— Saylor001: Introduction to Learning on Saylor Academy —

Are you interested in joining the growing community of Saylor Academy learners and embarking on an educational journey of your own? If so, there are a few things you need to do and should know in order to get started in taking one, or many, of our free online courses. And what better way to prepare you to take these courses than a course itself!

To begin, click on the link below for the Course Syllabus, which will help to get you on your way.

While Saylor Academy courses are free, and much of the course material can be viewed without having to sign in or create an account, we do encourage all of our learners to create an account in order to have the richest learning experience possible. The first unit of this course therefore will walk you through the steps on how to create and update your account information. By the end of this unit, you should be signed up as a Saylor Academy learner, which will allow you to fully complete the remaining units of this course: just move from one activity to the next; when you have finished the activity in subunit 1.2, move on to Unit 2.

Completing this unit should take you approximately 15 minutes.

Now that you have created an account, you are able to enroll in any* of Saylor Academy's 90+ courses, including this one. This unit will show you how to enroll in a course as well as where to find lists and descriptions of all of our courses.

*All Saylor Academy courses are tuition-free and are self-paced, meaning there are no start/end dates and can be worked on whenever is convenient to you. There is also no need to apply -- if you see a course you are interested in, you are more than welcome to become a student of that course.

Completing this unit should take you approximately 45 minutes.

Completing this unit should take you approximately 40 minutes.

At this point of Saylor001, you have learned how to become a registered Saylor Academy student as well as locate and enroll in courses. You have also familiarized yourself with the way Saylor courses are structured, including how to navigate through and access course resources. You have even taken your first assessments. Understanding the previous lessons will help you to start and work through other Saylor courses. This unit, however, is focused on teaching you the steps needed to finish a Saylor Academy course. 

A quick note about what success in a Saylor Academy course means: success is whatever you, the learner, want it to be. The Saylor community is composed of learners from all over the world, of all backgrounds, with a wide array of reasons for choosing to take a Saylor course. Some may be looking to take many courses, all of which will be used towards a college degree. Others may come to us because we offer one course of particular interest. Others still may just want to brush up on one specific topic, or perhaps are simply interested in viewing the next in our series of Tangent Videos. We expect you each to have your own goals, and for many, the measure of accomplishing that goal is not necessarily to have passed a Saylor exam.

This being said, we do want to have a way to recognize the accomplishment of working through an entire course and successfully completing that course's final exam. In this unit you'll learn a bit more about our scored cumulative final exams and how to earn and access the certificate of completion that accompanies an exam. Finally, we'll briefly discuss the Course Evaluation Surveys.

Completing this unit should take you approximately 30 minutes.