Welcome!!

Welcome...you have found the blog site of the Commission for Accelerated Programs, an organization dedicated to professionsals who teach, lead, and conduct research in accelerated programs in higher education. As an advocate for accelerated education, CAP enhances collaboration and shares best practices and research findings among its members to design and deliver the most effective accelerated learning for adult and nontraditional students. For more information visit us at CAP.

This blog is intended to provide a forum to answer questions about CAP and to provide information about the organization and its activities. A recent addition to the CAP social networking environment is the accelerated programs wiki hosted on Wikispaces. The link is located in the upper right corner of this blog under the title "My Wikispaces"...come join us to collaborate on the important topics in the profession.

What are Accelerated Programs?
Accelerated degree programs were created to market to the working adult students. Entrepreneurial thinkers in the 1970s looked at they way the higher educational scheduling system eliminated working adults from attending and earning a degree. A new format model was developed which allowed adults to attend classes in the evening, but if the system continued to follow the traditional semester system it would take them forever to complete the necessary number of credit hours. This resulted in two formats being created: 1) Compressed or Intensive Scheduling and 2) Accelerated Programs.

First, compressed or intensive scheduling took the face-to-face time of a semester length course and compressed it into an eight-week time period. Courses still met for 32 to 45 contact (face-to-face) hours.

Second, accelerated programs were developed which took the semester length course and lowered the contact hours for a three credit hour undergraduate course to about 20 hours, Graduate level courses were generally lowered to 24 contact hours.