Here Is Our Education discussion

Anyone with info on this topic should post on this thread.

Ok. I was introduced to this page and thankfully, Ms. Housman provided me a thread where I hope to do some good.
There are plenty of accredited universities and colleges where one can earn a Bachelor Degree. I will do my best to post the information here.

There are colleges that were founded in the 1970s for adult students who need to complete a degree because they started college, but life circumstances left them unable to complete a college degree in the traditional manner.

Four of these schools are:

-Excelsior College (www.excelsior.edu)
-Thomas Edison State College (www.tesc.edu)
-Charter Oak State College (www.charteroak.edu)
-State University of New York-Empire State College (www.esc.edu)

I've tried a few Coursera courses, but never finished any of them. It's HARD to learn outside of a classroom!

Having said that, I've learned a lot from sharing books on Goodreads.

There is an organization that takes a student's work experiences and converts them to college credits:

-(www.learningcounts.org)

How about Master's degrees?

Other sites:

www.straighterline.com
www.calcampus.com

Great stuff!

Potential students should be aware that many (although certainly not all) employers and graduate schools still look askance at online programs in general, and some specific ones in particular. Excelsior, Thomas Edison, and Charter Oak are definitely among the ones most likely to get a negative response (for a variety of reasons, including their extremely lenient transfer credit policies).

If I were a student interested in getting an online degree, I would actually start by looking at the local options. Many, many schools offer online courses, and quite a lot offer online degrees. If you chose a local school, especially if it is a state school, it is likely to be cheaper. And having the option to go to campus occasionally (for a specific class not offered online, to work out any paperwork snafus, etc.) is definitely helpful in many cases.

That said, if you are interested strictly in online programs and either have none nearby or none of the local schools will work for you, I have heard good things about Empire State and also about Utah State.

(Disclaimer: While I do not work for an online program, the university for which I work does have an online program. It is not any of the ones mentioned above.)

Also, if the main motivation is to educate yourself, rather than to complete a degree, I would suggest Coursera and some of the similar sites, rather than any online college.

I couldn't stick with Coursera, and apparently, that's the norm for the site.

Online classes are not a good fit for some people, whether on Coursera or an online college. For some students, a physical classroom is a key component.

With Coursera, the fact that there is no penalty (financial, academic) for dropping probably ups the rate of drops as well. However, I certainly know people who have enjoyed and completed multiple courses with them, so it's largely a question of figuring out if that learning modality works for you.

It doesn't seem to work for me. But Goodreads does.