Experience with Saylor Academy

Saylor is a very economical platform that offers ACE-accredited courses. Most of the ACE courses at Saylor transfer as credits at the UoPeople. You can use them to speed up your degree at the UoPeople. I took three ACE Accredited courses at Saylor Academy. The courses at Saylor are broken into units. Some classes have more units than others and vice versa. The ones I took had 5-8 units, mostly. Each unit has its own non-Graded Quizzes, which you can take to test your understanding of the concepts. There are no assignments on Saylor, and you can jump straight to the final exam without completing any of the units or non-Graded Quizzes if you know the subject. That's like finishing 2.5 months of work in a matter of a few hours!

The courses at Saylor are free of cost but need a mere $5 fee for the online proctoring. Once you’re ready to take the final, you just install an extension from Saylor, and an online proctor makes sure of a few things after which you can take the exam while they watch and listen to you during the test. The final exams at Saylor are tough, and there are rarely any repetitions of questions from non-Graded Quizzes. In other words, you can only pass if you actually study the material and take practice quizzes or if you know the subject extremely well. Thankfully, I passed all three classes with flying colors. You need at least 70% on the final to be eligible to get an accredited ACE credit. Each exam is always 2hrs long, which is more than enough to answer 50-60 MCQ questions. I was mostly done in 50mins to 1hr.  

Saylor is a bit slow compared to Sophia in sending an ACE-accredited transcript to Credly. It takes about 2-4 days, in my experience. However, Saylor is a speedier way of transferring credits, as you can jump straight to the final if you're familiar with the subject. For example, I took a Computer Science course at Sophia and jumped directly to the final after watching a crash course on YouTube. Many of you know by now that I studied computer science for a year or so in my previous degree, so, all it took was a crash course to refresh my concepts, and I ended up getting high 90s on the exam. Once Credly gets your transcripts from Saylor, you can upload them on the transfer credit app on the UoPeople's portal. Typically, it takes 1-2 weeks for credits to be approved, and about 1-3 additional weeks to be added to your Degree Audit Report. Though, transfer credits show up immediately on the unofficial transcript of the UoPeople once you pay for them. I took three courses at Saylor but opted to transfer only two as I didn't want too many on my transcript. 

The following probably explains what the choices in the exams look like at Saylor:

In a nutshell, I think that ACE-accredited courses at Saylor are an excellent way to knock off some major and elective courses from your degree, especially if you’re on a budget. $5 per course is like coffee change in this day and age. There are also a variety of courses available at Saylor on the subjects like Business, Computer Science, and Liberal Arts that are closely related to the classes at the UoPeople, which Sophia doesn't have, at least not at the moment. Saylor's support was also excellent in clarifying a few things about the issuance of transcripts. Nevertheless, the only caveat, in my opinion, is that some of the readings at Saylor are a bit dull. In that sense, you can't have your cake and eat it. Saylor also provides short videos for some courses to supposedly help you understand the material, which are merely introduction videos to the units. If any questions about Saylor, please shoot me. I'll be more than happy to answer them. 

Good luck!