The success of online courseware such as that offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (http://ocw.mit.edu) and now by many other institutions, together with a plethora of recent announcements of major new initiatives in this arena such as Coursera (https://www.coursera.org), Udacity (http://www.udacity.com), and the Harvard-MIT partnership edX (http://www.edxonline.org), have made it clear that online learning has reached a tipping point. Many signs point to the possibility in the near future of getting a quality, university-level education at a distance, and for free. As exciting as this prospect may be, it behooves online students to follow a few simple rules for getting the most out of the experience, while being realistic in their expectations, as outlined below.
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