US college students who want to keep learning over the summer break might be interested in checking out the latest promotion from Masterclass. They can get a three-month individual membership for just $1.

Masterclass hosts video-centric classes from notable, successful figures including Lewis Hamilton, Gordon Ramsay, Anna Wintour, Spike Lee and Serena Williams. The company says it now has more than 2,500 lessons on topics including gardening, writing, filmmaking, business leadership, wilderness survival and interior design.

You'll need a .edu email address and to meet a few other criteria, such as being a current student enrolled in a college or university program in the US. Masterclass says your promotional plan won't auto-renew. Once it expires, you'll have the option of continuing your membership at the regular price. The plans start at $15 per month.

It's not quite as great a deal as the one year of access for $1 Masterclass offered students in 2020. Still, it's a low-cost way to try the service and learn a thing or two.

You'll need to act swiftly if you're interested. Masterclass says there's a limited supply of promotional memberships available and the offer expires at 11:59PM PT tonight. You can sign up for the so-called Summer of Learning via a dedicated page on the Masterclass website.

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Lincoln College says it will close this week in the wake of a ransomware attack that took months to resolve. While the impact of COVID-19 severely impacted activities such as recruitment and fundraising, the cyberattack seems to have been the tipping point for the Illinois institution.

The college has informed the Illinois Department of Higher Education and Higher Learning Commission that it will permanently close as of May 13th. As NBC News notes, it's the first US college or university to shut down in part because of a ransomware attack.

Lincoln says it had "record-breaking student enrollment" in fall 2019. However, the pandemic caused a sizable fall in enrollment with some students opting to defer college or take a leave of absence. The college — one of only a few rural schools to qualify as a predominantly Black institution under the Department of Education — said those affected its financial standing.

Last December, Lincoln was hit by a cyberattack, which "thwarted admissions activities and hindered access to all institutional data, creating an unclear picture of fall 2022 enrollment. All systems required for recruitment, retention and fundraising efforts were inoperable," the college said in a statement posted on its homepage. "Fortunately, no personal identifying information was exposed. Once fully restored in March 2022, the projections displayed significant enrollment shortfalls, requiring a transformational donation or partnership to sustain Lincoln College beyond the current semester."

Barring a last-minute respite, the one-two punch of the pandemic and a cyberattack have brought an end to a 157-year-old institution. Lincoln says it will help students who aren't graduating this semester transfer to another college.

Over the last few years, ransomware hackers have attacked other educational facilities, as well as hospitals, game studios, Sinclair Broadcast Group and many other companies and institutions.

The smart home ecosystem is getting a little more integrated: Google just updated its Amazon Alexa Skill to work on its latest Nest cameras. So if you already own a variety of Nest and Alexa devices, they'll work together more seamlessly moving forward. Now, you can stream live feeds from your Nest cameras, doorbells and other devices to anything from your Amazon Fire TV to any Echo device. Amazon made a similar gesture to open up its own smart home ecosystem last month, when it announced that its doorbells and security cameras would work with Google Nest, Ring, Abode and other third-party devices. Amazon’s Ring doorbell already works with Google Home and Apple Homekit.

A few other integrations between Nest and Alexa have been available for a while. For example, if you own a Google Nest thermostat, you can tell Alexa to change the temperature of your home. Older Nest cameras and doorbells have also had limited Alexa abilities, but the new skill allows for even more cross-platform integration. According to a recent post on Google Nest’s blog, the updated skill means Alexa will now support streaming from the Nest Cam with Floodlight, as well as the battery-powered models of Nest Cam and Nest Doorbell to the Echo Show, Fire TV or Fire Tablets.

If you own a Nest Doorbell, you can also talk to people through your door with any of your Alexa devices (such as the Echo, Echo Show, Fire TV and Fire Tablet). Eventually, Alexa will be able to announce when a Nest Cam or Nest Doorbell detects a person at your front door as well.

Students using Google Classroom won't have to wait until a test to know how well they understand a concept. Google has previewed an upcoming "practice sets" feature in Classroom that lets teachers gauge progress through automatically graded assignments. Pupils can see real-time feedback on their answers, and can ask for hints through explainers and videos. Teachers, meanwhile, will know which students are struggling with a given problem.

Google is currently testing Classroom practice sets with some schools, and plans a beta release sometime in the "coming months." They'll be available to both teachers using the Teaching and Learning Upgrade as well as schools using Google Workspace for Education Plus. The company is encouraging would-be early adopters to register their interest in joining the beta.

Classroom's practice feature won't always be useful. Not every exercise can fit into a web form, after all. When it is relevant, though, it could help teachers devote more attention to individual students or focus lesson time on concepts that stymie the class at large. Kids will ideally be well-prepared for tests, while educators can refine their courses.

Taxpayers can now delete any selfies they submitted to ID.me, the company tasked by the IRS to verify identities. Following uproar from privacy advocates, civil liberties groups and Congress, the federal agency last month axed a new requirement that taxpayers who want to access certain online services must comply with ID.me's facial recognition tool. Users were asked to verify their identity by uploading a selfie and government-issued ID onto ID.me’s portal, which uses automated facial recognition to vet the images. Beginning today, any ID.me account holders who wish to delete their presence on the site can do so by simply visiting account.id.me. Don’t worry if you don’t get around to it. ID.me will automatically delete all facial recognition data from taxpayers on March 11th.

Not all taxpayers were required to use ID.me (only users seeking to look up past tax returns or child tax credit refunds online, and this is only if you don't have a current online IRS account). Unfortunately, if you fall into those two groups, you’ll still need to jump through some extra hoops on ID.me's website. Users will need to schedule a video interview with an IRS agent, as well as submit a photo ID such as a driver’s license, passport or state ID. While a video call may be less of a privacy invasion than facial recognition, you may be in for a long wait. While some users connect to a video agent in a matter of minutes, some have reported wait times of a few hours or more. Automated facial recognition is still an option for those who can’t stand the wait time. The company announced that starting on March 11th, it will begin automatically deleting photos submitted by users within 24 hours. 

Luckily for those who already have an IRS online account, they can skip ID.me altogether. The IRS has promised to roll out a new authentication tool by next tax season that won’t require ID.me, but hasn’t detailed what it is. Tax-related identity theft surged during the pandemic, with many thieves filing fraudulent claims for unemployment benefits. The agency advises taxpayers to file early, and to be on the lookout for any letters from the IRS about potential identity fraud. Taxpayers can also file for an Identity Protection Pin (IP Pin), a special six-digit number issued by the IRS that provides another layer of security in case your social security number is compromised.

Two Point Campus, Sega and Two Point Studios' follow up to Two Point Hospital, will arrive on May 17th. The quirky college life simulator is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch. Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass subscribers can play at no extra cost on launch day.

You'll be able to build a dream (or nightmare) college campus from the ground up, from residence halls and classrooms to ornamental pathways and forests. Players will be able to give students a college experience packed with relationships and extracurricular activities, such as concerts and a sport called Cheese Ball, and possibly even an education.

Students can take classes such as gastronomy and robotics, and they each have their own character traits to be catered to. Keeping students happy and helping them earn strong grades can boost your college's prestige, allowing you to enroll more students and boost the institution's bank balance.

Pre-orders for most platforms are open today, and will be available on the Switch eShop later. Locking in a pre-order will net you in-game goodies for not only Two Point Campus, but Two Point Hospital as well.

Sega/Two Point Studios

The SAT standardized college admissions tests will be taken exclusively on computers starting in 2024, The New York Times has reported. The new system will spell the end to tests taken on paper with No. 2 pencils, a right of passage for American high school students since the SAT was first administered nearly a hundred years ago.

Students will instead complete the exams on laptops or tablets, either their own or devices issued by the school. If students don't have a device, the board will provide one on the test day. And if a student loses power or connectivity, "the digital SAT has been designed to ensure they won't lose their work or time while they reconnect," said the College Board, which administers the tests.

On top of the technical changes, the testing time will be shortened to two hours instead of three. It'll feature shorter reading passages with one question for each, reflecting a wider range of topics more representative of what students will see in college. For the math section, calculators will finally be allowed. And students and teachers will get test scores in days rather than weeks, with educators no longer having to deal with packing, sorting or shipping test materials. 

It felt a lot less stressful, and whole lot quicker than I thought it'd be.

The College Board said that in pilot testing, 80 percent of students found the digital-only tests less stressful. "It felt a lot less stressful, and whole lot quicker than I thought it'd be," 11th grade student Natalia Cossio told the board. "The shorter passages helped me concentrate more on what the question wanted me to do."

The new testing standard was announced amid a growing trend for schools across the US to drop the SAT (or rival ACT) tests altogether. For Fall 2022, around 1,815 schools (of nearly 4,000 degree-granting institutions) have eliminated the requirement for standardized test scores, according to the FairTest non-profit foundation. 

"Schools that did not mandate ACT/SAT submission last year generally received more applicants, better academically qualified applicants and a more diverse pool of applicants," FairTest Executive Director Bob Schaeffer told the Los Angeles Times last year. 

Critics have also noted that the SAT tests handicap students who don't have access to expensive test preparation courses or who can't afford to take the $55 test multiple times. The digital SAT shift "does not magically transform it to a more accurate, fairer or valid tool for assessing college readiness," Schaefer told the NYT. The College Board, meanwhile, has said that SAT scores can actually help students who don't have top-flight grade-point averages. 

Electronic Arts is dipping back into college football with a limited-time mode in Madden NFL 22. The Campus Legends mode features ten school teams, including rosters filled with college football icons, as well as current and former NFL stars who are alumni of those squads.

The event is available through the Superstar KO multiplayer mode. The college teams are Clemson University, University of Miami, Louisiana State University, University of Florida, University of Oklahoma, University of Texas, University of Southern California (USC), University of Oregon, University of Nebraska and Michigan State University.

EA notes Madden 22 is now the first game since 2013 to include a college football experience. The publisher announced earlier this year that it's bringing back the College Football series. The next game in the no-longer-dormant franchise is likely years away though, so college football modes in Madden might have to do the trick for now.

To mark the release of the mode, former college and NFL stars Vince Young and Reggie Bush will play against each other as their respective alma maters (University of Texas and USC). The pair faced off in the Rose Bowl in 2006, and they'll return to the Rose Bowl Stadium to repeat the matchup in Madden 22. You can watch the showdown tonight starting at 7PM ET on the NFL YouTube or Madden NFL Twitch channels.

You have a few weeks to check out Campus Legends. The mode will be available until September 27th.

We know you may not be ready to go back to school just yet — but being prepared for the inevitable return can’t hurt. In between beach days and summer barbecues, it’s worth starting to think about all the things you’ll need for the new school year, because no one enjoys scrambling for supplies at the last minute.

We hope our annual back-to-school gift guide can help students everywhere figure out what they need well before they return to campus in the fall. Since tech is kind of our thing, we have a number of laptop recommendations suitable for all kinds of students (and all budgets) along with picks for dorm room essentials, studying supplies and helpful gadgets that come in under $50. And for those of you with little ones, our staffers share their favorite educational toys for kids in case you want to add something new to your repertoire.

We know going back to school this year is going to feel different; it may even make you feel anxious for various reasons. But we hope our product recommendations can ease at least one source of stress. Figuring out which tools you need to be your best academic self, and which gadgets you want to invest in to make your time at school easier (and maybe a bit more fun).

TurboTax creator Intuit has had a chilly relationship with the IRS, and now it's cutting some of its involvement. The Hillreports that Intuit is leaving the IRS' Free File program after participating for almost 20 years. The company said it was "proud" of its involvement, but claimed the limits of the program and "conflicting demands" from outside the program left it with little choice but to leave.

An exit would let Intuit concentrate on "further innovating" in ways the IRS Free File program didn't allow, the company said. While the firm didn't elaborate on what those plans were, it argued that it could help taxpayers get refunds sooner at no charge while drawing on experts and letting users rely on their own data.

The company maintained that it was still "committed" to free tax filing, but that almost 90 percent of filings from the past eight years came from outside of the Free File program.

The move comes just a year after the New York State Department of Financial Services found that Intuit and four other tax prep providers (including H&R Block) had conducted "unfair and abusive" practices by hiding the landing pages for their free filing pages in an alleged attempt to artificially drive paid filing. The IRS also added protections that not only prevented attempts at hiding free filing, but gave the IRS the power to create its own free-file option.

It's not certain if the government crackdowns prompted Intuit's exit. Whatever the motivations, the move could still make it harder for some people to file their taxes. About 3 million of Intuit's 17 million free filings last year went through IRS Free File. That's a large number of people who will have to either find alternative free solutions or hope that TurboTax won't incur a cost.