Virginia has become the 14^th state in the USA to push legislation that bans improperly accredited online colleges that advertise they will award college degrees based solely on life experience.

Virginia's Higher Education Coordinating Board has proposed legislation for 2008 that will make it illegal to both award such a degree and purchase such a degree for use in employment.

The state is attempting to protect its residents from a swell in fake and improperly accredited distance colleges that prey on consumers and employers by offering fast degrees that require nothing but a valid credit card. 

According to research by GetEducated analysts over 200 such fly-by-night operations specialize in this type of consumer fraud in the USA.

College degree scams operate primarily from states where laws against such operations are lean or non-existent.  Wyoming is one state that harbored scores of degree mills in the past decade.  Now that Wyoming has enacted laws requiring colleges to obtain valid accreditation or leave the state beginning in 2008, other states, such as Virginia, face becoming home to college scams unless they take strong preventive action.

The Virginia law, if passed in 2008, will carry penalties of up to one year in jail and stiff fines for scam operators while students who buy and use such degrees will face criminal convictions and fines of up to $500.

Mark A. Knight, professor and online instructor at University of Southern Indiana and R. Lance Hogan, of Eastern Illinois University, studied burn out among 76 online instructors in a distance bachelor's program to assess levels of stress.  Their results are posted in a recent study, which appeared in the academic research journal the "Internet and Higher Education."

Under the recently launched International Outreach Program (IOP), headed by Reinhold Steinbeck, Stanford faculty are helping to redefine the way students learn whether they are in high-tech classrooms on campus, in remote wildlife parks in Tanzania, in teacher-training colleges in Chile or at a university in Cali, Colombia.

"What's really exciting about this is that it opens a whole new chapter in engaging students in these countries in globally distributed courses," Steinbeck said of these and other pilot projects supported by IOP, which is based at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) under the auspices of the International Initiative. "We are very determined to make this a collaborative process."

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Granite State College, the online college for the University System of New Hampshire - Accessible. Affordable. Accredited. 

Granite State College (GSC), a traditional, not-for-profit brick and mortar state institution has been ranked by GetEducated's educational analysts as a national Best Buy in online learning.