Fast Online Degree: Challenge for Credit

A lot of people need to get a college degree and don't have the time to spend 4 years working towards one. The good news is that there are a few ways that you can get a degree in considerably less time. One way to do this is to get credit for the things that you already know.

If you have a fair amount of work experience it may be possible to do this with a portfolio evaluation. In order to do this you are going to have to documentation of the training that you have had. If you aren't able to provide this another option is to challenge for credit.

A lot of schools will allow you to earn credit by challenging a course. Exactly how this is done will depend on the school and in most cases the course professor. Usually it will be done with a test but in some cases it will be through a course project.

If you are interested in getting a degree quickly and you think that you already know most of the material covered in the required courses it is definitely worth looking into finding an online college that will allow you to challenge for credit.

How to Get an Online Degree for you Life Experience

Most adults  have learned a lot of things over the years, unfortunately we live in a world where your knowledge counts for very little unless you have some sort of credential to prove it. The good news is that there are a lot of colleges out there that will give you a degree based on what you already know.

There are a couple of ways to do this, the first is to find a school that will allow you to test out, that's a subject for another post, in this one will look at getting a degree by Prior Learning Assessment.

In order to get a degree based on what you already know you are going to have to put together a portfolio that shows what you know and how you learned it. Some of this will come from courses that you may have taken over the years but most of it will be based on your work experience.

Whether or not you can get a degree by prior learning assessment is going to depend in part on how much experience you have and on how well documented it is. You will need to talk to the school that you intend to go through to determine exactly what their policies are and what you will need to provide them to get degree credit.

If you don't have enough experience for a degree it might still make sense to go through the assessment process as in many cases they will grant partial credit reducing the number of courses tha that you have to take.

Do Employers Consider Online Degrees Credible?

Whether or not employers consider online degrees to be considerable will depend in large part on where you got your degree. There are some very good online degrees and some that are of questionable value. Therefore you are going to want to make sure that you get your degree from a school that is of good quality and which has a good reputation.

There does seem to be a bit of an issue with employers looking down on online degrees, or at least not considering them to be as good as regular degrees. This is less common than it used to be but it does still exist. That being said there are ways to get around this problem so there is no reason to give up on distance learning if you are in need of a degree and don’t want to return to school full time.

The best way to make sure that potential employers look at your online degree in a positive way is to not tell them that you have an online degree. If you take your degree at a school that offers both online and regular programs the degrees themselves generally don’t say anything about being earned online. The standards to get the degree are the same either way so there is no reason to tell potential employers that you got the degree online or if you do tell them you can point out that the degrees is the same as the on campus degree.

The best option in most case for people who are looking to get online degrees is their local state university. This is because the school will be well known in the local area and it offers on campus degrees, in fact the vast majority of graduates will have earned their degree on campus. If your local state university does not offer the program that you want online then a state university from another state is probably your next best option.

If you are going to go with a school that offers only online degrees the best bet is to go with a school that is not widely known. If you do this employers will generally just assume that you got your degree on campus. The schools that seem to cause a credibility with employers are the online only schools that advertise heavily like the University of Phoenix, they are well known and have a bad reputation which makes degrees from them of limited value.

What Schools Offer the Best Online Degrees?

There is of course no easy answer to which school offers the best online degree, there are lots of factors that have to be considered. There are however a few things that you are going to want to look at when you are choosing a school so that you can get the best possible degree for your needs.

The first thing that you are going to want to look at when you are choosing a school for an online degree is to make sure that the school is regionally accredited. This is the guarantee that the school that you are attending is a legitimate school and that the courses that you take at that school will be recognized by other schools. There are thousands of schools that are regionally accredited so there is really no reason to even consider one that isn’t.

Unfortunately regional accreditation is not a guarantee that the school is particularly good, just that it meets a minimum standard. Therefore the next thing that you have to look at is the degree requirements that the school has. This is where things can get tricky as one of the biggest problems that online education is facing is that a lot of the for profit schools are setting requirements that are quite low for the simple reason that a harder degree program would reduce the number of customers they get.

When you are choosing a degree program you have to make sure that you not choose one that is easy, ideally you should be choosing a school that has degree programs that have the same course requirements that they have for their on campus students. This of course means that you would be limiting your options to schools that have on campus programs. While there are a lot of good online only schools you will probably find that regular college that offers online degrees is the better option.

There are other factors that you are going to want to consider as well like cost and reputation which is why I generally recommend to people that their best option for an online degree is their local state university, providing of course that they offer online programs. If not there are lots of other state universities that do which are also good options if your local school doesn’t offer the degree program that will meet your needs.

Are Online College Degrees Just as Good as Regular Degrees?

The best answer to whether or not an online degree is as good as a degree that you get by actually attending a college is that it depends. One of the issues that you are going to find when you start researching schools that offer online degrees is that there is a huge variation in terms of the quality of them. In general if you pick a good school that has a decent reputation in the distance learning world you should get a degree that is as good as any other, the problems start to occur with some of the online only schools.

The most important thing that you have to make sure of when you are choosing an online degree is that it is regionally accredited. This is supposed to be an assurance of quality and in theory and online school that is regionally accredited meets the same standards as a regular college that is regionally accredited. In reality however the standards that are required for accreditation have declined pretty dramatically, the result is that there are a lot of online colleges that are not up to the standard that you would expect.

Most of the issues that you will find with degree programs that are regionally accredited but not up to the same standard are the strictly online, for profit schools, although some of these have started to offer classroom attendance as well which just makes things more confusing. A good example of this is the University of Phoenix which was clearly set up as a money making venture more than as an educational institution. The result is very low standards and a degree that is not well respected despite the very high tuition rates.

The other issue that you are going to face when it comes to online degrees is whether or not potential employers consider them to be the equal of a regular degree. Again this is going to depend on where you go to school. The best option is generally to attend a state university, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the one in your state. State universities while not generally considered the equivalent of schools like Harvard are generally respected and should not cause an issue if they appear on your resume. In addition almost all state universities have far more on campus students than online ones and in almost all cases have the same classes and requirements for both.