Looking Back at 2021: A Year of Growth & Progress

by Carrie Watkins | Dec 21, 2021 | News

In many ways, 2021 was a year of incredible growth for TEL Education. We launched dozens of new partnerships, both with schools and organizations. We found ways to better support students, and our completion and pass rates reflected those efforts. Here is a look at what we accomplished this year.

View the complete infographic

Streamlining Products & Services

In true start-up fashion, we’ve tried a number of ways to reach students over the years. Some of them worked well and some of them helped us figure out what didn’t. This year, we have fine-tuned our offering to what we know schools and institutions need.

A Collegiate Academy Experience

Most high schools already offer dual credit, but it often doesn’t fit the needs of all their students. Schools are looking for a way to do dual credit differently. With the collegiate academy experience, students get a clear pathway to their educational goals, from a single dual credit course up to a complete associate degree.

General Education Supplementation

Schools across the board have been through a lot in the past 18 months. Small, liberal arts colleges have been especially stretched. From adjunct shortages, faculty overload, and students needing more flexible options, we’ve been able to help colleges and universities meet the needs of their students without overburdening their faculty and staff.

Academics section of the infographic

Scaffolding Student and Partner Success

Our courses are rigorous, and for many of our students, this is the first college-level online course they’ve taken. So we found ways to incorporate additional resources and support to help students stay on track. We expanded our student coaching program with new workshops and more contacts with students. We also launched the writing lab, which helps students at all stages of the writing process, no matter what course they are taking.

This year we saw more than 4,000 course enrollments and we’re on pace to double that next year. That also means we have a number of new partner schools. We’re continuing to streamline our implementation process so students get enrolled quickly and easily. We also recognize the need for schools to market the program to their students, so we expanded our marketing options for schools to include flyers, FAQs, and social media graphics.

Curriculum Section of the Infographic

Establishing A Complete Catalog

We launched eight new courses in 2021, including several foundational business courses and our fine arts course, Music Appreciation. With Philosophy of Life, which is scheduled to launch in January 2022, we have our complete associate degree catalog. While we may look for new opportunities to add courses in the future, such as Spanish, the 26 courses and three science labs create a solid course catalog for our partners.

Our most popular courses this year were Language & Composition, Principles of Psychology, and College Readiness.

New Partners Section of the Infographic

Reaching More Students

Our growth this year was most evident in the number of new partner schools we added. We added 87 new high schools to our partner list, each offering the collegiate academy experience to their students. Much of that growth came from high schools excited about our new higher education partners who will be providing the credit for the dual credit. We added Jacksonville University in Florida, Iowa Wesleyan University, and Salem University in West Virginia. Towards the end of the year, University of Saint Katherine in California agreed to partner, and we ended the year bringing on the College of Mount St. Vincent for our partner schools in New York.

In total, we brought on 22 new higher education partners in 2021 and expanded to 13 states with credit-granting partners.

Goodbye 2021. Hello opportunity.

Things look a little different as we close out 2021 than they did when we started, but our mission is still the same: provide high-quality, affordable college-level learning to anyone who wants it. If you are interested in joining us on that journey, reach out to us through our contact form and let us know how we can work together.

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