The official guide to self-study RA courses from ASU, BYU, UIdaho, etc.

[MNomadic]

I skipped writing reviews for the 2 ASU EA/ULC/GFA courses I did last year but figured I'd write about the ones I'm doing now. I just finished the proctored final for this one a few minutes ago, though I haven't yet received final grades for the last few assignments.

Provider: ASU Universal Learner Courses
Course: COM 100: Intro to Human Communication. 
Course content: Generally the standard ASU ULC format, with lecture videos, long readings, one weekly essay, and weekly quizzes. One exam covering the entire course. 
Final exam format: 70 multiple choice questions, proctored. Covers all 7 weeks.
Final exam content vs course content/practice exams: The final pulled some questions from the weekly quizzes. The course adequately prepares you for the final.
Time taken on course: A few hours per week to go through the content and do the quiz and an additional few hours for the weekly essay. 7-8 weeks long.
Familiarity with subject before course: Somewhat familiar. I'd done a few communication courses through Sophia and the Sociology and Psychology CLEPs which gave me a decent background.
Pitfalls, high points, things others should know: They hit a huge grading bottleneck at the beginning of the course so I didn't receive feedback/grades from my first 4-5 essays until more than halfway through the course which was pretty frustrating. I'm actually still waiting on grades from my last 2 papers as well. They weren't too strict with grading but I did get points deducted on a few essays for going over the word count, which was a very narrow band of 400-450 words. I'm used to writing 500-600 words so I had to adjust to accommodate since I didn't realize they'd take points away. Also, instead of submitting a word document, you had to copy and paste your essay into a small submission form which was frustrating and destroyed any attempts at nice formatting. 

The quizzes are open book and I recommend having it open as you work through the week's course content to answer as you go rather than viewing/reading everything and then having to go back later to double-check stuff as you're answering the quiz. About 90% of the questions come right from the course readings and course lectures but every quiz had about 2-3 questions not directly covered by the readings/lectures but I did find them in the open-source textbook that the course uses.
1-10 Difficulty level: 3-4. I always stress over papers more than I should. It wasn't super intense.
Final grade: A(I actually haven't received grades for the last 2 assignments yet but I've already met the threshold for A)