I currently am a student at WGU in the post bacc teaching cert program. I have a bachelors and masters from a bricks and mortar university. All the courses I needed for the program transferred to WGU. I did have to take 2 history and English courses that I did not have in my bs and ms degrees at a b&m before I could be accepted. My masters is in education but I decided to not do student teaching and graduate. Let me first say this program has offered me more experience in preparing for student teaching than my university did. If I had this experience there I might had followed through. I have had just as much if not more interaction with my mentor as I did with my grad advisor. The work that I am doing is the same as what my supervising teacher had to do for her teaching program at a university level. I have access to community blogs to talk to other students. The course mentors are efficient at getting back to you when you need help. Yes when I graduate my certification will be in Utah but I knew that, my state offers reciprocity and I just have to apply for transfer of certification with my state. WGU makes sure you take all the required state praxis and pedagogy tests needed for that transfer. Overall I’ve learned just as much if not more as I would have at a b&m university. As for the degree and cert recognition, I cannot answer until I start applying for jobs.
Stace,
By now you have received my email and I hope you are a real student at WGU, are benefiting, and will tell us more here.
I do have some concerns with your comment:
1. Depending on what you want to teach, Utah’s standards are not very impressive. For example, as I am told, in Utah a Physics Teacher does not need to have any expertise in Physics beyond WGU’s teach yourself home lab work. How does this effect you?
2. What you describe is practice teaching. I know that WGU had set this up, but I also understand that the “mentors” at WGU are not themselves teachers or cntent experts. They are coaches who encourage you to do your work … sort of pay for hire moms. Is this correct?
3. Again, as I understand the law in Utah, you are supervised in the school setting by a teacher. This person is not your “mentor” though she or he is overseen by someone at WGU. Can you tell us anything about who oversees the Utah practice teaching program?
4. In an era where many people are worried that we are getting teachers from the lowest rungs of the academic barrel and an era where many PhDs in the arts and sciences need jobs, why does it make sense to hire teachers from WGU vs the UW, WWU, Eastern, Universality of Utah?????? Wouldn’t the kids be bette roff if we offered (as Harvard does) a 1 year MAT to retread these unemployed high achievers to work as teachers.
5. Since you describe practice teaching as the main value you get from WGU, in this case WGU is not acting in its much touted role as an “on line educator.” So, can you tell us what you are getting from WGU that you could not get from any other resource that offers practice teaching? Is WGU cheaper? Does it work with better schools? Does it give you an easy way to fill in credits, as you wrote, for things like history?