Non-Degree Courses that Drive Student Success

With the massive move online during Covid-19, the need to get people back to work, and the pressure on time and cost, there has been a growing movement toward offering short-form, non-degree credentials to expedite education and career paths. At the same time, there is a legitimate concern about the quality of these credentials and the outcomes of students. A course provider has engaged with a quality assurance organization since 2012 to ensure that all courses are aligned to the quality expectations of U.S. higher education. This provides the design teams with a clear competency based design process to ensure consistent quality and it provides students with credit recommendations they can take to any university to request prior learning assessment (PLA) credit backed by the experts at the quality assurance organization. Consistent with other studies on PLA, for students that complete at least one course we have found dramatic increases in continuation rates at two universities that are highly likely to be replicable at other universities.

This will be an interactive session including periodic polls and question and answer sessions. Examples of poll question topics include:

• Level of interest in non-degree and PLA at your organization
• Ranking of academic integrity concerns
• Level of focus on continuation in the first year
• Agreement on need to address time and cost
• Maturing of approach to ensuring integrity of PLA

The two presenting organizations come with deep expertise in these areas. The quality assurance organization has worked for decades with leading employers, government agencies, and labor unions to connect workplace learning and corporate training programs with college credit. The course provider’s mission is to help make education affordable and accessible to students at every stage of their educational career through courses that are priced much lower than traditional college courses. These self-paced courses are accepted for credit at hundreds of colleges and universities and can be taken any time, on any device, and there are no textbooks or in-person requirements.

In this presentation, we will provide an overview of how we conduct the design process to ensure the high quality of the courses. We will explain:

• The process of determining market need
• How benchmarking with universities and other providers is done
• Where to source high quality content and media
• How we determine the best assessment strategy for the competencies
• The role of subject matter experts in crafting the assessments and instruction

The quality assurance organization provides the framework and the review process. We will show how:

• The quality assurance organization selects and trains faculty reviewers
• The timeline, criteria, and process of review
• The kinds of feedback reviewers provide to strengthen the courses
• The continuous review process that ensures courses stay aligned to best practices.  

With the move to online, many traditional faculty members and administrators are justifiably concerned about academic integrity and cheating. The course provider and quality assurance organization have developed considerable expertise and are monitoring industry trends. It’s not as simple as implementing the most aggressive measures, considerations of user experience, equity and privacy are growing concerns. We will share the practices found to be most successful for our population to ensure identity, stop plagiarism and test cheating, and block dishonest activity.

Finally, what is most important are the outcomes of the students. There have been many studies showing the large increases in degree completion rates of students that earn PLA credits. We will be able to share new research on students that completed courses and transferred them into two universities. We have seen double digit increases in continuation at the end of the first term and the end of the fourth term.

At the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Explain how to design high quality non-degree courses
• Analyze academic integrity strategies
• Evaluate options to use PLA to improve first year success