Regulatory heat. Loan default worries. Bad publicity.

That's the storyline about for-profit colleges lately, but here's some other news: They just keep gobbling up the online-education market.

According to new research from the consulting firm Eduventures, for-profits' share of the 2.1-million-student online sector rose from 39 percent in 2008 to 42 percent in 2009, as the recession drove students back to college and severe budget cuts strained public universities.

That may not seem like a big increase, but you can see how skewed that online penetration is when you compare it with for-profits' chunk of the total higher-education market: about 9 percent. And consider that for-profits' share had been projected to stabilize or even shrink.

Meanwhile, says Richard Garrett, managing director at Eduventures, some nonprofit online pioneers “have stalled.”

"It’s just more competition," he...

A hacker broke into a computer server at the North Carolina Community College System, gaining access to the personal information of 51,000 people, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported on Thursday. The breach occurred at a library server in Raleigh, North Carolina, in August. System officials say the server contains driver's license and Social Security information used to track library materials at 46 community-college libraries.

Administrators say no information seems to have been taken, though they will still send letters to all those whose details were stored on the server.

Between September and October last year, Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, logged 27 reported laptop thefts. But now the university's next would-be computer thief might be met with an alarm and a greeting from campus security.

That’s because officials have been planting a “bait” laptop, equipped with a contact-activated alarm and monitored by security staff, in common spaces around the university.

Even though the program is new and small (there’s just one bait computer, though more could be added in the future), the results seem to be positive, according to Kiehah Kim, the university's security supervisor. Mr. Kim says the number of laptop thefts between September and October this year has fallen to 22 (an 18 percent drop).

The alarm-rigged laptop hasn't caught any burglars in the act, but Mr. Kim says awareness of the program (campus officials have dispersed posters with Big...

... and you'll be surprised what he or she can do with it. That's what the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Department of Energy figured. Last year, they staged a competition for "computationally intensive" humanities projects that would draw on the DOE's High Performance Computing (HPC) resources at Nersc, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Was the gamble worth it? Yes, to judge by the results on display at the Coalition for Networked Information membership meeting, held in Washington, D.C., this week. Several scholars involved in the HPC competition reported on their supercomputing experiences. Among them were Gregory Crane, editor in chief of the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, and David Bamman, a computational linguist with the project, which has been experimenting with computer-enhanced ways...

Just weeks ago Blackboard said it would appeal its patent battle against rival Desire2Learn all the way to the Supreme Court, but on Tuesday both companies announced that they have settled their epic legal battle.

The companies issued a joint press release announcing that they had reached an agreement that will settle all lawsuits between them, ending litigation that began more than three years ago when Blackboard sued its rival, asserting that it had violated the company's patent on education software. Apparently both sides will license each other's technology, meaning that technically neither side won the dispute. The terms of the agreement are confidential, according to the statement, and as part of the deal, both sides agreed not to talk about the issue publicly.

So a vocal and divisive fight has ended in silence.

Actually, one Blackboard official, Ray Henderson, posted a blog...

France will spend $1.1-billion on digitizing its archives, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced on Monday, in an effort to maintain control over its literary history. But the investment doesn't mean France is dismissing collaborating with Google, The New York Times reported.

An announcement earlier this year that the French government was working with Google to digitize its history angered the French publishing community and raised questions about entrusting its culture to an American company.

"We won't let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big, or American it is," Mr. Sarkozy said, according to The New York Times.

The president of France's National Library, however, said the announcement didn't rule out working with Google, adding that the government would have to find private-sector partners to help pay for the project.

A ...

Washington, D.C.—Don't de-accession those print materials yet. The digital research library is not quite ready for prime time, according to Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University, and Geneva Henry, executive director of Rice's Center for Digital Scholarship.

At a session of the membership meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information, held here yesterday and today, Ms. Spiro and Ms. Henry talked about research they have done into how close we are to all-digital (or even mostly digital) research libraries. To find out, they did case studies of several libraries founded since 2000, including facilities at the University of California at Merced, Olin College, Soka University of America, California State University-Channel Islands, and New York University's Abu Dhabi campus.

Signs of the digital shift are everywhere. E-resources expenditures "are only...

Flat World Knowledge Inc. on Monday announced an effort to make its electronic textbooks more accessible to blind students and those with other disabilities.

The upstart textbook publisher, which makes its textbooks free online but hopes students will purchase print copies or related study aids, said it will form a partnership with a nonprofit group to offer its titles in formats that are easy to use by electronic Braille devices or by software that reads texts aloud. The group is called Bookshare.

Though Bookshare already works with many major publishers of novels and other texts, Flat World is the first textbook publisher to partner with the group, said Betsy Beaumon, a vice president and general manager of Bookshare.

The move comes just months after the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind sued Arizona State University for using e-books on Amazon's...

You've heard of MIT OpenCourseWare. The free Web site FinalsClub.org, which pays Harvard students to share lecture notes online, piggybacks on that open-content genre — with one twist. Harvard gets little power over what's published.

The two-year-old startup derives its name from the Ivy League university's final clubs. As The Boston Globe wrote Sunday in a lengthy article featuring FinalsClub.org, these are "insular all-male social clubs" known for stashing files of old lectures.

"And just like the Final Clubs' files, the site serves as a crutch for students who haven't bothered to attend class or take their own notes," The Globe said.

Companies selling lecture notes are nothing new. The phenomenon sometimes lands them in court, as happened in the case of a University of Florida professor's battle with Einstein's Notes.

But the difference is that FinalsClub.org doesn't charge. It's ...

A new report from a business-financed public-policy organization says that traditional colleges and universities can learn from for-profit colleges' approach to teaching.

The Committee for Economic Development's new report makes recommendations for how the government, colleges, and universities should encourage online education. One of its chapters, titled "Lessons From For-Profit Institutions of Higher Education," summarizes the strengths of for-profit colleges' teaching methods.

For example, the report says of for-profit colleges, "If disruptive technology allows them to serve new markets, or serve markets more efficiently and effectively in order to profit, then they are more likely to utilize them." It cites e-texts as an example of a disruptive technology for-profit colleges were quick to use.

Some for-profit institutions emphasize instructor training in a way that more...