One university's decision to close its central distance-education office has stirred a national debate over the best way to operate online programs.

Under a restructuring at Texas A&M University at College Station, individual colleges will now manage online learning. And tuition paid for those programs will flow directly through those colleges.

The decision follows a related move at the University of Texas system. As online education continues to grow, those reorganizations have prompted many educators to share their opinions about e-learning management on a listserv run by the technology cooperative WCET.

To some, decentralization is "doomed to failure." To others, a separate bureaucracy "simply doesn't make sense anymore." A third camp advocates a hybrid approach.

Chad Wootton, Texas A&M's associate vice president for external affairs, frames the question of managing online and...

Although universities have had to trim their budgets, and information technology has not been immune from the cuts, a broadband network that links institutions in more than a dozen northern states could actually grow, according to an Associated Press report.

The Northern Tier Network serves universities in Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Bonnie Neas, North Dakota State University's vice president for information technology, told that state's legislature this week that the system could get money from a $97-million federal grant being pursued by two nonprofit networking groups, Internet2 and National LambdaRail.

That could increase the network's capacity tenfold, according to the report, as well as cut costs to the universities and states behind it.

Feds to colleges: If you require students to use electronic-book readers that blind people can't access, you may be running afoul of the law.

That was the message of a letter released to college presidents Tuesday by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice.

"It is unacceptable for universities to use emerging technology without insisting that this technology be accessible to all students," the letter warns.

The move comes after two national organizations representing the blind sued Arizona State University over its use of the Kindle. The groups had also asked the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division to investigate whether e-book practices at several universities violated the rights of blind students under the Americans With Disabilities Act. In January, a series of agreements were announced in which universities pledged not to use Amazon's Kindle or any similar devices...

The Springer publishing company today announced that it is setting up a new open-access journal program. Called SpringerOpen, the program will initially include 12 new online-only, peer-reviewed journals in science, technical, and medical fields.

The Chronicle sat down with Eric Merkel-Sobotta, Springer's executive vice president for corporate communications, and Bettina Goerner, the company's manager of open access, to talk about the program. (They were in town for the annual meeting of the American Library Association.) They emphasized that all SpringerOpen journals will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows reuse of articles as long as the authors are given credit. So if you're an instructor who wants to use a SpringerOpen article in a course you're teaching, "you can include it in course packages without e-mailing Springer's rights department," Mr. ...

The University of Illinois system has received federal money to create an open-access textbook to be used on its three campuses, as well as the state's community colleges, and shared with colleges and universities around the country, said Charles V. Evans, the university's assistant vice president for academic affairs. The project is financed by a $150,000 grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education that the system secured in May with the help of Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, Mr. Evans said.

Unlike many projects that build collections of open-access textbooks by moving existing content to less restrictive licenses, Illinois is starting from scratch. Faculty members will write the textbook, though its subject has not been selected yet. The planning committee intends to choose a topic that is a strength at all of the system's three campuses, said Mr....

A new program will give grants to a variety of high-tech teaching projects, with the hope of helping low-income students better succeed in their studies.

Next Gen Learning Challenges, led by Educause, a nonprofit that supports education technology, is designed to find technology-based approaches to improve college readiness and completion among low-income students.

Initial goals include expanding access to free educational materials online, exploring the use of social networks for teaching, combining online and face-to-face education, and finding ways to measure learning success.

"Those are things that have been happening on the fringe of mainstream education for almost a decade now," said David Wiley, an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University. "These challenges are really about bringing those innovations to scale, so they benefit...

Thanks to videoconferencing, literary criticism is playing a small part in the rebuilding of Iraq.

At the end of last year, Steve Wilson, a professor of English at Texas State University at San Marcos, got an email from a U.S. official working on provincial reconstruction in Iraq. Through contacts at Iraqi universities, the official had met some professors of English who wanted to find a way to talk to their U.S. counterparts about literature. So he went looking on the Internet for American professors who had experience that might be relevant and found Mr. Wilson, who had taught in a largely Muslim country, Malaysia.

Mr. Wilson and two of his Texas State English-department colleagues, Nelly Rosario and John Blair, were invited to talk with the Iraqi scholars via videoconferencing. The first conversation took place in March. To participate, the Iraqi scholars had to dodge curfews and be...

A few college admissions committees are ramping up efforts to detect dishonest applicants.

About 25 universities and 20 application services are testing a plagiarism-detection service offered by iParadigms, the same company that provides Turnitin.com, a popular tool for catching plagiarism in academic writing, said Jeff Lorton, business manager at Turnitin for Admissions.

Turnitin for Admissions runs essays through a database of Internet content, journals, books, and previously submitted papers. It then provides a report detailing the number and nature of matches to see if any admissions essays appear to be copied from others.

 “What we don’t do is call plagiarism out,” said Mr. Lorton. “What we do is give people a tool to show matches, and it’s up to that admissions officer to look at that document and make a determination.”

Pennsylvania State University’s M.B.A. program ...

All eyes will be on the for-profit-education industry Thursday as the U.S. Senate convenes the first in a series of hearings examining federal spending on proprietary colleges. If you care about online education, it's worth paying attention because for-profits are gobbling up a growing share of the e-learning market.

Here's how you can follow along and join in the conversation online:

The hearing kicks off at 10 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, and will be Webcast here. I'll be reporting live from the event on Twitter (@marcparry). If you're on Twitter, you can contribute to our coverage by using the hashtag "#4profit." All tweets with that tag will be published in a box on The Chronicle's home page.

A key witness testifying will be Steven Eisman, a hedge-fund manager who predicted the housing bubble and is now issuing similar warnings about for-profit higher education. He played a part...

Communications scholars often fret over the legal nuances of using copyrighted material in their research, says Pat Aufderheide, a professor of communication at American University and director of its Center for Social Media. Ms. Aufderheide and Peter A. Jaszi, a law professor at American, hope to help researchers rest easy with a new guide to using copyrighted work—like political cartoons or screenshots from online games—in their studies.

Because of the "fair use" provisions of copyright law, copyrighted work can be quoted if it is being used for a purpose different from its original intent, according to the report, which was vetted by a committee of lawyers.

The report, released today, gives communications scholars four types of research-related situations as examples: analyzing copyrighted material, quoting it to illustrate a point, using it to spark discussion, and storing it in a...