How Good Are Our Courses?
Quality Assurance Strategies
Equal 100% Accountability
Introduction: The Institute for Graduate Studies (IGS) has offered continuing teacher education graduate credit courses in Wisconsin for 40 years and during the past nine years in academic partnership with the accredited University of St. Thomas of St. Paul, MN. IGS is in constant communication with the University to assure quality courses for educators.
1. Performance Money Back Guarantee:
A 100% refund of tuition and any material costs are provided without question when someone drops a course due to dissatisfaction with our “product”. (To our best knowledge, IGS is the only Institution of Higher Learning offering graduate courses in the state of WI to have this practice.)
2. Accreditation:
All CTED courses carry continuing education graduate credits offered by the University of St. Thomas. UST is accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA), and the UST School of Education is accredited by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE).
3. Academic Rigor:
IGS follows the widely practiced Carnegie Unit Guidelines.Course syllabi for all IGS courses are available upon request to from bpalmer4065@sbcglobal.net. Each syllabus specifies, in part, the credit hour expectations in terms of the course content and class schedule as well as on site and homework assignments, all of which follow the widely practiced Carnegie unit graduate level guidelines for contact hours and out-of-class assignments. All syllabi are reviewed regularly by the UST School of Education Graduation Continuing Education Office and the CECRC Committee and all new face-to-face and online course proposals must be approved prior to being offered.
4. Course Evaluations:
All students are invited to evaluate all courses in which they are enrolled. The results of these separate evaluations are carefully reviewed by both IGS and UST. The following student’s opinion is typical of countless number of comments received:”I learned more in this one graduate course than in more than 30 other hours of graduate study.” (2005 WI Teacher)
5. Faculty Excellence:
All faculty members hold at least a Master’s Degree and have been approved by the staff of the University of St. Thomas School of Education’s Graduate Continuing Education office. Many are published authorities in their own right and use both current and “classical” textbooks for their courses. The IGS faculty is headed by Dr. Ed Pino PhD, Ed D. (See Facultyweb pages.)
Closing:
We welcome close scrutiny of any and all of our courses and instructors. Evaluators are welcome to attend our courses, carefully review our course syllabi, talk to our instructors about the courses they offer and ask a good sampling of our alumni to determine their feelings about the value of our courses to them. Any meaningful feedback is invited and encouraged.
We challenge any other WI institution of higher learning to match this level of academic rigor and accountability