Meaningful international experiences should be an important part of everyone’s education, yet, as the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors data resource points out, American students are often reluctant to travel. The 2013 annual survey states that only 283,332 U.S. students studied abroad for academic credit. That number is only a tiny fraction — about 1.4 percent — of the nearly 20 million U.S. students enrolled in higher education. Time and money are the usual reasons students forego this rich learning opportunity. For online and non-traditional students, the idea of studying abroad is almost unheard of. At Northeastern University’s College of Professional Studies, one small part of our institution-wide efforts at internationalizing was our creation of a study abroad program for our online graduate students. We arranged a weeklong trip to Florence, Italy, as the key component in an eight-week-long summer course. We worked with a third-party provider for logistical support, and were lucky to have a Florence-based colleague who was eager to help. Here, in a nutshell, are five lessons we learned: (click here for the full article)