Accreditation of educational institutions offers two benefits. First, it assures students and employers that the degree that an individual has meets a certain level of quality. Secondly, accreditation offers a certain level of interchangeability and transferability of educational credits when an individual moves from one institution to another. Of course, the lack of accreditation has the obvious value of alerting students and employers to possible issues with an individual’s academic record.
Initially Space College will seek to aggregate educational offerings already in existence at established educational institutions and will default to the accreditation(s) of these institutions. Space College will seek to review and document these institutions but other than listing their offerings as recommendations, there will be no accreditation of or by Space College in this regard.
The initial focus of Space College will be on the first several years of undergraduate course i.e. community college. As that population’s needs are addressed, Space College will expand its focus through undergraduate to graduate and then postgraduate education.
Space College will seek accreditation if/when it decides to offer its own courses and training and of course, if/when SpaceCollege seeks to grant degrees and certifications. In advance of that, Space College will seek to ascertain the accreditation (or lack thereof) of courses and materials that it lists on spacecollege.org and make the accreditation (or lack thereof) obvious to users of spacecollege.org.
Ideally, down the road, Space College would offer a complete course of study in several areas related to space exploration as a degree program. It is likely that all Space College activities will be a hybrid of local, online, and onsite courses and activities. As such Space College will seek to adopt models in use by other degree granting education institutions with similar models of instruction. Institutions that offer overseas study and corporate experience would be logical models to emulate.
Resources and other information on the professional accreditation of colleges and universities can be found at http://www2.ed.gov/admins/finaid/accred/index.html
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