WGU Master's in Elementary Education - Progress Thread

[nykorn]

What strategies can help WGU students complete their teaching degree faster while meeting all state licensure requirements?

The major bottleneck is only two things. The internships and the way the courses are set up.

1) To speed things up, WGU should apply to as many schools as possible for the PCE (pre-student teaching internship) and student teaching internship placements from the start. As it is now, WGU applied to 1 school, waited a month and a half, then applied to a second school, waited a month, applied to 3 more schools, waited, then applied to 3 more. They should have just applied to these 8 schools all at once.

I only have 10 weeks left of term 2. I've ended up feeling dejected and started neglecting my studies, I feel like I'm sitting around waiting for schools to take action and I feel like I'm throwing away months' worth of money on the wait. My degree is going to have to be finished in 3 terms instead of 2. That's an extra $4,500 or so. For a total of around $13,000 for the Master's. I keep thinking that I could have gotten a cheaper degree at another school or I could have majored in a different subject at WGU like Accounting which would have been finished in just 1 term for $4,700. I do really like WGU but it certainly does cost money. I live in poverty (income of $1,000 or less, usually less, per month) so the tuition is a big deal to me emotionally.

You also can't even apply for a student internship until you've finished your PCE internship. That'll be another long wait to get accepted. I assume it's done this way due to state requirements regarding applications. What WGU could theoretically do is find schools willing to accept you early on based on your PCE application, and just not do any of the finalizing until you've actually finished your PCE, at which point they update your application and confirm the school is still willing to accept you for the student internship. They need to figure out a way to streamline this whole process with the schools.

2) The courses often have repeating info, which I understand is by design but it does take up your time to reread stuff you were already taught before, and is demotivating for some of us. I believe some courses should be merged and some should be re-arranged so it results in the sense of less work overall. For example if you are taking a Methodologies course, which tells you stuff like "find a way to teach about Health while in Math class", you should take that after you've taken the content classes on Math and Health. I noticed some courses like Pacific Northwest Methodologies have almost no new content (literally, it was only a couple paragraphs of new content, or so I felt) and should really just be merged with the Pacific Northwest Histories course.

Anyways, I started my degree in March, it is now December. I only have 3 assignments left I can do. I'm no longer accelerating as there is no point, but I'll finish these last 3 before the end of December. WGU's homepage says that for this degree, 64% of graduates finish within 2 years.