Distance Course Formats

Semester Based

Semester Based classes are the traditional model with which everyone (except maybe home-schoolers) is familiar. The majority of classes listed in the online ICN Catalog are organized around a semester (or, in the case of summer classes, the varying kinds of summer terms of the institutions). This format may be the best choice for most high-school students because it will track approximately if not exactly with the high-school semesters of your other classes. And if you can best organize your studying within a familiar, well-defined structure, this may be the best choice for you. The choices abound.

Open Enrollment

Open Enrollment means that you can start any time you want, and you typically have a fixed period of time in which to complete your coursework (common periods are six months, one year, and two years). This kind of flexibility is obviously very desirable for a lot of working adult students, which is why there are so many classes offered in an Open Enrollment format, but depending on your own circumstances, it might work for you, too. You generally need to be pretty good at keeping yourself well organized so you don’t arrive at the end of the time period with only a few lessons completed. And since this is generally an independent-study mode, you may feel the lack of other students with whom to compare notes or discuss problems. On the other hand, it’s a natural for many home-schoolers. And all classes are what is called “instructor led,” which means there’s a real professor at the other end of a telephone call or email/IM exchange who’s grading your assignments, monitoring your progress, and available for consultation. Most Open Enrollment classes are taught online, which avoids the drawbacks with traditional print correspondence classes in having long lags between the time you mail in an assignment and the time you actually find out how you did. If you’re a good independent learner, these classes may work very well for you.

Accelerated

Accelerated is the typical term for short courses, but another term might be “intense.” Typically you have five or perhaps eight weeks in which to complete a semester’s worth of learning, so again, this choice isn’t for everyone. If you’re taking a full load of other classes and have a part-time job after school, you may not be able to deal with the intensity of an accelerated-format class. On the other hand, you might think about these courses for summer, when even the more traditional courses are compressed into five- or eight-week summer sessions. Many high schools have had to cut summer programs due to lack of funds, but taking these accelerated classes (or other online classes offered in the summer) can be a way to use summer to keep on learning. (We all know it’s amazing how much you can forget over the summer anyway, right? If you keep using what you learned the previous year, you’re less likely to lose it by the next fall.)