WEU.......any idea?

Another suggestion: if you dislike telemarketing, try to avoid giving WEU your real phone number, based on this story:

There is no free lunch. WEU does expect something in return for those "free" courses -- their plan is to make WEU students available to advertisers.

It remains to be seen how intrusive or annoying this might be. However, this is WEU's only source of revenue, as far as I can see. So it wouldn't surprise me if they need to run a lot of online ads, or if they need to sell your personal info to a lot of third parties, in order to stay in business.

 

Then perhaps you should check out this 2012 news story on WEU, which identifies a potential "gotcha" pretty clearly:

*****

You will have no sunk financial costs. But there is a potential privacy cost: if WEU sells your personal info to its "business partners" -- which they explicitly acknowledge that they may do -- then you can't reverse that. That's why you may not want to give WEU your primary email or phone number.

 

I don't know CalDog, to me that's a just a minor inconvenience that can be dealt with. Salespeople call, ask them to put you on their DNC. If that won't work, get a cheap dollar store dummy cellphone or dummy VOIP number and let them call until their heart's content. Receive junk in the mail? Throw it out. Worried about spam? As you suggested, set up a different account.

Dealing with that for a quality tuition-free education is well worth it in my opinion. However, whether that education is quality or not is what we're all circling to evaluate, but at least at the moment Excelsior had to think WEU was offering quality enough to be working with them.

 

You beat me to it

 

I see Bachelor's degrees aren't being offered by WEU anymore. In some of their literature, they identified offering a few before. From a resources a standpoint, I suppose the Bachelor's degree would require the most committment (about 120 credits), so maybe that explains them getting rid of it.

 

Didn't AJU have some weird "free tuition" thing a few years ago in which you had to sign up with one of their sponsors in order to get "free" tuition. I remember talk about it on this board. There were "fees" involved rather than tuition but I recall someone signing up for some social networking advertiser-sponsored type thing back then. Could this be a similar setup?

 

Yes, they did. There were people in this forum at the time who were enrolled at AJU under that scheme. They were reporting effective rates as low as $45 a credit hour with "sponsorship." It seemed to work out well for those students; I don't know how well it worked for the school. I do know they're no longer AJU but now operate as New Charter University, so...

I don't think it was the same. WEU seems prepared to sell students' e-mail addresses multi-times, etc. I don't believe that was ever a part of the AJU plan. The prospect of WEU - to me - is somewhat like going to distance school via Facebook. It might even work, but I wouldn't like it. I gave up Facebook a long time ago, after a very short fling.

Johann

 

I found this on their In the News... page:

“WEU is not accredited,” Mr. Hines says. “We are in the process of being evaluated through both national and regional accreditors. We have acquired two small colleges that already have accreditation and are moving through that process with them. We’re also pursuing accreditation with the American Council of Education, which recently approved five courses with a MOOC sister company of ours.” He says he is confident that WEU will “achieve accreditation by 2014.”

There is a link to an audio file in which the program is explained. I didn't listen to it.


Full article here:
http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=23050

 

I listened. There wasn't much more info stated in the audio that we haven't read about already.

From the way Scott Hines addressed the questions in the audio, the school already has quite a few students and appears to have a pretty clear direction and approach to bringing in money. Now, we just have to see how it holds up.

On another note, here is a little battle between Scott Hines of WEU and Alan Contreras (See comments below the article): World Education University looks to ride the MOOC wave despite skeptics | Inside Higher Ed