Sophia
Limited Transfer
http://www.sophia.org
Sophia is a business (not a college) that sells courses you can take at home for college credit. These courses transfer to partner colleges that accept ACE credit. (What is ACE?)
Sophia’s courses are video-lesson based, and used to be a little more expensive than some of their other ACE competitors, however, in August 2020, they changed their pricing structure to $79/month. Unfortunately, under this new price structure, you ARE under a time crunch to complete a course quickly. You can work on 2 courses at a time, but if you don’t get them finished inside of 1 month, you’ll have to keep paying until you do.
What you need to know about Sophia:
(1) No photo ID required. For teens that have a driver’s license or passport, this might not be a big deal, but if your teen doesn’t have an official identification card of some kind, getting past the ID checkpoint can be a pain. Sophia doesn’t require a photo ID, so no worries.
(2) No webcam proctoring. If you’ve taken other ACE courses, you know that webcam proctoring is an expected part of the final exam process. There are always concerns regarding privacy as well as providing a space that meets the proctor’s specifications (nothing on the walls, no one else in the room, etc.) so by using their new technology, they’ve eliminated web proctoring entirely. They are using a product called “keyboard biometrics” that identifies a person by their typing style. My son used it earlier this year and liked it a lot!
(3) Course platform is excellent. The appearance, style, visual attractiveness, and ease of use, intuitive style, etc. are constantly praised by our audience as being “their favorite” online course.
(4) All lower level. Their college credits will come in at 100 freshman and 200 sophomore level. To date they haven’t developed any upper level courses, but we hope they do!
(5) Responsiveness. Their customer service is excellent! In addition, they are in regular communication with HS4CC offering promotions, deals, and coupons exclusively to our audience, and we love deals!!
(6) No labs. At this time, none of their sciences offer lab credit. It wouldn’t hurt to send them an email asking for them to add a lab. A lot of colleges want lab sciences, and there are other ACE providers already serving this market, so we hope Sophia jumps into this area too.
Sophia Course List (as of December, 2020)
New courses expected to launch in 2021 in the areas of computer science and IT as well as several more general education courses!
