Last week, a team at Harvard University rolled out the latest release of a program that helps researchers create their own Web sites. The open-source software, OpenScholar, seeks to make building and customizing Web sites simple and straightforward, even for academics who aren't tech-savvy.

There are currently two versions of the software: one for scholars to create a personal Web site and one for researchers to build a project Web site.

Though faculty members often have Web sites created for them by their department's staff, OpenScholar was created to help academics make their own Web sites by automating most of the process, said Gary King, the director of Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the project's principal investigator.

"It’s about making the technology accessible to people," said Ferdinand Alimadhi, a programmer and Web developer at the institute and the...

Think students don't care about online privacy? Think again, say two researchers who have published a new paper about the privacy attitudes of 18- and 19-year-olds.

The researchers, Danah Boyd and Eszter Hargittai, report that most Facebook users modified their privacy settings at least once in 2009 and that "engagement with privacy settings increased significantly" between 2009 and 2010.

"Over all, our data show that far from being nonchalant and unconcerned about privacy matters, the majority of young adult users of Facebook are engaged with managing their privacy settings on the site at least to some extent," the researchers write.

Ms. Boyd, a researcher at Microsoft Research, and Ms. Hargittai, an associate professor in the communication-studies department at Northwestern University, base their findings on surveys of students at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Their paper...

The modern Internet did not exist when the Americans With Disabilities Act was enacted in 1990. Now the Justice Department is weighing changes to bring the landmark civil-rights law in line with the rise of the Web—a debate that could have implications for colleges.

The department this week announced that it is considering revising ADA regulations "to establish specific requirements for state and local governments and public accommodations to make their Web sites accessible to individuals with disabilities."

The announcement and call for public comment, preliminary as they are, drew celebration from WebAIM, an Internet-accessibility training and consulting nonprofit at Utah State University. Jonathan Whiting, the center's director of training and evaluation, described the move as "huge." Many colleges' digital materials are designed in a way that makes them difficult to use for people ...

Princeton University announced today that it plans to shut down University Channel, a Web service that streams videos of public-policy lectures, citing financial reasons.

The online audio and video service, started in 2005, provides lectures by prominent scholars on political affairs. The Web site offers hundreds of videos and audio recordings from 47 college campuses, including some outside the United States. The service also provides academic programming to 121 public television operations.

The University Channel Web site will shut down on November 3, according to a message sent to the channel's e-mail announcement list, signed by Rebecca Anderson, a spokesperson for Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

"While we have decided that it no longer makes financial sense for Princeton to host the UChannel, we still believe that noncommercial, quality...

While many students turn to YouTube when looking for help with their homework, it can be hard to find good-quality educational clips there, according to two professors who did a preliminary analysis of several video search engines.

The two researchers, Jeffrey R. Bell, a professor of biological sciences at California State University at Chico, and Jim Bidlack, a biology professor at University of Central Oklahoma, entered scientific terms into several video search engines and analyzed the top 20 results from each one to compare their relevance and educational usefulness. Students were also shown some of the resulting videos and asked to rate their effectiveness at explaining the concept involved.

The professors found that YouTube favored videos made by students as class projects, perhaps because those videos attracted more comments than professionally made ones, said Mr. Bell in an...

A new player entered the field of open online education last week: Nixty, a Web site that allows any user to take and create courses for free.

The new learning platform started up with over 200 course offerings culled from open-source content already available online, such as courses from the Khan Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare Project. Nixty's users have begun developing about 120 new courses since its launch, said Glen Moriarty, the company's chief executive.

Nixty comes with all the trappings of most course-management systems: a grade book, testing, discussion boards. Mr. Moriarty used to head and is still in the leadership team at Scholar360, which develops course-management software. But right now, Nixty is meant to help make educational content free, open, and easy to access.

Other sites exist that put together the open-source educational ...

Through a new partnership with World Computer Exchange, the upstart online institution University of the People hopes to build communication centers in six developing countries over the next six months, allowing students without good Internet access to take online courses.

World Computer Exchange is a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding youth access to information technology in developing countries. “We’re trying to go into developing countries that [the university] might not have a lot of students in now,” said Timothy Anderson, World Computer Exchange president.

University of the People, founded in 2009, promises tuition-free education in business administration and computer science. The university says its enrollment includes approximately 500 students from nearly 100 countries.

According to Mr. Anderson, the two institutions are focusing on establishing sites in...

The title is provocative: "College Journalists Are Good at Consuming Multimedia But Bad at Making It. Why?" It sits atop a column published yesterday in The Huffington Post by Michael Koretzky, a journalist who has been an adviser to the student newspaper at Florida Atlantic University. (The university let him go from the official position this spring, but the students running the paper brought him back, on a volunteer basis.)

Students, Mr. Koretzky writes, make the same mistake widely considered to be the downfall of the professional newspaper business: They only care about print. Look at college newspaper Web sites, Mr. Koretzsky says: "Most of the stories on these sites are mere "shovelware," meaning print articles are tossed online without much thought. Or pictures, graphics, or video." The online presentation is bland, derivative, without imagination or verve, he continues....

Each week it seems like a new college is ready to bestow iPads on its students for academic purposes. The latest is Oklahoma State University, which plans to distribute iPads to an estimated 120 students in the fall.

“The goal is to push this tool as hard and as far as we possibly can to really see what the limitations are,” said Bill Handy, visiting associate professor at the university's School of Media and Strategic Communications.

Mr. Handy, who is overseeing the project along with Tracy Suter, associate professor of marketing, said that iPads will be given to students in two courses at the university's communications and business schools, along with the faculty members.

“We’re going to be evaluating what we need to do to fully integrate the tool into the classroom,” he said.

Oklahoma State joins several other colleges that have announced plans to distribute iPads to students in ...

Faculty members and information-technology staff members alike say technology is useful for teaching and learning, but professors take a narrower view of what technology belongs in today's classroom, according to a report released on Monday by the technology company CDW Government Inc.

Eighty-eight percent of the 303 faculty members surveyed said technology was essential or useful for student learning, and over 60 percent said they used electronic materials in their teaching, according to the report.

The most popular tools cited by professors were e-textbooks and online documents, with faculty members reporting far less enthusiasm for other electronic tools. Under a quarter of faculty members surveyed use wikis or blogs in their teaching, and only 31 percent of professors surveyed considered online collaboration tools "essential" to today's classroom, compared with 72 percent of over 3...