News

HCC Continuing Education's new initiative helps military spouses earn degrees faster

Mar 26, 2015

The Department of Defense Spouse Education and Career Opportunities program (SECO) along with LearningCounts is piloting a new initiative to help military spouses earn undergraduate college credit for knowledge and expertise gained through life and work experience.

SECO has partnered with Council on Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), the national authority on Prior Learning Assessment (PLA), to give military spouses the opportunity to earn undergraduate college credit for college-level learning gained from volunteer and community service, work experience, training programs and independent study.

"HCC was one of the first community colleges to partner with CAEL and use LearningCounts as one of the tools available to HCC students as part of the new HCC Prior Learning Assessment procedures. We are proud of this partnership as CAEL continues to lead the nation through an objective process to assist students with preparing portfolios to validate prior work experience as a Prior Learning Experience (PLA) pathway to gaining college credit toward a degree. The scholarship support of this process to the spouses of all military and veterans students by CAEL demonstrates their support to help adults, especially our military families in accelerating their degree pathways and success," said Associate VC of Workforce Instruction, Madeline Burillo, Ed.D.

HCC offers six alternatives or receiving Prior Learning Assessment:
1. ACE-Evaluated Military training
2. Testing/Credit by Exam
3. CEU/WECM to credit
4. ACE/NCCRS-Evaluated Industry Certificates and Training Programs
5. Work Experience-Assessment of prior learning via portfolio
6. Articulated Agreement

SECO will take care of the expenses for portfolio development with LearningCounts for spouses of military personnel. This is a pilot program aimed at accelerating the attainment of postsecondary education by military spouses.

LearningCounts Spring 2015 Portfolio Development Course Start Dates
March 9 (FULL!)
March 23 
April 6 (NEW)
April 20
May 4
May 18
June 8
June 22

For more information on this program, please visit http://www.learningcounts.org