Your problem is that you are using relative URLs– that is URLs, that include only part of the web address. What is taking on your URL is the browser, not WordPress. Browsers have long done this. Here is how it is supposed to work.
If you provide an absolute URL nothing happens– for example, http://www.example.com. The idea is that you can use shorthand version of the URL. If you had a directory at /filesystem/path/to/www.example.com/images/ then a file named here.html located at http://www.example.com/here.html could use urls like images/image1.jpg to load the images. The browser will assume the first part of the URL is “this URL” and create http://www.example.com/images/image1.jpg. The relative URL is always relative to “this URL”.
What is happening in your case is that you are providing the relative URL of, for example, elearning.loyno.edu/, so the browser is filling in the rest creating http://yoursite.com/elearning.loyno.edu/. Your URLs are relative because you’ve left off the scheme– the http:// part. (My editors do it too…. a lot. 🙂 )
You just need to provide the complete, absolute url for those links– aka., add the http:// bit.
While it doesn’t effect you in this case since you are loading external URLs, this relative URL issue is especially tricky inside WordPress because pages don’t really load from the locations they appear to load from, at least not when pretty permalinks are enabled. In short, just don’t use relative URLs.