After working 18 hours a day at a temperature that often touched 115 degrees, 1st Lt. Jeremiah Manning, 31, who serves as a military engineer at a US air base in Balad, Iraq sat in front of his monitor to attend a virtual class at University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He studied for an online online master’s degree in civil engineering, in which he enrolled last year. He went to Iraq just after his graduation, when the war began in 2003.

“Juggling work here was the name of the game,” he says. “It will have taken me close to three years to complete this degree part-time (via) long-distance, and that is long enough. It feels good to know that I will have been able to do this one thing for myself this year here in Iraq.”

The class had 16 distance students; and he was the only one studying from another country.

He admits it was tough studying from a war zone. He usually worked on assignments and viewed online courses when everyone else had completed their 14 to 18-hour day. “I have slept in my office a few nights this semester already” he adds.

The university back home is proud of him; “We are very appreciative of his dedication to his online graduate studies and service to this great country” says Dr. Dayakar Penumadu, professor and interim department head of UT’s Civil and Environmental Engineering, “Jeremiah represents the spirit of our department,” he exudes.

Distance learning is one of the ways through which remote interaction with professors in the classroom and faculty is possible. It is a unique opportunity to bring some sense of normality back in the life of student soldiers such as Lt. Manning.

Apart from limitations like going to the professor with a jumble of questions after a lecture or having a bunch of classmates to talk to, online education has certainly emerged as a blessing for people like Manning who constantly need to choose between their duty to their nation, personal life and education.