Last fall, the company, which has partnered with several leading universities for online masters degree programs that feature small classes and live instruction, announced a new for-credit online program for undergraduates called Semester Online. But three of the 10 schools that had originally committed to the program have since backed out.

Last month, Duke revealed that it was withdrawing from the program after a faculty vote against the program. And, according to Inside Higher Ed, Vanderbilt and University of Rochester have also pulled out as of Friday, with Wake Forest sitting on the fence.

“Each school has their own process for evaluating these opportunities,” 2U’s SVP of communications Chance Patterson told GigaOM, adding that the company is moving ahead with its plans to launch the program this fall with the remaining schools, including Northwestern, Emory and Brandeis. 2U also said that Boston College has since joined the consortium and that it’s in talks with 20 other schools.

At Duke, faculty concerns over the lack of administrator transparency related to the 2U deal, as well as unease with awarding school credit to students not admitted to the college, apparently led to the withdrawal.

Other issues led Vanderbilt and University of Rochester to back away from the 2U consortium. While several schools work with different online learning companies, University of Rochester reportedly chose Coursera over 2U because of the MOOC provider’s ability to reach a larger audience. Vanderbilt raised the issue of cost; while efforts like the MOOCs try to provide educational experiences at a lower price, 2U’s program costs the same as an on-campus for-credit program. Vanderbilt, as well as Duke, still maintain partnerships with Coursera for non-credit-granting courses.

The decisions to back away from 2U come after faculty resistance to online learning programs at other institutions. Earlier this month, San Jose State University professors refused to teach an edX course on justice developed by a Harvard University professor, arguing that MOOCs come at “great peril” to the country’s university system.  And in April, faculty at Amherst College voted to reject a partnership with edX, citing similar concerns about the effects of MOOCs on U.S. universities.

2U’s model, which focuses on small class sizes, live instruction and real teacher-student interaction, exists in stark contrast to the mega-sized virtual classrooms created by the MOOC providers. But it’s still bringing a new and different instructional approach to slow-moving academia. Even though one could argue that 2U’s flavor of online education isn’t as disruptive as MOOCs — like traditional college courses, it promotes teacher-student relationships, live classes and paid courses — it’s still causing some faculty to wonder about its long-term impact on their institutions and employment prospects. For example, the New York Times reported that some Duke professors were concerned that it might eventually cause the university to offer fewer courses and hire fewer professors.

Ultimately, these on-campus debates emphasize that transitioning to online learning isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Faculty and administrators raising concerns aren’t rejecting online learning wholesale, they’re trying to determine the approaches that work best for their students, missions and economic needs. As MOOC providers and other online learning companies make bigger headway, we’ll inevitably see more of these tussles — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

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In the past couple of years, startups like Pave, Upstart, Campus Slice and CommonBond have started promoting crowdfunding platforms that give students a way to solicit microinvestments from friends, family and even strangers.

But those approaches tend to target older students (in college or graduate school) who have already made — and potentially eliminated — college options based on their financial situation. And, in some cases, those startups require students to give up “equity” in themselves (which works like a loan, sometimes with interest), a model that may work for companies but has yet to prove itself when it comes to supporting individuals.

Raise Labs, a San Francisco-based startup backed by the Imagine K-12 ed tech accelerator, is bringing another model into the mix: Instead of targeting students who have already made their college decision, it offers college hopefuls microscholarships they can earn over the course of their high-school careers. The money would come from colleges, corporations and foundations.

“We’re rethinking how students access financial aid for college. The system is really complicated… And it happens at the end of high school, when it can be too late,” said founder and CEO Preston Silverman.

Through Raise Labs, high-school students can set up an account and then earn scholarship money every week through school and community achievements. Sponsors, including corporations, universities and foundations, can award microscholarships for accomplishments like perfect attendance, community service, demonstrating leadership and improvement in grades.

High-school students can obviously already earn scholarships and financial prizes that can help them pay for college. But Raise Labs gives students and sponsors a centralized platform for learning about and promoting awards while making more scholarships accessible to a larger pool of students.

While Silverman declined at this time to provide specifics on the size of the microscholarships, he said the goal is to help students earn thousands of dollars. But given the rising cost of a college education, depending on where a student goes, a few thousand dollars may only make a small dent in the total cost.

For the students, opening up the conversation earlier could motivate them o set goals for themselves and potentially achieve more. For the sponsors, it provides opportunities for cause marketing (for corporations) and enables more engagement and relationship-building with students.

For now, Raise Labs is offering the program to a total of 20,000 students at range of schools. But it plans to open up the service to students nationwide this fall. Earlier this year, the company won a $100,000 grant after winning a top prize in an ed tech challenge sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Facebook, and it said that, so far, it’s secured $30 million in scholarship commitments.

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Starting this fall, it plans to offer teachers across the country an education-focused Android app store, called Google Play for Education, which has been in pilot testing with various schools.

“There’s a big part of all of our lives – and the lives of our kids – that mobile technology hasn’t touched. When I visit my kids’ classroom, it looks pretty much like it did when I went to school,” said Chris Yerga, an engineering director at Google. “Google Play for Education was built from the ground up to meet the unique content needs of educators.”

Through the new store, teachers will be able to search for educator-recommended apps appropriate for their grades and subjects. And, as long as each student has their own Google account, teachers can deploy their app selections to the tablets for an entire class or grade from their own account.

Apple is also pushing aggressively in education — last year, it sold 4.5 million iPads to schools and reported one billion downloads for iTunes U. But Google is clearly getting ready to take on its Silicon Valley rival in the education market in a bigger way. Google’s existing school presence through its Apps for Education, which has more than 20 million users, could help the company in its latest effort, as could the seemingly teacher-friendly management features built into Google Play.

Ahead of the launch this fall, Google said it would start accepting app submissions from developers this summer.

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Earlier this year at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng and edX president Anant Agarwal were asked about the likelihood of full MOOC degrees. Ng gave a diplomatic reply, emphasizing that Coursera isn’t a university but a “humble hosting platform.” But, later, Agarwal told me that he fully expected pure MOOC degrees to emerge.

“Universities are already giving full degrees for online education, for distance online education, so what is different? Extension school programs and online programs are already giving full degrees. So why is this anything special?” he said at the time.

In a post on Udacity’s blog, founder Sebastian Thrun compared the announcement about the new online degree to the moment he proposed to his wife and other “moments in his life [he] will never forget.”

“Ever since Peter Norvig and I launched AI Class, I have been dreaming of putting an entire computer science degree online, and to make access to the material free of charge, so that everyone can become a proficient computer scientist,” he wrote. ”Education has become much more exclusive, and getting into a top-10 computer science department, like Georgia Tech’s, is still out of reach for all but a chosen few.”

Taught through Udacity’s platform, only students granted admission by Georgia Tech will receive credit and will pay based on individual courses or the entire degree program.  A pilot program is expected to begin in the next academic year with enrollment limited to a few hundred students, but they plan to expand over the next three years.

Given the need for more workers in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, the companies decided to focus on computer science.  If the program goes well, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Udacity expand into other subjects with master’s programs. But Georgia Tech Provost Rafael Bras told Inside Higher Ed that the format may not be as suitable for other disciplines.

“We’ll wait and see,” he said. “I believe this is quite appropriate for professional master’s degrees but I also believe it is less appropriate for non-master’s degrees and certainly for other fields.”

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That’s why CollegeFeed, launched publicly on Tuesday, has built a social platform to connect college students and companies. It helps students showcase their skills and provides a Facebook-like newsfeed for keeping networking and job opportunities front and center.

“LinkedIn is good for someone who has learned how to ride a bike,” said CollegeFeed founder and CEO Sanjeev Agrawal. “But when you know how to ride a bike or swing a tennis racket, you forget how hard it was when you were beginning…We believe that [providing a career marketplace] requires going the extra mile for students, rather than saying we’ve got this site where you can hang your resume.”

Since March, the site has been beta tested by students at Stanford, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. This week, it will open up to students and employers nationwide.

On the site, students are guided through the process of creating a personal profile of skills and experiences, as well as selecting companies that most interest them. From there, the site provides Netflix-like recommendations for other companies that might be of interest, job opportunities and other kinds of career-related content.

Through virtual networking events like online speaker series, students can listen to industry veterans share their experiences. And they’re offered the opportunity to win awards and show off their skills through employer-sponsored challenges on the site.

The point, said Agarwal, a former global head of product marketing at Google, is to help kickstart college students’ careers by pushing opportunities to them, rather than by forcing them to search for or seek out alumni and opportunities they probably don’t even know exist.

And for employers, who in CollegeFeed’s estimation spend up to $10,000 trying to fill empty positions, it’s a way to market themselves while getting the chance to connect with specific students. Companies like eBay can pay for various levels of placement and engagement on the site, including branded pages, innovation challenges and the ability to send content to specific students.

Last year, LinkedIn described college students as its fastest-growing demographic, and the company actively reaches out to college students through academic institutions and career experts. But other companies are quickly trying to move in to capture the college crowd. With funding from Google Ventures, MindSumo launched earlier this year to provide an online marketplace of mini competitions sponsored by companies and organizations. It gives college students a chance to show off their skills while giving companies access to new ideas and talent. AfterCollege last year updated its career site with a new social layer meant to attract college students. And TechStars-backed EverTrue is targeting colleges with a mobile app platform to connect alumni and support fundraising.

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On Wednesday, Chegg, which now bills itself as an online “student hub,” said that it is partnering with ed tech darling du jour, Coursera, to provide digital content, including textbooks and other materials, to students enrolled in its massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Through the partnership, Coursera students will be able to purchase Chegg material, as well as receive some publisher content for free. They will also be able to make use of other Chegg features, including Q&A forums, search and highlight options. Coursera students could still purchase content from other sources, but the company said it offers lower prices than other vendors and students wouldn’t benefit from the social options connected to Chegg content.

The companies declined to share financial details of the deal. And, when asked whether similar partnerships with other MOOC providers edX and Udacity might be on the horizon, CEO Dan Rosenweig said, “Our vision is to become the leading connected learning platform… We’re not going to limit ourselves to anything.”

MOOC providers have faced more vocal challengers in recent months, but this deal underscores their steadily growing influence. Even if their completion rates hover around just 10 percent, Chegg clearly wants to be able to get in front of the millions of learning-focused eyeballs that are being drawn to Coursera.

Until now, Coursera professors have only been able to require supplemental content that is available for free on the web and recommend textbooks. Chegg said it will enable the MOOC provider to make some publisher-created content available for free during the course. Students will then have the option to purchase the full eTextbook from Chegg for continued learning after the course.

As of the partnership’s launch, just two courses will offer Chegg content but, over the next few months, the companies said it will expand to several dozen of the site’s 370 courses.

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At the NewSchools Summit on Wednesday, social gaming giant Zynga and NewSchools Venture Fund said they are partnering up for an entrepreneurship program to support startups developing learning games and apps.

Zynga will host the startups at its San Francisco office, where they’ll be able to interact with game designers and product managers, and Zynga.org, the company’s nonprofit arm, has committed $1 million for the first year.

“Through the efforts of Zynga.org, we’ve shown that social games can impact peoples’ lives for the better,” said Ken Weber, executive director of Zynga.org. “[With NewSchools], we want to help entrepreneurs create high quality, scalable learning games that will enhance learning experiences for all 21st century students.”

The announcement comes during something of a boom time in ed tech. Since the start of the year, a handful of other accelerators have also launched targeting education startups. And, according to CB Insights, education technology companies raised $1.1 billion in 2012.

The first cohort of the Zynga- and NewSchools-backed program will start this summer and include learning gaming apps Kidaptive, LocoMotiveLabs and Motion Math. Education social network Edmodo will join the cohort as a charter partner.

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On Wednesday, the startup said it had partnered with several schools of education and other institutions and museums, including schools of education at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Virginia, the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art, to bring free professional development courses to teachers via the web.

“We looked at our technology and realized that for 7-year-old kids, streaming university content for them wasn’t going [to be effective]. But the lever for that 7-year-old kid may be to help them get a better teacher,” said Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng.

Most school districts don’t have the resources to offer quality professional development programs that match the interests and needs of individual teachers, he said.  Typically, teachers are pulled out of their classrooms for a few days a year (disrupting instruction for their students) and are required to follow the same program, regardless of the subjects they teach or their strengths and weaknesses.

With its new courses, Coursera said teachers can focus on the topics, areas of expertise and pedagogies that are most relevant for them.  For example, early courses will cover topics including content development, the common core curriculum, character education and implementing flipped classroom and blended learning strategies.

The courses will follow the same format as other MOOCs on Coursera and will adopt the startup’s peer-grading approach. For example, teachers could write a lesson plan or videotape themselves teaching and then receive feedback from other members of the course.

Teachers, educators and even parents can take the new courses for free but, as with other Coursera classes, they can pay $30 to $100 for the “Signature Track” option, in which their identity is verified and they receive a certificate at the end of the course. Coursera’s hope is that, in time, school superintendents will award teachers continuing education credit for the courses. But Ng said that, so far, they’ve only had informal conversations with superintendents about the possibility.

Given the attention MOOCs have received in the last year, it’s not so surprising that the phenomenon is spreading to K-12 education. Conversations are underway about adapting the MOOC format for K-12 students and other educational organizations are offering one-off MOOCs for teachers and administrators. But Coursera is the first of the major MOOC providers to make a foray into K-12 education and given the debate it and its rivals Udacity and edX have stirred among colleges and universities, it will be interesting to see how it is received by K-12 educators.

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Instead of receiving $20,000 upon acceptance into ImagineK12, startups will now receive $100,000 each, thanks to a new Start Fund, the accelerator said. The newly-created Start Fund is funded by big name Silicon Valley types, including Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, Yahoo co-founder David Filo, Angela Filo, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, as well as the NewSchools Venture Fund and GSV Asset Management. Startups will receive up to $20,000 from ImagineK12 and a convertible note for $80,000 from the Start Fund.

Since launching in early 2011, the accelerator said its 39 startups have raised more than $30 million in funding and it claims that its products are used by more than 10 percent of U.S. teachers.

Tim Brady, a co-founder of Imagine K12, said their goal is to not only give accepted ed tech startups a longer runway for adoption, but to make education more welcoming to entrepreneurs.

“It has a reputation as a difficult sector,” he said. “One of our over-arching goals is to make entrepreneurship in education as attractive as it is in other sectors.”

While $100,000 would certainly be difficult to turn down, other ed tech accelerators offering less capital aren’t without their selling points for aspiring education entrepreneurs. For obvious reasons, Silicon Valley is a great place to build a company, but education startups could also be well-served by building networks in other parts of the country.

Socratic Labs and Kaplan’s new TechStars-powered ed tech accelerator, both of which are based in New York City, offer education entrepreneurs the chance to experiment within the country’s largest K-12 school district and in the backyard of major content companies. And Boston-based LearnLaunchX is in close proximity to plenty of publishers, colleges and universities.

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The San Francisco-based company, which last year grabbed headlines with a $25 million seed round for its plans to bring an Ivy League-level education online, on Monday announced a $500,000 prize that will go to one educator per year for making advancements in higher education.

The point of the award is to help elevate the teaching profession and bring attention to people creating breakthrough learning experiences, the company said. That it will likely help the young startup build its brand certainly doesn’t hurt.

In addition to announcing the new prize, the startup said Roger Kornberg, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, would serve as the Governor of the Minerva Academy, an honorary institution that will include educational innovators from around the world.  The Academy will be responsible for selecting the winners of the new Minerva Prize.

“Respect for teaching has declined over the years. Teachers were once one of the most esteemed members of the community and, in some way, their remuneration reflected that. But today that’s much less true,” said Kornberg. “The purpose of this prize [is] to enhance the public appreciation of people who today make a great sacrifice and devote their lives to this profession.”

As student debt climbs and more question the value of a high-priced college education, startups of all kinds are emerging with different models for online education. In attempting to lure both top students and top professors who might otherwise gravitate to the country’s leading brick and mortar institutions, Minerva has an audacious vision.

But beyond raising $25 million from Benchmark Capital, Minerva, which is led by founder and CEO Ben Nelson (the former CEO of Snapfish), has attracted the support of several high-profile leaders. Former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is an advisor and former U.S. Senator and Governor Bob Kerrey (D-NB) leads Minerva’s Institute for Research and Scholarship.

Image by Sergey Nivens via Shutterstock.

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