Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, Illinois partnered with cloud-based software company Salesforce to create an innovative online program aimed at adult students who wish to complete their education.
The YourWay initiative, built with Salesforce.org Education Cloud, offers students to complete general-education courses with no upfront costs, no tuition, no books purchases, and no fees. The only cost is for official transcripts at $50 per credit hour which are payable via PayPal. This fee covers the cost of reviewing mastery assessments and awarding credit for an official transcript.
YourWay is a completely online, self-paced environment which contains all of the education materials required for the course. Students are allowed two retakes on all assessments; there is no tuition assessed to enroll in general education courses.
The Olivet Nazarene University (ONU) YourWay initiative is significant in many ways. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that education is a fundamental human right for everyone. According to UNESCO, higher education must be accessible to all on the basis of individual capacity and progressively free. The YourWay initiative is aligned with this principle.
Indeed, the ONU YourWay initiative responds to an eminent need in the United States urging 3.5 million Americans who have completed some college but have not obtained a degree to return and finish college.
According to Some College, No Degree: Snapshot for the Nation and 50 States (PDF) research conducted in October 2019 by National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, many students get left behind. “One-third of those who enroll every year drop out before earning a degree or certificate. Imagine how far America could advance its attainment goals if states and colleges and universities, informed by the evidence from this report, actually tried to re-enroll students from the 36 million current ‘Some College, No Degree’ population, reaching out with tailored programs and policies to meet their needs,” the authors of the report stated.
ONU’s YourWay initiative is a five-year strategic plan with a goal to help create scale to serve their students in a more impactful way. “We believe that technology innovation is key to help schools our size automate, create efficiencies, and build scale to serve our students better,” said Ryan Spittal, Vice President for ONU Global, which houses the School of Graduate and Continuing Studies.
Giving students this second chance certainly pays off. Almost one million students identified as Some College, No Degree in the first report by National Student Clearinghouse Research Center in 2014 re-enrolled and became completers. Online enrollees were more likely to have returned to online institutions.
“Completers tend to finish at the institution where they first re-enrolled and complete within two years of re-enrolling, without stopping out,” according to the report. “Completers typically re-enrolled and finished in the same state where they last enrolled, with a few exceptions.”
YourWay is student centric. ONU radically simplified and redefined the learning experience. The bite-sized content makes learning more accessible, more hands-on, and more engaging. The program creates equity by ensuring students can learn of where they live or their background.
Students can transfer 60 credits from a community or two-year college, or 60 to 90 credits from a combination of two and four-year institutions toward a degree. The Nursing program accepts up to 82-hour credit hours. Transfer students looking for online options are required to complete at least the final 30 to 60 credits at Olivet in order to earn a degree. Students interested in the Olivet’s YourWay program can request more information following this link.