New here; intrigued, slightly confused and overwhelmed

[jobojoe285]

If you want to work for an American company, having an American degree may work in your favor. Americans can be a bit strange about "foreign" degrees, even if the other country is Canada. So that's good!

Monetarily, $20k is more than sufficient for a TESU degree. If your programs are worth university credit, you're looking at (approximately) 4-6 months of Study.com ($235/mo.), 3-6 months of Sophia.org ($99/mo., $299 for 4 months, or $599 for a year), and maybe a couple of Coursera certificates (currently $299/year). Plus TESU tuition & fees of around $4k-5k, depending on your choices. (If your Canadian studies aren't worth university credits, there would be additional tuition of $1000-$2000, depending on additional college/university.) As a bonus, if you think you might ever want to move to management, it's possible to get a BS(BA) CIS degree at TESU at the same time as a TESU BACS and you'd only spend slightly more time/money on this when planned out carefully. It's like a BOGO deal for degrees!

$20k is also more than sufficient for about 2 years at WGU: https://www.wgu.edu/financial-aid-tuitio...grees.html Plus approximately 2 months of Sophia, maybe 6-8 months of Study.com, and maybe a Coursera certificate or two. Coursera certificate equivalencies can be found under "The American Dream Academy" on the WGU partnership page: https://partners.wgu.edu/home Without Sophia, SDC, and Coursera, WGU would almost certainly take significantly longer than 1-1.5 years. With them, it can take 6-12 months.

But I'm not 100% sure that you could complete a WGU degree. I'm not sure if they're open to people in Alberta. IIRC, you have to be within a certain distance of Toronto in order to be accepted. But maybe if you're located in a big city? Not sure. 

There is technically also a BSIT degree from PUG available: https://www.purdueglobal.edu/degree-prog...echnology/ But that's IT, not Computer Science. And there is a LOT of writing at PUG. Every single credit requires at least one paper or project at PUG. You can transfer in 75% of the required 180 credits, but that's still 45-50 papers that you'd have to write. Minimum. Some people have been able to complete it all in under a year, but it's still a lot of work.

Thank you for the info, I will take a look at it and update later if I have any questions or just to let you know what happened !

Before I go off, to confirm: I would take a look at what courses on study.com, etc. are accepted for credits from TESU or WGU (I contacted them, they said it's fine as long as I can get past their admissions; for my college, I would need to get it transferred to USA equivalent and then they would take a look to see if any credits would be awarded) then I would do a count of how many courses would net me a number of credits, do all the courses and only afterwards apply for admission at TESU, WGU, etc? So I would start university with a large chunk completed? Or am I misunderstanding?

As an example for WGU, I was looking at their partners:

For Sophia courses that can be credit transferred for BS of software engineering I would start buying and doing multiple of these Sophia courses:
https://partners.wgu.edu/transfer-pathwa...instId=796

For Study.com: 
https://partners.wgu.edu/transfer-pathwa...instId=678


Some certificates:
https://partners.wgu.edu/transfer-pathwa...instId=870


So basically I would take a look at every course in the bachelor program, and then I would take a look at a 3rd party course that could be exchanged for credits later on. Then I would spend a year doing all these courses and then applying for admission for the bachelor of software engineer, etc.? Then I would just do the program mandatory courses that I cannot get from 3rd party sources?