Online Partnerships: Opening the Door to
Higher Education

By Mary Briden, Rio Salado College, Tempe, AZ

Rio Salado College (RSC), in direct response to the needs of students enrolled in one of its ten state-approved online teacher education programs, has developed unique online academic transfer partnerships. These transfer partnerships provide students with the opportunity to continue their path through higher education at the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree levels without having to duplicate the education content they have already received. Learners are able to enhance their existing knowledge and pursue and develop the next level of skills and understanding needed for initial and continuing success in meeting the needs of the students they have in their classrooms.

For students who do not have a bachelor’s degree, RSC and Northcentral University (NCU), hve collaboratively designed an online undergraduate degree completion program. In this program, students complete a total of 120 credit hours. Fifty-one credits in teacher education and 39 credits in general education are offered through RSC. The remaining 30 credits are offered by NCU. Completion of this program results in a Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.) degree, which qualifies students to apply for teacher certification through the Arizona Department of Education in the areas of elementary, secondary, and special education.

Since the majority of RSC’s teacher education students already have a baccalaureate degree, it was extremely important to develop online master’s degree partnerships. The partnership with NCU provides students who complete one of RSC’s Post Baccalaureate Teacher Certification programs 18 hours of equivalent master’s degree credit. This credit is directly applied toward one of NCU’s eight 36 hour master’s degree concentrations. This means that when a student successfully completes one of the RSC programs, they have already completed one half of their master’s degree requirements. Some of the benefits of this program include the following:

• The 18 Teacher Education credits from RSC apply directly to a Master’s in
  Education degree.
• There are no transcription fees.
• RSC students receive discounted tuition.
  Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and Miller Analogies Test Scores (MAT) tests are not required.
• Remaining NCU course work is 100% online.
• Courses begin monthly and are not cancelled.

A second master’s degree partnership was developed with Plymouth State University (PSU). This partnership provides for 15 of the 33 master’s degree credits to be satisfied with RSC teacher education course work. Some examples of admission requirements for this program include the following:

• Fifteen teacher education credits from RSC apply directly to a Master’s in
  Education degree.
• Remaining five courses can be competed online.
• Schedule of classes enables students to take as few as one PSU class per term, four terms per year: Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer. Individual classes may be accelerated within each term.
• An official report of the MAT or the GRE is required but waived for students who already hold a graduate degree.

For students who already possess a master’s degree, an online doctoral partnership is available through NCU. This partnership provides the student with a NCU individual evaluation of their degrees along with their RSC teacher education course work. The type of degrees the student has determines the number of credits that can be directly accepted and applied toward an NCU Doctorate degree.

These unique online partnerships developed by the RSC Education Department have proven to be very popular with students and exceedingly beneficial. They truly open the door to higher education and help students attain degrees in a reasonable time frame and an extremely cost effective manner.