Former General Electric chairman and chief executive Jack Welch agreed to sell his online leadership education program to Strayer Education Inc. for undisclosed terms.

The deal, announced Friday, November 11, is the latest transaction to take place between higher learning institutions, which has seen an uptick in M&A over the past couple months. Welch’s holding company, S&J Welch LLC, sold the Jack Welch Management Institute, or JWMI, to Strayer with the ultimate goal of making it into “the number one online business school in the world,” said Welch in a prepared statement.

According to the release, Welch taught business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and in numerous other academic settings after his retirement from GE. He founded JWMI and launched it in 2009 as part of Chancellor University.

Strayer, which owns Strayer University and other assets, expects to close the transaction before the end of 2011.

Strayer is Nasdaq-listed and trades under the ticker STRA, with a market capitalization of roughly $1.09 billion.