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Soldiers have the commitment and self-discipline that’s needed to experience success with online college courses. For members of the military, online college programs offer flexibility that can provide stability: Studies can be conducted anywhere and without transfers and deployments interrupting them. In the military, online?college classes, like?their more conventional counterparts, are taken while solders are off-duty. Continuing education in the military is voluntary, often free, and experts cite several positives associated with it.

“Voluntary education programs help members improve their mission performance, prepare members for greater responsibility and enhance their professional, as well as their personal, potential,” Education Technician Lori Popp of the Lifelong Learning section of Marine and Family Services aboard North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune told the Jacksonville Daily News in July 2009.

U.S. Congress in 1944 passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act. Also known as the GI Bill, the law provided anyone who served in uniform the opportunity to obtain a college scholarship. By 1947, nearly 50 percent of all college students in America were veterans, according to a Time Magazine article. A Post 9/11 GI Bill has since made as much as full tuition money for graduate and undergraduate degrees and vocational or technical training as well as book and housing stipends available to service members on active duty after Sept. 10, 2001.

Now, as part of a Post 9/11 GI Bill, service members on active duty after Sept. 10, 2001 can obtain as much as 100 percent of their tuition money for graduate and undergraduate degrees and vocational or technical training. The bill also allows money for books and housing. Members of the military can get academic credit for military training and experience, and the U.S. Army reportedly has more than 1,900 community college and university partners that accept these credits from soldiers during or after service.

Local, accredited universities are said to make continuing education convenient for soldiers by offering satellite campuses on many bases, and online college courses and programs allow for greater mobility. Technological advances in distance learning opportunities make it easier for deployed service members to continue their education, Lori Popp told the Jacksonville Daily News.

Lori Popp told the Jacksonville Daily News that technological advances in distance education now make it easier for deployed service members to continue their education. The consortium, comprised of organizations and institutions committed to quality online education, recently released the results of a study entitled “Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States.” Between the falls of 2007 and 2008, the study noted, the number of online students increased by 17 percent, to 4.6 million.

According to Popp, more than 1,000 deployed marines and sailors these days put tuition assistance to use. Among the military, online courses are a “boon” for those who “want to participate in college despite geographic displacement,” an October article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. The article, centered around a professor and National Guardsman who continued teaching online classes after being deployed to Iraq, noted that soldiers work, read, exercise, play video games and watch movies when the situation isn’t hectic. Deployed soldiers also enroll in online college classes, according to The Chronicle.

Corporal Dakota Berg was reportedly doing just this when the Jacksonville Daily News told his story in July. Berg graduated high school in 2006 and joined the U.S. Marines for the degree programs online benefits. The military’s tuition assistance program alleviated a lot of financial and mental stress, Berg told the Daily News. He’s using them to pursue his online school and online university degree in accounting—an endeavor that his deployment from Parris Island, S.C., to Iraq hasn’t interrupted.