Cost-effective Dual Enrollment Courses

The DODO Story

The #1 Directory of Online Dual-enrollment Options

Howdy!

Hi there, I’m Jay. Perpetrator of DODO.

I started DODO and I manage it today.

In case you're wondering, here's the story behind DODO.

How It Started

Looking back, DODO probably started the day I finally drilled far enough down my to-do list to get to the item that said ‘Find kiddo #5 some good online dual enrollment courses’.

I thought this would be a relatively quick process, surely it’s easy to find online courses online, yes?

Online? Why Online?

People pick online dual-enrollment for lots of reasons, from cost savings to curriculum fine-tuning, but our reason boiled down to the fact that kiddo #5 had a part-time job she loved, that gave her valuable work experience, on top of her high school study, and attending on-campus dual enrollment classes was never going to fit around the job schedule.

The Trouble Begins

Here’s where the story gets long and messy.

It wasn’t easy to find quality online dual enrollment programs in search engines.

It WAS easy to find programs listed in Google searches, and on top-10 type sites, but most of them were out of the question for my kiddo.

There were admissions rules that my kid didn't fit, schedules that wouldn't work, prices that weren't attractive (read: low enough), schools that sounded great until it was revealed they didn't have regional accreditation, and colleges whose academics didn't impress at the prices stated.

I was getting discouraged.

Hours and then days went by, while I continued to soldier through the search results' endless fine print --

only to realize that the vast majority of colleges dual enrollment programs that came up --

really weren’t 100% online, or
weren't regionally accredited, or
only offered a few lackluster courses, or
the tuition was (imho) out of line for the product delivered, or
were only open to students in one state, or
the school’s educational approach didn't seem suitable, and so on.

The rest of the family began to view me as something of a nut. Why was I spending so much time on this!

Well, the reason was...

Glimmers of Hope

Every once in a while, I'd come across a gem.

A school with dual-enrollment options I'd have hated for my daughter to miss out on.

After weeks of most of my spare time being sucked into putting convoluted search strings into Google, I was STILL coming to page 30 and 40 of the search results and stumbling across amazing, unique, incredible, affordable and truly 100% online dual-enrollment programs that I’d never heard of before.

Programs, in fact, that nobody I knew (and I knew a lot of people interested in dual-enrollment) seemed to have heard of.

The Teenager Has Her Say

About this time, I sat down with kiddo #5 and she looked through my finds and picked out the courses she thought would be interesting.

She ended up taking six dual-enrollment courses (from both high-profile and niche institutions) over about 12 months – with a previously unseen level of motivation – and ended up with a pretty reasonable GPA.

And applies to university...

What impressed me the most, was when she eventually applied to several universities for regular undergrad study and got accepted by three of them solely on the basis of her dual-enrollment study, without submitting any high-school transcript whatsoever.

(None of these universities, by the way, were ones where she had done dual-enrollment.)

Spreading the News

At this point, I thought other parents and high-schoolers might like to see all the cool dual enrollment options out there, so I decided to (and I quote) put up a "quick little website."

Little did I know how long I would spend researching dual-enrollment programs that were completely Online!

It wasn’t quick.

And it turned out to be about 100 charts bigger than I ever intended.

It also gave me an education in databases and CSS styling and HTML coding and acquaintances at software support teams in Australia, Serbia, California, New Zealand, and Michigan.

But it was worth it.