Orlando, Fla. -- Online education is a runaway best seller. Its growth rate -- 12.9 percent -- dwarfs the overall pace of academe’s student expansion. More than 25 percent of all students may have taken at least one online class this year, according to a speculative estimate suggested at a distance-education conference that wraps up here today.

But the success isn’t smashing enough. Not even close.

That’s the case made by A. Frank Mayadas, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program director who called on online educators gathered here to meet what he sees as a major need -- fast. And Mr. Mayadas, considered the Father of Online Learning, suggested in an interview following his speech that the government should step in with some $500-million to support traditional online courses -- not just the experimental “free” courses that have emerged as a darling of the Obama administration.

Questions of...

Illicit file sharing isn’t just for kids these days. Once mainly used for downloading pirated music, sites have sprung up on the Internet that allow free swapping of academic journals (think Napster’s younger dweeby brother).

A new study, published in the Internet Journal of Medical Informatics, looks at a site aimed specifically at medical professionals and students and finds that thousands of people were obtaining non-open-access materials free of charge. The article says that in a six-month period of watching the unnamed site, nearly 5,500 articles were exchanged, costing journals about $700,000 in that time, or about $1.4-million a year.

The site had 127,626 registered users, who during the study period put in requests for 6,587 journals. There was an 83 percent success rate in finding the article. Nature and Science were the most commonly swapped journals.

The article does not focus on...

What did civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy have to do with the Apollo moon missions? Find out next week, when the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum holds its first virtual conference for educators. The date is November 10, and the time is from 11 AM to 5 PM Eastern time.

There are six sessions with Smithsonian curators, designed to help instructors use materials about the space program in lessons. One, for instance, will focus on the cultural impact of Apollo imagery. (A version of a photo of astronauts saluting the American flag was used as an MTV logo for many years, for instance.) The politics and history of the program will be discussed in another session, which you will have to view in order to learn about the civil rights connection.

By opening the largest online rental service for scientific, technical, and research journals, the company Deep Dyve is hoping to do for academic publications what Netflix has done for movies: make them easily accessible and inexpensive for everyone.

The Web site has been an academic-journal search engine since 2005 and unveiled its rental program this week. Now anyone can “rent” an article—which means you can view it on your computer without ownership rights or printing capabilities—for as little as 99 cents for 24 hours. Users can also subscribe for monthly passes. Currently the site has 30 million articles from various peer-reviewed journals.

William Park, chief executive of Deep Dyve, says the model will not only allow more people to read articles they might otherwise not see, but will actually encourage users to purchase more content from journals. He says that now, only about 0.2...

If the last four years are any indication, college-student e-mail addresses may soon be a thing of the past.

So says a report issued by Educause, a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of information technology in higher education. The "Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2008 Summary Report" took information from nearly 930 colleges and universities regarding their IT practices and environments.

It found, among other things, that in 2008 nearly 10 percent of associate, baccalaureate, and master’s institutions as well as 25 percent of doctoral institutions were considering putting an end to student e-mail addresses because so many students were already using personal e-mail accounts. That is a large shift from the 1 to 2 percent of institutions that were considering this in 2004.

The survey highlighted findings from IT categories like networking and security, information systems, faculty and...

Collaboration is old news. "Radical collaboration" is the way of the future. That's the idea behind a new partnership announced by the libraries at Columbia University and Cornell University.

Called 2CUL (pronounced "too cool") after the partners' acronyms, the project will first focus on how the libraries can jointly transform their operations (and save money) in three areas: managing electronic resources and other nuts-and-bolts library work, building global-collecting capabilities, and creating a digital-preservation infrastructure. Those "mass-production activities" will require developing a shared library-management system "in which we would both be able to see and work seamlessly," said James G. Neal. Mr. Neal is vice president for information services and university librarian at Columbia.

Although it is in no way a merger, the venture will require Mr. Neal to work hand in glove ...

Music schools have a tradition of bringing in famous musicians to hold master classes with a handful of students, but many of those visits have been cut this year because of tight budgets. Free software developed at the University of Southern California promises to make videoconferencing clear enough to hold such classes remotely over high-speed Internet connections.

The software is called EchoDamp, and it was developed by Brian K. Shepard, an assistant professor of composition at Southern California's Thornton School of Music. "There's a great deal of information that is there if you're in the same room with somebody singing or performing an instrument, but that is often not transmitted in a videoconference," he said. The goal of his software, he added, is "to maintain a sonic environment online that is musically effective."

One reason most Internet connections -- even high-speed ones...

On Friday, Carnegie Mellon University will dedicate a pedestrian bridge in honor of Randy Pausch, a computer-science professor whose lecture about achieving childhood dreams, given while he was terminally ill, inspired millions after it was posted on YouTube. Mr. Pausch succumbed to pancreatic cancer in July 2008.

The bridge connects a building that houses the university's School of Drama with a new building for the School of Computer Science. University officials said the bridge mirrored Mr. Pausch's support of collaboration between scientists and artists. He started a popular course at Carnegie Mellon called "Building Virtual Worlds," in which students from several disciplines work together on virtual projects.

"What Randy did to connect computer science with the arts was remarkable," the university's president, Jared L. Cohon, said in a written statement. "His work had -- and...

For five hours last Friday, Tyler Penrod watched his fellow students at Purdue University take sledgehammers to computers.

Mr. Penrod, a senior at Purdue and president of a computer-animation club at the university, organized the event with other club leaders to raise travel funds for students to attend a national computer-animation conference. A local computer store donated old computers.

At Purdue, where many students take computer-related courses, "everyone has frustrations at a computer at one point or another," Mr. Penrod said. "So it's always a popular event."

Students paid $1 for the privilege of destroying a machine. Organizers of the event, in its third year, follow safety guidelines used for car-smashing events, which are hosted by fraternities on the campus.

The anticomputer hoopla took place on a main quad, attracting attention from students on the way to and from class....

The open-access journal Innovate, published by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University, is ceasing publication, Stephen Downes announced on his blog and a university spokesperson confirmed.

The peer-reviewed online journal focused on how information technology could be used to enhance academic, governmental, and business settings. It was started in 2004 by James L. Morrison, professor emeritus of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and had 76,282 subscribers from 271 countries.

In its last issue, Innovate had stories about creating learning environments in Second Life, approaches to develop quality assurance in online education, and a virtual learning space that allowed for three-dimensional representations of important archaeological sites.