The FITiST membership gives access to all of these, with individual classes booked online through its scheduling engine.

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Companies including Udacity ( udacity.com), Coursera ( coursera.com) and edX ( edx.org) are partnering with schools or independent instructors to offer online classes.

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Yet the institute's impressive web presence, with ever more signing up for its online classes, makes its ideas, if not its ambience, available to all.

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For first-year student Alexis, the key benefits of Nova Southeastern's emphasis on technology are the convenience of being able to register for classes online and to communicate with professors via e-mail.

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In the Forum, Professors from MIT and Stanford spoke of their determination to put their classes online for all to engage with, while Bill Gates made it clear that this was something he was personally committed to supporting.

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With new classes starting May 1, Kaplan's online courses cover everything from nursing and criminal justice to information technology.

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Udacity has developed partnerships with companies such as Nvidia, Microsoft and Google, helping to develop online classes that sharpen specific technical skills such as parallel programming, thereby broadening the pool of potential job candidates for these employers.

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Levine predicted that there would continue to be traditional campuses in the future where students live and attend classes, but that they would compete with virtual universities that only exist online.

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Tracy had been in discussion with Karlie's public high school about alternative education programs, and they were coordinating an online curriculum for her daily classes.

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