usually fine, but otherwise, that time was extended by the weekend, which was frustrating.

[wow]

Provider: Sophia
Course: Workplace Writing II
Course content: Text. Videos.
Final exam format: N/A
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: N/A
Time taken on course: 32 hours
Familiarity with subject before course: I’m pretty good at writing, but I’m not great at research.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: Each touchstone has to be graded before you can submit the next one, which slows down the process a lot! Double-check your citations. I found it easier to do them all manually. These assignments weren’t terrible, just time-consuming. Some of the grader’s comments were very nit-picky, and some of the things they mentioned weren’t actually in the rubric. I had to contact Sophia over it a couple times….
1-10 Difficulty level: 5

How long did the grading usually take? Are we talking days or weeks? (Trying to decide whether taking this course is worth it if I want to keep my membership to 2 months.)

Usually 3 business days, so if I turned something in on Monday or Tuesday, it was usually fine, but otherwise, that time was extended by the weekend, which was frustrating.

That does sound frustrating! Thanks so much for your reply. Very helpful.

[RachelB]

Provider: Sophia
Course: Human Biology Lab
Course content: Text. 14 simulations (1400 points) 2 touchstones (500 points).
Final exam format: N/A
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: N/A
Time taken on course: 13.5 hours (this included loading time, which took forever)
Familiarity with subject before course: I took the Human Bio class, but months before I did the lab. I recommend taking them closer together.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: There is an option to turn off the audio and just read the information, which I appreciated, but it has to be selected for each simulation rather than it remembering your choice. Annoying. The loading is incredibly slow, and the program was constantly crashing on me and I had to start the loading all over again. This is so very, very tedious. I recommend watching tv or something simultaneously. On the positive side, the lab report touchstones were graded very easily. I didn't really try at all, and still did fine.
1-10 Difficulty level: 3

[RachelB]

Provider: Study.com 
Course: ENG305: Advanced Technical Writing 
Course content: Text. Videos.
Final exam format: Multiple Choice. 100 questions. 2 hours.
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: It's the same.
Time taken on course: 13.5 hours
Familiarity with subject before course: So-so. I tested out of 25% or so. 
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: There are 3 assignments: the first is 800-1200 words (20 points), the others are each 2000+ words (40 points each). I only did two. SDC doesn’t keep your scores for these assignments on the website, so you’re advised to keep the emails that they send containing your grades. There were a lot of redundant lessons and some that contradicted one another. The quiz, practice, and exam questions are very similar, though, so if you do well on the practice exams, you’ll do well on the final.
1-10 Difficulty level: 4-5

[wow]

Provider: Study.com 
Course: ENG305: Advanced Technical Writing 
Course content: Text. Videos.
Final exam format: Multiple Choice. 100 questions. 2 hours.
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: It's the same.
Time taken on course: 13.5 hours
Familiarity with subject before course: So-so. I tested out of 25% or so. 
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: There are 3 assignments: the first is 800-1200 words (20 points), the others are each 2000+ words (40 points each). I only did two. SDC doesn’t keep your scores for these assignments on the website, so you’re advised to keep the emails that they send containing your grades. There were a lot of redundant lessons and some that contradicted one another. The quiz, practice, and exam questions are very similar, though, so if you do well on the practice exams, you’ll do well on the final.
1-10 Difficulty level: 4-5

I'm taking a course on Study.com with papers right now, so thanks for the tip about keeping the emails.

How do you get your grade total if they don't keep the grades on the website?

(Will be back to give my own review after I'm done.)

[RachelB]

I'm taking a course on Study.com with papers right now, so thanks for the tip about keeping the emails.

How do you get your grade total if they don't keep the grades on the website?

(Will be back to give my own review after I'm done.)

I've just been keeping track myself to make sure I have enough points to pass; they obviously record grades somewhere on their end to figure out the course grade after you finish everything.

[RachelB]

[b]Provider: Study.com 
Course: ENG301: Non-Western Literature 
[/b]
Course content: Text. Videos. 
Final exam format: Multiple Choice. 70 questions. 2 hours.
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: Technically, the exam covers the course content, but the quiz and practice exam questions are very different from the real exam questions. I did the course practice exam as well as all of the practice chapter tests multiple times, and got around 90% on each of these, but I was completely blindsided by the exam’s questions and only got 64% on the final.
Time taken on course: 31 hours
Familiarity with subject before course: I was familiar with most of the concepts presented in the course (colonialism, feminism, critical race theory, etc.); most of the specific literature was new to me.

Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: 
There's a required reading list, and these materials are not included in the course, so you need to source them yourself. They're used to inform the essay portions of the course. The required reading list is not accessible until you have an SDC subscription, so this might affect people who don’t have easy/fast access to these books from their library, or who aren’t able to easily buy them. I have a really great library system in the States and still struggled to find a couple of the books.

There are 3 assignments, which are all 2000-2500 word essays (worth 30, 30, and 35 points, respectively). Thankfully, grading for these seems to be pretty lenient, so I only did 2 of these, despite a terrible exam score.

For being an English course, there were so many grammatical errors.

All the lessons are written by different people (89 lessons total), and some of these have contradictory information.

Some of the lessons also have repetitive, redundant information. One author copied and pasted the same paragraph on critical race theory into every single one of her lessons, for example.

1-10 Difficulty level: 6?

[wow]

Provider: Study.com
Course: Genetics 101
Course content: Text. Videos.
Final exam format: Multiple Choice. 100 questions. 2 hours.
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: Similar
Time taken on course: A few days
Familiarity with subject before course: Very familiar. Tested out of 25%. There is some overlap with Intro or General Biology--not a lot but some. I also took genetics courses on Coursera and EdX years ago, so most of this was remembering what I once knew.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: The videos are generally good and reasonably entertaining
1-10 Difficulty level: 2-3; if you aren't already familiar with the subject it will be much harder

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Provider: Study.com
Course: Geology 101
Course content: Text. Videos.
Final exam format: Multiple Choice. 100 questions. 2 hours.
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: Similar
Time taken on course: A few days
Familiarity with subject before course: Somewhat familiar. I took Earth Science a few years ago and have taken naturalist training for volunteering at parks; I tested out of maybe 15 percent of this.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: I was hoping we would spend more time on mineralogy but that was only one or two sections of the course. The course covers a wide variety of topics in physical geology so it's likely that some units will be hard and others difficult for a person, depending on where they live and what they already know (If you live on the San Andreas Fault, you might have some familiarity with earthquake science than someone who doesn't, for example)
1-10 Difficulty level: 3

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Provider: Study.com
Course: Advanced Social Psychology
Course content: Text. Videos. 4 papers.
Final exam format: Multiple Choice. 70 questions. 2 hours?
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: Similar, maybe one or two from left field.
Time taken on course: A few days to a week; I was doing other courses at the same time so it's hard to say. Also this is probably the most time-consuming study .com course I've taken because it required four papers.
Familiarity with subject before course: Tested out of 10-15% or so. I have taken intro psychology and intro sociology at community college, I have worked in health care settings, have taken education courses, and I have absorbed a lot of this stuff over the years. Also familiar with AP style and have a citation manager (Zotero) which makes things more efficient.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know:
1-10 Difficulty level: 2-3; BUT have I mentioned the four papers? Also probably a lot harder if you are a young adult as more of the info will be new to you. I spent most of my energy on the papers that were worth the most points and then did a mediocre to poor job on the other two because I'd already taken the final and knew I would pass.