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Americans looking to earn degrees at their own speed can now do so via their mobile phones after Cornerstone University tailored degree offerings in its business program to cater to students who prefer a self-paced program that can be completed on a smartphone.
“We developed the nation’s first mobile platform to deliver an accredited undergraduate degree and a master’s degree as well, all via your mobile phone,” Cornerstone University President Gerson Moreno-Riaño told FOX Business in an interview.
Moreno-Riaño said that the program launched in August and has about 250 students enrolled.
Students in what’s known as the SOAR program can obtain an associate’s or bachelor’s degree in strategic business management, or a master’s degree in organizational leadership.
“One of the beautiful things we’ve seen is that the persistence rate from month-to-month is 91%, so students are sticking with this and completing it,” he said, adding that some students who transferred in with prior credits to complete a degree will be the program’s first graduates this year.
Moreno-Riaño said that Cornerstone’s price point for its SOAR bachelor’s degree is $24,000 from start to finish, while the master’s degree is $12,000.
“More than half of our current students enrolled in the program now are paying no tuition due to scholarships and grants.
“We see this as an opportunity to address a gap in our country now when it comes to education, and frankly, we’re convinced that the current American higher ed infrastructure cannot address this challenge. It was built for what I call traditional brick and mortar students,” he said.
“We thought, how can we take this ubiquitous piece of technology that everybody has, that everyone spends a lot of time on? On average, in our country, we’re talking about well over four hours a day that adults are on their mobile devices.”
Moreno-Riaño said Cornerstone tested the app for over a year with about 120 students, which informed the university’s process of revising and launching the SOAR app.
He said that Cornerstone is deeply concerned with how it reaches out to non-traditional students and disenchanted students, some of whom haven’t tried to pursue a degree while others tried a traditional college experience and aren’t willing to return.
Moreno-Riaño said that when Cornerstone was mapping out the program, it understood that the traditional curriculum of 120 credit hours in a degree program couldn’t be mapped over to a mobile app, so the school sought to unpackage those courses into “bite-sized chunks of educational content.”
“In the app, there will be mini-lectures, podcasts, book reviews, interviews, all with very closely, carefully designed learning objectives throughout the program,” Moreno-Riaño said, explaining that some of the lectures may be in the range of 5 to 10 minutes.
“We have micro assessments built-in that are immediately graded and feedback is given to the student.”
Some of the program’s first graduates told Moreno-Riaño that they listen to some of the lessons while commuting to work, while traveling or doing household chores.
“It allows them to, in essence, continue the learning experience amidst a complex schedule because we unbundle it, unpackage it, redevelop it and maintain the engagement criteria so that students stay studying and focused,” he said.
