The Ever-Expanding TEL Course Catalog

by | Oct 15, 2019 | News

It’s always exciting and exhausting to overhaul your organization’s website. Typically, organizations stretch the utility of their old websites as far as they can before launching a new one. There can be good reasons for this, especially for startups with resource constraints. Is redesigning your website more important than your other design and development tasks?

All this to say that, usually, by the time we get around to overhauling our websites there are many updates and new features to address. That’s certainly been the case of TEL’s new site. We’ve grown significantly as an organization, both in terms of staff and products. As I reviewed our new pages recently, I was reminded again of just how far we’ve come.

One area, in particular, where we’ve expanded is in our course catalog. A year ago we had one (yes, 1) course that was available to students — U.S. History 1. Fast-forward to the present and we are offering nine courses for college credit. Better yet, we’re on track to release the following courses in January.

  • Biology (with lab)
  • Chemistry
  • Chinese 1
  • College Algebra
  • Latin 1
  • Microeconomics
  • Physical Science (with lab)
  • U.S. History 2

That will bring our course total to 16 (17 if you include College Readiness), and it also brings some important additions to our catalog. Biology and Physical Science will be our first science courses with labs and will give our high school students great options for dual-credit science classes.

Chinese and Latin are also firsts for us. These and future language courses will help students satisfy their college language requirements and also provide expanded diversity to our curriculum. We’ll roll out Spanish 1 in August 2020, which will give students an even broader spectrum of languages and cultures to study.

I’m particularly excited about College Algebra. This is still a required course at many colleges and universities and many of its topics are foundational to other STEM courses. In addition to College Algebra and our Quantitative Analysis courses for non-STEM majors, in August 2020 we’ll also have our first Calculus course.

Our goal, as has always been, is to create a catalog of college-level general education courses that makes it possible for anyone to earn two years of college credit at truly affordable prices. By fall 2020, we expect to have approximately 24 courses, with a fairly complete set of dual-credit options for high school juniors and seniors. We remain on schedule to complete our core catalog of 30 courses by January 2021.

On a personal level, what this means for me is that I have plenty of new voiceovers to record for these fun courses.

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