Speed/Ease of completion - SL vs SDC vs Penn Foster

[vpassenheim]

This one's fresh for me so I'll share my experience. I have experience with SDC, SL, Davar, and Saylor. Saylor is, of course, the cheapest. SDC/SL/Davar are different price structures, but almost boil down to the same. My preferred format is SDC for ease of knocking out courses. At least, for the LL courses. I've had a bumpy experience, to say the least, with their UL courses as I've found that the assignment requirements and rubrics play a game with students and it can be very frustrating to spend a lot of time researching, preparing, and writing a research paper only to find AFTER the fact that you didn't curtsy quite like they like.

I've had A product papers be graded B- and C+. Now, just so that we're clear, I got an A+ in my Cornerstone Seminar online course with COSC, and I've had As with all my Davar papers, as well. The problem lies in SDC's structural inability to properly and adequately communicate all requirements for these papers with the student. Feedback is vital BEFORE you write the paper, not after. Yes, they offer an "Instant Answer" feature for students with subject matter questions, but what they don't tell you is that you really need to be very proactive in using it BEFORE you engage in any of these assignments, because you will be surprised to find that the assignment requirements and rubric DON'T actually cover everything their looking for and will grade you on. It's up to you to be very creative and inquisitive about the myriad of possibilities that they might consider "important" content on the final assignment product - they won't tell you this, so I'm telling you (*if anybody's interested I can share my detailed response complaining to SDC on this matter).

I've already registered my complaint (lol) with SDC support and via response to my graded assignment. Of course, I'm not very optimistic it means anything to them, so I decided to "vent" here (lol), because at least here I might be able to save somebody from the heartache I've gone through (lol). Trust me, you wouldn't be laughing either if after all that hard work you submit what to your estimation is an A+ product, but end up getting a B- for your effort. I have resigned myself to getting Bs with both of my SDC UL courses: Business 303 and Marketing 303. I have As in all the other LL courses.

So, in summary, I recommend:
SDC for LL courses
Davar for UL courses (Davar gives you the study guides for their courses, which are very helpful, and you also get pretty good feedback from them and I've had no problems with the research papers/assignments I've had to write for them - all As.)