The Teaching Company provides college level lectures on audio and video. We used them often in our homeschool, to supplement areas the boys were interested in (like science and economics) and to fill in the gaps in my own weak areas (like music.) Today I got a question about how to count those courses as high school credit.
Lee,
Thanks for the suggestion in your newsletter to check our library for Teaching Company courses. Sure enough, our library has lots of them. Yea!! How do you decide how much credit to give for one of those courses? They’d make a great summer project.
Thanks,
Kitty in Washington
I know that some homeschoolers feel the classes are college level, so that when you complete a big series (48 lectures) they give a full credit of high school work in that subject.
Other homeschoolers feel that since it isn’t a “prepared curriculum” you would need to count hours, and 48 hours is NOT enough for a credit. 75-90 hours is worth 1/2 credit, just for reference.
I used The Teaching Company mainly as a supplement. We would do our Sonlight work, and I supplemented with Teaching Company lectures to beef it up. I had the children take notes from the lectures, so they would get practice with college note-taking while still learning something.
I used the Teaching Company to fill in gaps, as well. Kevin didn’t get any economics in high school; because his brother studied economics 24/7, I simply FORGOT that I’d never had Kevin even TAKE economics. Bad Mom! Once Kevin finished his Econ lectures, I did give him 1/2 high school credit in that class.
I also gave my children full high school credit when they passed a CLEP exam. Because they learned SO much with The Teaching Company lectures, they were able to pass quite a few CLEP exams in different topics. Each passed CLEP went onto their transcript as a full 1 credit high school honors course.
So…. you are probably looking for “rules” about The Teaching Company. I can’t really give you any hard and fast rule. I can give you my opinion, though. In my opinion, an adult course with 48 lectures, standing alone with nothing else would probably be a 1/2 credit class. A high school level course with the workbook and everything, supplemental reading, would probably be a 1 credit course, because I think it would take about an hour a day to get through the whole thing. But you know, this is why I have my little disclaimer all over my website:
Disclaimer: Parents assume full responsibility for the education of their children in accordance with state law. Parents assume full responsibility for the accuracy of all homeschool records. We offer no guarantees, written or implied, that use of our products and services will result in college admissions or scholarship awards.
There just are no black and white answers on this one!
I hope that helps!
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Christianbook.com Curriculum Page
Scents From The Bible says:
Great resource – thanks! We’re doing research for our daughter for next year, and I’ll definitely look into this.
April 4th, 2009 at 8:45 am
Lois says:
The Teaching Company is terrific and you might tell your readers to check their
library first before making a purchase.
Our library had a number of their courses.
I used their Economics which is
College level as a supplement to the Austrian School and then took a number of
topics to compare the two schools. I used the Richard Maybury books and Workbooks
for an intro to Austrian Economics, particularly What Ever Happened to Penny
Candy. These books are great for sifting out the false information the media and
academia feed us. We need leaders in this area to create good change.
I also used for a Review of Algebra 2 which my daughter felt they did a good job
on. I didn’t use it for her real class though. Only because it was 2 years later
since she had Algebra and had to do her SAT/ACT.
October 1st, 2011 at 10:18 pm
Carol says:
Thanks for addressing this, Lee. I wanted more math credits for my non-math student (he did his Algebra I, II, and Geometry) but wanted to give him a break. We went with the Teaching Company’s lectures on Stats and Probability. I’m just going to call it an intro course on his transcripts, but I agree that the practice in notetaking is very valuable, and I was pleased that the course included a booklet containing lecture notes and a few practice questions.
January 20th, 2012 at 6:54 am