The Navy lieutenant needed armed guards and an armored car to get to an exam site, in Kabul, Afghanistan. A deadly bomb attack also caused him to his miss classes _ transmitted live via the Internet _ but he persevered and earned a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Southern California while commanding a top security team. His class graduated on Friday, as he joins a growing number of service members earning college degrees while deployed in a war zone. “Not only was he out there living on the edge, but he had to get his homework done,” USC professor Frank Alvidrez said.

http://dailyjournalonline.com/news/national/navy-pilot-earns-degree-in-combat-zone/article_193f5b28-1723-576d-9e80-7dc7fd4f1486.html

South Carolina residents who have successfully completed at least 60 college credits can now complete their Bachelor’s degrees from anywhere thanks to a new online college launching this spring. Palmetto College, part of the University of South Carolina, offers degrees in liberal arts, organizational leadership, nursing, business administration, criminal justice, elementary education and human services. Enrollment is open to both in-state and out-of-state students, as long as they meet the University of South Carolina’s enrollment requirements and have at least 60 college credits earned at any accredited institution. Students who do not reside in South Carolina can take the online courses, but will pay a higher tuition rate.

http://www.businessadministrationinformation.com/news/new-online-college-provides-opportunities-for-students-to-complete-bachelors-degrees

The Georgia Institute of Technology will soon offer an online, three-year masters degree in computer science for less than $7,000. That’s about one-sixth of the cost of its traditional program, but officials maintain that the two degrees will be comparable, The Wall Street Journal reports. The program, which is offered in collaboration with education startup Udacity and AT&T, aims to open enrollment for fall 2014. As part of the deal, Udacity will get 40% of the revenue and Georgia Tech will take the rest. AT&T is subsiding the program to ensure it breaks even in its first year. Initially, enrollment will be limited to just a few hundred students. But Georgia Tech plans to gradually expand its student population over the next three years.

http://www.businessinsider.com/georgia-techs-7000-masters-degree-2013-5

Microsoft has donated $1 million to help D.C. teachers redesign their classrooms using a “blended learning” approach that combines online learning with face-to-face instruction. Blended learning has drawn both excitement and skepticism as it has exploded in popularity in recent years. Boosters believe that technology could transform schools and give students a more personalized learning experience, while critics fear that when executed poorly, blended approaches reduce learning to clicks on a computer. The donation will help expand a D.C. program — known as the Education Innovation Fellowship — that exposes teachers to the latest thinking in the field and then encourages them to adapt those ideas into their own classrooms.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/microsoft-donates-1-million-to-help-expand-blended-learning-in-dc/2013/05/16/f14f7f76-be58-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_story.html

It would be naïve to think that online resources are not going to alter traditional business school education; they will and they should. Business schools better think hard how they are going to integrate online education into their courses and curricula. But this means that it offers opportunities rather than a threat. And research on the effects of disruptive innovation – for example in newspapers – has also shown that established players who treat the arrival of a new technology as an opportunity, rather than as direct substitute, are the ones that are most likely to survive and prosper.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/freekvermeulen/2013/05/16/antiquated-to-be-annihilated-is-an-on-line-revolution-brewing-in-business-education/

Three top-tier universities have backed away from a partnership with their peers and the company 2U to create a pool of for-credit online courses. Despite a year of considerable hype as leading colleges and universities created online partnerships to try to redefine higher education, a recent spate of strong faculty reactions make clear that tradition will not change easily or silently, especially at institutions with a strong history of faculty influence. Citing a variety of reasons, the three universities’ decisions offer a spectrum of reactions to a new wave of online learning and the companies, in this case 2U, that are trying to drive that change.  Inside Higher Ed a group of 10 top-tier universities that said last November they planned to offer courses through 2U for a project, billed as “one of a kind,” known as Semester Online. But as this fall’s launch date approached, these institutions backed away.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/17/three-universities-back-away-plan-pool-courses-online

Buoyed by her own experiences, and with support from administrators at Cyprus High School in the Anaheim Union High School District, Citlau launched one of the school system’s first online courses. Five years later, the district boasts a full slate of curriculum-approved, teacher-generated online courses, with 23 optional classes scheduled for the 2013–2014 school year. That success is just one of the reasons why iNACOL, a national nonprofit that supports the use of technology in U.S. schools, and the Southern Regional Education Board chose Citlau as their National Online Teacher of the Year. I was fortunate to catch up with Citlau while she was in Washington, D.C., last week to meet with education officials and representatives for learning management systems provider Blackboard, Inc. Itching to launch an online course at your school? Here are five steps the nation’s best online teacher says every program should take.

http://www.edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2013/05/5-must-have-elements-every-online-class

Following a December report that encouraged the University to prioritize online education, Yale is answering the call. In a Wednesday email to the Yale community, Provost Benjamin Polak announced the University’s new partnership with Coursera, an online education platform used by Princeton, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania. Polak also announced the creation of a new standing committee on online education and the appointment of music professor Craig Wright to the new position of academic director of online education. In the email, Polak stressed the importance of using online education to explore new teaching strategies that can be used in Yale classrooms.

http://yaledailynews.com/crosscampus/2013/05/15/yale-expands-online-education-appoints-new-director/

Some of the nation’s most elite professors are taking up a new teaching fad: Massively Open Online Courses. MOOCs rhymes with nukes, and the reach is about the same. These classes streamed on the Internet have millions of students around the world enrolling. They’re free of charge. But when you add up all the work it takes on and off camera to make a MOOC, the cost to professors is pretty high. As Prof. Kevin Werbach can attest, the life of a MOOCs rockstar is not pure glitz.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/education/life-online-professor

 Why do students cheat — and how are they getting away with it? One unintended use for massive open online courses, dubbed “MOOCs,” is to help professors better understand the mechanics of cheating in online learning. Bernard Bull, an assistant vice president for academics at Concordia University Wisconsin, will ask his class to cheat for the purposes of anthropological research. Students will then be asked to disclose exactly how they cheated. The assignment is a unit in a new class, “Understanding Cheating in Online Courses,” which is offered through the Canvas MOOC platform run by Instructure, a course-management company.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/14/new-online-course-encourages-students-to-cheat-for-science/