Take Semester With Online Education

Undergraduates may not complete their degrees for a more variety of reasons. When a family member becomes ill and they need to return to the home; they find a promising internship in another city; they don't think for their campus' coursework is the right fit.

Here new offering from online education platform to you, Semester Online, hopes to provide a better option for the satisfied undergraduates. For $4,200 per course, undergrads can enroll in and receive credits for the 11 courses offered in the inaugural term of Semester Online.

"We're unleashing university from its physical limitations," 2U co-founder Chip Paucek tells us Mashable. "We are not trying to change on-campus scholar’s experience, but we think that it can be a great complement."

Paucek suggest that a semester online would be ideal for anybody, for instance, a student who wants to return home temporarily for family reasons or someone looking for more rigorous offering during study abroad.

At launch, Semester Online offers eleven courses taught by professors from Boston College, Emory, Northwestern, UNC, Washington University and Notre Dame in St. Louis. Titles range from more traditional "History of The Religions in America" to the unconventional "How to Rule the World" and "Baseball and the American Culture."

Paucek believes the course selection will soon increase widely. Mostly, Semester Online hopes to offer advanced and obscure languages, which students enroll full-time on a campus, could use to supplement for their school's offerings.

While students can apply via Semester Online website through May 24 to participate in the fall term, no admissions decisions are made by 2U.

First launched in the 2008, 2U has been some 7,000 student’s complete programs through the platform. Each week, instructors teach 1,146 graduation courses live from the 6 institutions offering the online degrees: USC, Georgetown, UNC, GW, Wash U and American. The grade classes have an average class’s size of 12, and 84% of students enroll complete their programs.

Unlike undergraduate courses, which are a little marked down, grad program tuition is precisely what it would be on a typical campus.

Paucek himself has been enrolled for the three semesters in UNC's online MBA program, a degree he never had the time to earn on campus while starting three companies.

"It's full participation, since there is no back row," Paucek says. "You are called on a lot more than you would be in a bigger lecture hall."

Most classes have some on-campus rigorous component, and during all programs, students collaborate with their classmates. Two masters of social work the students enrolled in the USC program have even gotten married after meeting in class.

"There is an issue of the portability," Paucek says. "People cannot always pick up their lives, leave their jobs and move to somewhere. Great schools are starting to think this way."