I'm torn about their program - Almost finished myself Posted: Oct 28th, 2017 - 3:52 pm In Reply to: If I had it to do over again, I would... - DO
I got almost all the way through module III. I didn't finish for reasons I won't post here.
On the pro side, the course is intense and educational and I did pass my CPC exam on the first shot. You have to be willing to put in the work and it's a lot of work and a lot of reading. I was able to take the CPC exam even though I didn't finish the course because of outside forces that I also won't post here for identification purposes.
On the con side, if you are not someone who learns well in a self-paced environment, this may not be the type of program for you. There is no direct access to the instructor. The courses are comprised of you getting the books and a syllabus for that particular module plus a lot of extra "reading" type pages and exercises that the school designs.
You HAVE to be able to learn by reading and comprehending and working the exercises on your own and not having a class type situation that is led by an instructor. Not everyone learns the same way. There was a question posed by someone I know to that module's instructor and the response she got was VERY snippy and condescending where the instructor basically said the person shouldn't expect to have her education "hand fed" to her. That's not what she wanted at all, but a little more guidance would have been nice.
There is no direct contact with the instructors. If you have a question, you have to send the question to the student coordinator, who then forwards it to the instructor, who responds and forwards it back to the student coordinator, who then forwards the answer back to you. Depending on when you send this question, it can take up to several days to get a response back. That's not that helpful.
In the third module, they give you the book and say read this and work the first four problems in the particular book chapter for your exercises. It works out to 4 problems for each chapter of the ICD book. The next section is work the last 4 problems in the book and that's your test. Again, it works out to 4 problems for each chapter in the ICD book. As practice, this is flat out not enough. It's just not. The book they sent us was the version without the answers. I found the version WITH the answers on Amazon and worked every problem in the book. Yes, that meant I had the answers for the tests, too, but if I didn't get it right, I didn't change my answer.
I don't have any experience with any of the other online coding schools so I don't know how they do it in terms of access to instructors. Andrews does have a forum where students can post related to their particular module and the instructors do go in and answer questions. Any online course is going to have the same limitations in terms of not being in a traditional classroom setting and not having some of the more nuanced points explained by someone knowledgeable.
What made me ultimately choose Andrews was their payment plan and the online self-paced aspect worked for me at the time. I don't own a vehicle and was working night shift. Going to the continuing ed coding program at my local university wasn't going to work in terms of transportation or timing plus I would have had to shell out the money all at once. Andrews has a payment plan that they don't charge interest for. That was very attractive to me then and probably would still be a deciding factor for me now if I were doing it all over again.
The big thing to understand is a coding program like this is teaching you very basic stuff. I told someone once that it was like learning to walk before you can run. You have to know the basics and how to look things up in the books for the tests because you will have to have the books for the certification tests. The thing is, once you get out into the real world and start working with encoding software, chances are very good you won't need the books. I've just started this week as a coding employee and looked something up in my book once simply because my training was searching through something else to find it and I had the book right next to me. It's been eye opening.
This got longer than I thought. Feel free to email if you want.
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