Military-friendly online colleges have many of the same features that brick-and-mortar colleges have. They all do their best to provide an education and intermediate and advanced degrees to military personnel regardless of rank and serving status. There are also some defining characteristics of military-friendly colleges that you should be made aware of, especially if you are trying to pursue an education and a degree but you think that your military status might get in the way. 

Accelerated Learning

You do not need to learn every detail about one particular subject. Sometimes, you know that you only have two months to take and complete a course before you will be deployed to serve overseas, and your education will have to wait. When that happens, online colleges offer accelerated learning courses. You will be able to move at your own pace, but you will also have to complete a little more work each day at an accelerated rate to complete the course by its completion date. Military personnel find that these accelerated courses work very well for them because their military discipline is put to use in order to complete all of the coursework on time. 

Pausing Classes

As long as you give your online college and instructors enough notice (e.g., about a week or two), you can "pause" your classes. This action literally allows you to press a button to pause the class, stopping it right where you were, holding your place, and allowing you to return from serving your country at a future date to pick up where you left off. While you are gone, the college and the instructors may create class recordings for all of the classes you missed, and you'll have assignments and documents on various platforms to study. All videos, documents, and assignments are never closed to you, but if you find that anything has been accidentally closed, you only have to contact the instructor to ask him or her to open it again. 

Earning Credit for Military Experience

There are a lot of colleges willing to trade your military experience for credit. For example, if you are trying to complete an engineering degree and you are required to calculate, calibrate, and repair machines in the military field, there is definitely something there that can be traded for course credit. You would have to submit documentation from your CO to the online college for assessment and verification, but then you could receive credit in corresponding classes for it.