 In this video, I'm going to be talking about how you can get a bachelor's degree in special education in as little as one year. And this is going to be done by using what's known as competency-based education. Now, this is a really exciting new type of education. And there are several schools out there that do this. The particular one that I'm going to be talking about in this video is WGU or Western Governors University. However, there are several other really good options that also do competency-based education. And I'll talk about them later in this video, and I'll show you how you can decide which one is right for you. And this is a completely legit top 10% regionally accredited industry-respected degree. And if you don't believe me, just look at all the testimonials and reviews that you see on YouTube, Google, and Reddit. And up until now, I only revealed this process in my private coaching and consultation sessions. Wow. But I did a few videos on this. People really loved it and they wanted me to make more videos. So that's what I'm doing today. So if you appreciate me revealing this ridiculous amount of value all for free, go ahead, gently tap that like button, and let's jump into it. All right. So this is a four-step process. And you're going to want to make sure you do this step by step, right? Don't skip any of the steps because I've seen people skip steps and I've seen it cost them thousands of dollars. So make sure you follow this very carefully and do everything exactly as I say. So the first step on this list is you are going to go ahead and transfer in all of your existing credits. Now, this step might seem simple enough, but I have seen people mess up on this. So for instance, WGU and many other competency-based universities or accelerated universities are very gracious about the units that they accept. Now, the typical stuff that colleges may or may not accept, depending on the university, is going to be AP and IB exams that you took during high school, things like CLEP exams, the college-level examination program tests, and then also, of course, other college courses that you've taken. Typically you can transfer those in depending on the university. But at WGU, they actually accept quite a bit more than this. So for instance, there are some examples where they will accept work experience, military experience, certificates and certifications, even classes that you might have taken on Udemy. These are all things that, in some cases, you can transfer into WGU as well as other competency-based universities. So this is something that you don't want to skip. You want to spend your time on this step. Once you've gotten your resume and your transcript together and all of your experience, go ahead send that in to WGU and they will send you back a list of classes that you still have to take. So here's an example of a person who is able to transfer in five classes. Now, once you've transferred these in, you've gotten that list back, go ahead, move on to step two, which is the most important step, and that is you are going to go ahead and test out of a bunch of the remaining credits using third-party companies. Now, you might be thinking, why am I using third-party companies if WGU is already so fast? Well, simply put, it's faster, easier, and cheaper to use third-party companies. And my three favorites are going to be study.com, Sophia.org, and straighterline.com in that order. And by the way, this process can be a little bit confusing, especially depending on the school you're going to and whether they, you know, make it easy with that degree program or not. But I created a spreadsheet. Basically, it's a cheat sheet that makes this entire process just stupidly easy. You can just literally do it step by step and follow along. I'll put that down in the description as well as the pinned comment below. So for this particular degree, there are 41 total classes you have to take to get your bachelor's degree. Now, if you have a lot of time and you want to do this really fast, you can very comfortably test out of one class per day, especially with the entry-level classes. I've even seen students test out of multiple classes per day. But if you're super busy, you've got a family, you've got a full-time job, you can't do that, you can still do it relatively easy about once per week. And again, this is with some of the entry and mid-level classes that you can do this. So realistically speaking, you can test out of quite a few classes within just a few months. And you can actually bring that entire number from 41 classes all the way down to about 28 classes before you even enroll. And study.com is great because you don't have to attend lectures, do group projects, any of that boring stuff. You also don't have to buy any textbooks where you have to buy the clicker or all the other random stuff that the professors make you buy. You don't have to deal with any of that on study.com. The UI is really good. You're probably going to learn a lot using study.com, and it's just a pretty frictionless process overall. So yeah, definitely check out study.com. It is a phenomenal resource. Use that to test out of as many classes as you can, then transfer all those classes in, and then you're going to move on to step number three. This is an important step that a lot of people skip, and that is you are going to pre-study the remaining classes, right? So you are not enrolling in WGU yet. This is a mistake a lot of people make because sometimes the enrollment counselors will sort of pressure you a little bit to enroll because if you think about it, you know, they're going to make more money if you're in WGU for a longer period of time. But the way that WGU as well as a lot of competency-based universities work is they will make you pay per term. Now with the different degrees, it's going to cost somewhere between $3,500 to $4,000 per term, and each term is six months. So your goal here is to graduate in as few terms as possible, and it's very realistic to graduate in two terms or less. And I have seen many different situations where people don't do the pre-study step and they end up taking an extra term, like they'll spend a week or a month in an extra term, but the problem is you have to pay for the whole thing, right? So your goal here is to try to finish it in two terms. And if you're able to do that, you don't have to spend like an extra week or a month. You can do two terms instead of three terms or three terms instead of four terms if you're really busy. So definitely don't skip this step. This is a very important step. I do understand if you're super busy and you just kind of want to get it over with and you're sort of like timing it correctly, you can make a plan where you just study for certain classes, like some of the more difficult classes, and then make it work within those two to three terms. So with that being said, there are two phenomenal resources that are really the only resources you need because they're going to point you to everything else that you need to study. And those two resources are one, the WGU subreddits and two, the WGU Facebook groups. So there's like a main WGU subreddit and then there are sub subreddits, I guess you could say, that have the specific degrees. And then same thing for the Facebook groups. And basically on both of these references, they are going to be sharing tips, tricks, strategies to study for classes, as well as pass tests as quickly and efficiently as possible. And so these are people who either just pass the tests or they are currently taking the tests. And so they're really in the trenches, they know what's working right now. So they might tell you, Hey, watch this YouTube channel, look at this blog, watch this Khan Academy course, something along those lines, typically they are going to recommend either free or very cheap, very affordable resources. But if you're a textbook type of person, of course, you can like order an online textbook, or you can just order a physical textbook if you like that too. But once you feel comfortable, and you think you can pass it in a certain amount of time, you have a really good plan, and you're confident about that plan, go ahead and roll in WGU and move on to step number four, which is you are going to knock the classes out as fast as you possibly can. Now this step is relatively straightforward. You know, you are going to talk to your enrollment counselor and roll and then you're just going to try to get through this classes as fast as you can. Again, using those two resources that I told you, the WGU subreddits as well as the Facebook group and make sure you talk to your mentor and your instructors about some of the harder classes like disciplinary literacy, preclinical experiences and special education, etc. Now overall, let's go over the four steps again really quickly. And then I'm actually going to take you into the cheat sheet and give you a step by step example, just break it down so that you basically have zero questions after this. And that is going to be step one, transfer in all your existing credit, step two, knock out as many classes as you can using third party companies. Step three, you're going to pre-study the remaining classes. And then step four, knock out the rest of the classes while you're enrolled in WGU as fast as possible. Now let's go ahead and jump into that cheat sheet and go through an example of what this would probably look like for you. Now again guys, this cheat sheet is going to be linked in the pinned comment as well as the description below. And we'll quickly just go over some housekeeping stuff and like how to use this. First of all, this copy you probably are not able to edit it or you shouldn't be able to edit it. But you can edit and put your information in if you go file, then make a copy. Now there is one downside of doing this and that is if I have any updates in the future, like if study.com comes out with another class or straighter line or Sophia, or maybe there's some kind of certificate you can transfer in, you will not see it on the copy that you make. So maybe keep your eye on this particular spreadsheet. And then you know, you can do the copy and do your own thing with the copy because I will likely be updating this in the future. If any new classes come out or I have gotten some requests to do the Sophia classes as well because some people really like Sophia. But with that being said, let's go ahead and go through this really quickly on the far left. These are the class numbers that you would be taking at WGU. This next column here, this is going to be the names of the classes, then the units for each class. And then this is probably the most important column. And that is going to be the classes that you can transfer in using study.com. So just to make this very clear, if you look at this row here, English composition one, that's a class at WGU, if you were to take English 104, which is class number 57 at study.com, that will transfer into WGU for English composition one. So just to make that very clear, I did have some questions on some of my other videos about that. And something that's very awesome is you can actually save 30% on your first three months with study.com using the code Shane Hommis during checkout study.com was nice enough to give me a code and that will save you a ton of money. And it'll also be helping the channel out as well. So definitely take advantage of that. Now let's go ahead and go through this process step by step. So the first step of course is you're going to transfer in classes. So in this particular case, let's just say I'm of course I'm just making this up. You took a biology class in high school. So you were able to transfer this one in biology 101. And then you also took one semester of college and you took like a communications and art another biology and astronomy and a math class and you were able to transfer all of those in as well. So right off the bat, it looks like you knocked out about six classes, then you would move on to the second step, which is you would test out of these classes using third party companies. So you would knock the rest of them out using study.com. And as you can see, you're able to test out of about 30% of the classes or so, just using study.com as well as the transfers and you haven't even enrolled in WGU yet. And this probably won't take you very long. So if you're in a situation where you don't have any classes to transfer in, that's totally fine. It won't take you very long to take these study.com classes. Like I said, especially for the entry level ones, you can knock these out extremely quickly. And by the way, generally speaking, these green classes, the ones that are color coded as green are typically going to be relatively easy. The yellow classes are moderate difficulty and the red classes are going to be the harder ones. But it really depends on the degree you're taking. And in some cases, they're, you know, relatively easy overall in general. But this is what it would look like after you got the list back from your counselor. So you don't even really need to wait for that or anything. This is probably what it's going to look like right here. So in this particular case, what you'd want to do is you'd want to go ahead and pre study these remaining classes. Now again, you want to use the WGU subreddits and the Facebook groups to do the pre studying. And if you're super busy, or you kind of have a plan where you're, you know, you think you can get it done within like maybe three terms or something like that, maybe just choose to study some of the red ones instead, some of the harder ones. But I really just recommend getting hold of the curriculum and pre studying them to the point where you're feeling really confident. So once you feel good about your plan, you're feeling really confident, go ahead and roll in WGU and knock out the rest of the classes as fast as you can. And again, your goal is going to be finishing it in two terms or less. So after you finished it in two terms, you're going to go ahead and move on to step number five, which is go ahead, brag to everybody you know, post it on your Facebook, tell everybody you know your friends and your family, et cetera, that you were able to finish a legitimate bachelor's degree in one year. And if you're really nice, share this video with them so everybody else can do the same as well because this is basically like a cheat code. Alternative education is coming up. People are getting very sick of traditional colleges and these sorts of things are becoming more and more available as time goes on. Now one thing I will say very quickly is WGU is a great school and it's a great option for a lot of people, but it is not for everyone. And this is actually one of the main reasons why I didn't reveal it except to my consulting clients for a long time. And that is because I wanted to make sure I understand the person's situation before I recommend anything to them. So make sure you do your research on this, right? Take what everybody says on the internet with a grain of salt, even though there's a ton of positive reviews about WGU on subreddits and YouTube, et cetera, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the right choice for you. So for instance, there are people out there that just simply cannot study if it's remote class. Some people absolutely hate remote learning. So in that particular case, maybe WGU is not the right choice for you. There's also people out there that really value having a strong network. And in the case of WGU, it can be somewhat difficult to network. I mean, it's kind of obvious you're going to be online. You're not going to be in person. So it's just a lot harder to form those relationships. And the third thing is there are some cases where people might want a degree that WGU doesn't have to offer or in some cases, you know, maybe WGU just isn't their cup of tea. In that particular case, there are other competency based or accelerated universities that you can look into. And I break all of this down in this video right here. So I highly, highly recommend you check that video out.