A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devised a clever way to detect student cheating on homework in his introductory physics course—and found about 50 percent more cheating than students reported in anonymous surveys. And he discovered that frequent cheaters ended up bombing their exams.

The professor, David E. Pritchard, led a research team that analyzed student performance in an online homework system called MasteringPhysics.com during four different semesters. The researchers were able to measure the time spent on each question and look for suspicious work patterns. If a student took less than a minute each answering several complex questions and got them all right, for instance, the system flagged that as likely cheating. "Since one minute is insufficient time to read the problem and enter the several answers typically required, we infer that...

The draft of a new federal plan focuses on improving digital learning at the elementary- and secondary-school level, but it calls for changes in higher education as well.

"Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology," released this month by the Department of Education, is a draft of the National Educational Technology Plan 2010. It calls for an increased role for online learning in kindergarten through 12th grade and says colleges of education must include online learning in their curricula as well.

Susan Patrick, president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, said students today have grown up with the Internet and are more comfortable with technology, but also have higher expectations for the online learning experience. Ms. Patrick cited Boise State...

More than half of college students frequently or always consult Wikipedia for course-related research, according to a report published in First Monday, an online, peer-reviewed journal. Only 22 percent of respondents to the survey said they rarely or never use Wikipedia. The study is based on responses from 2,318 students and qualitative data from 86 who participated in focus groups.

The most common reason that students reported using Wikipedia was to obtain background information or a summary about a topic and to get started with research. Only 16 percent of survey respondents said they used Wikipedia because of its wiki capabilities. Students were far more likely to use Wikipedia at the very begining or near the begining of research than at the end of the process.

The Federal Communications Commission will release the country's first national broadband plan Tuesday—a landmark blueprint for universal high-speed Internet access that will be eagerly pored over in some parts of academe.

"If we’re right, the FCC report will call for a new role of leadership for higher education in this whole area of broadband," said Gary Bachula, vice president for external relations at Internet2, the high-speed networking consortium for colleges and universities.

In a news release previewing the 360-page document, the FCC said on Monday that one of its goals was affordable access to ultra-high-speed broadband at "anchor institutions" like schools and hospitals. Mr. Bachula, who has joined other higher-education networking leaders in trying to shape the plan, expects...

Students at universities in the United States have been pegged as good targets for online criminals, the security company RSA notes in a recent report.

The first month of 2010 marked a new record in the total number of monthly phishing attacks for RSA's Anti-Fraud Command Center, at 18,820, up from 8,497 in January 2009. The center now monitors more than 300 organizations in 140-plus countries. RSA, a division of the information firm EMC, says that it has noticed several attacks focused on servers at American universities so far this year, although no total is given, compared with a "minimal number" of total attacks in 2009.

"This sudden reversal may mark a new trend in phishing and online fraud—and a source for concern within the education...

Students in Emory University's bike-sharing program will soon be able to unlock the bikes they want to use by sending a text message. The university will replace its current system, which requires manually checking out a key, with the automatic one, developed by students at the nearby Georgia Institute of Technology.

Each bike in the new "viaCycle" fleet will be equipped with a GPS and locking system. When students or employees want to use a bike, they will send a text message with the bike's identification number to a server. The server will forward the request to the bike and unlock it automatically. After using the bike, the rider will use an attached cable to secure it anywhere and send another text message to lock it.

Five graduate students and one alumni of Georgia Tech's mechanical-engineering program won a $50,000 grant from the Ford Motor Company Fund to...

NEW YORK — The TEDxNYED Conference that took place here on Saturday was like the Lollapalooza festival for education technologists. Almost every speaker was a headliner in his or her own right.

The forum was a regional spin-off of the "billionaires-and-brains edutainment summit in California," as one participant, Dan Cohen, of George Mason University, described the mothership TED conferences and the hugely popular videos of their presentations. The theme Saturday was how new media and technology are shaping the future of education. And the speakers — including Lawrence Lessig, Michael Wesch, Henry Jenkins, Gina Bianchini, Jay Rosen, and David Wiley — each had 18 minutes to deliver what sometimes felt like a "greatest hits" snapshot of their ideas, with the chance for future online glory...

In an effort to better prepare its students for cyberwarfare, the United States Naval Academy presented a plan to expand its cybersecurity program on Monday, the Associated Press reported. According to the AP article, the Naval Academy recognizes that it falls behind the other two major military academies -- the United States Military Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy --in preparing its students to defend and attack computer systems.

The Naval Academy created a new Center for Cyber Security Studies in December 2009 and now offers cybersecurity internships with the National Security Agency and the National Defense University. The academy is testing two new courses in the computer-science department this semester: "Cryptology and Network Security" and...

Lots of colleges are designing smartphone applications that make life more convenient for students by shrinking what they can already get on desktop computers. North Carolina State University today announced a new library service that carries that trend a step further, sharing campus history by taking advantage of a smartphone's ability to sense your location.

The system, called WolfWalk, alerts pedestrians to information about nearby buildings and shows them hundreds of archival photos. One of the oldest is an 1890 shot that depicts the first freshman class, when the institution was called the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts.

“Particularly on college campuses,...

The February 18 fairness hearing on the revised settlement in the Google Books lawsuit has come and gone, and the world now waits for word from Denny Chin, the federal judge in charge of the case. It could be a long wait. At the Association of American Publishers meeting held in Washington this week, there was talk that we might not hear from the judge for a couple of months. (He could issue a ruling anytime, of course.)

One question on the minds of everyone following the settlement is : What happens after the judge rules? Jonathan Band, a specialist in technology law and policy, has created a nifty chart of possible paths the settlement might take, depending on what Judge Chin decides. Called "GBS...