ICYMI, this week’s issue of B&T features a special section on continuing education programs for bankers. And in the process of researching that article, I got to learn about a really awesome college not included in the paper, The American Women’s College (TAWC) at Bay Path University.
TAWC is the only all-women, all-online degree program in the country. It’s headed by Dr. Carol Leary, president of Bay Path University, and it aims to help the 76 million women in America who have started but not completed an undergraduate degree, or haven’t started at all.
The college began just last year, but its history really begins 15 years ago when Bay Path started offering a one-day-per-week program where women could come to the campus each Saturday and take one or two classes toward their bachelor’s degree each semester. The program worked great and allowed women to get their degree in a format that fit more easily into a busy schedule.
Bay Path continues to offer the one-day-a-week classes, but with the dawn of online education, Dr. Leary and her staff founded the all-online American Women’s College, which allows the program to reach more women and makes it even easier for them to find time to learn, since they can take the classes at any place and any time that works for them.
There’s a LOT about the program that’s not only innovative but also really awesome, including the financial and personal support the school offers, but one of the coolest things about TACW is its Social Online Universal Learning (SOUL) platform.
So, what exactly is SOUL? In an article that Dr. Leary wrote for the New England Journal of Higher Education, she described it as like this:
“SOUL facilitates the acceleration of the degree-attainment process for students by creating an adaptive, customized learning environment that leverages robust learning analytics to inform instructional approaches. The data collected through the SOUL platform allows faculty to more rapidly understand which students are completing each learning module, and which are falling behind or failing to complete them accurately. Tracking student performance in real-time permits faculty to proactively respond and intervene immediately when a problem arises so students can stay on track and graduate on time.”
Pretty cool, yes? The U.S. Department of Education thinks so, because it just awarded the school a $3.5 million First in the World grant to help develop the platform.
Pretty cool, indeed.
