Education anywhere

Rosemary Lauricella will walk at graduation Sunday along with her classmates from Coastline Community College. The second-year student once thought she would never finish college at all, but that’s not the only reason that commencement will be a unique experience.

It will also be the first time Lauricella has ever seen, or heard, the professors who taught her for the last 14 months.

Lauricella, who lives in San Diego, works as an instructor for the U.S. Navy. Like nearly 80% of Coastline’s graduates this year, she has never set foot on any of the school’s three sites in Orange County. The New York native has earned a double major in electronics technology and vocational technical education, and she’s done it entirely online — with her only supervisor being the Navy-appointed proctor who sometimes watched her during tests.

“I came in the Navy because I didn’t want to go to college, and then I ended up going anyway because it was so easy and so affordable,” Lauricella said.

Coastline, one of three campuses in the Coast Community College District, plans to honor 1,582 graduates on Sunday at Garden Grove High School. Only a handful of them, though, will likely attend the ceremony. The vast majority of Coastline students take their courses online while serving in the armed forces, and some will be stationed around the world — even in Iraq and Afghanistan — when their classmates pass the podium.

For those who manage to attend graduation, the college has a simple request: that they wear their uniforms to the ceremony.

“It really brings tears to your eyes to see this grizzled old Navy chief who’s been there 30 years standing there in his cap and gown,” said Ted Boehler, Coastline’s dean of distance learning and the teacher of an online management course.

A former interpreter for the Army, Boehler took a distance learning class from the University of Maryland while deployed in Vietnam. He did it through the mail then. Now, he oversees classes in which dozens of students post assignments online and even join in discussion forums.

Boehler has to be lenient on deadlines. His students occasionally send him e-mails asking if they can take exams late, since they’ll spend the next few days on patrol. The military, though, strongly supports their education: any enlisted student who earns at least a C average gets his or her tuition paid in full.

“That’s a tremendous recruitment tool in this day and age of being shipped around the world,” Boehler said.

Jeremiah Freye, a naval officer stationed in Port Hueneme, also plans to graduate on Sunday. He did some of his coursework in the last two years while on duty at the U.S. Army base in Kuwait. Despite going most of it alone, Freye said, he found the support he needed.

“Whenever I got in a crunch, I just sent a few e-mails and I was good to go,” he said.