Denver -- Plenty of colleges have a presence in Second Life. Pennsylvania State University is taking that a step further. Academic advisers at the university’s online campus are now required to be available for meetings with students in the virtual world every week, a Penn State official said during last week’s Educause conference here.

Students on the real campus get to chat with their advisers face to face. Now online students who never set foot there can do the “exact same thing,” says Shannon Ritter, social-networks adviser for the Penn State World Campus.

Almost the same thing, anyway. Second Life requires users to choose avatars, or graphical representations of themselves. So...

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."

YouTube EDU, the Web site for video channels from universities, has recently added content from institutions in Europe and Israel.

Forty-five colleges and universities from those areas, including the University of Cambridge and distance-learning institutions like the Open University of Catalonia, now have channels on the site.

About 200 American and Canadian institutions also have YouTube EDU channels, where viewers can watch professors' lectures, famous people speaking on campuses, and even half-time antics at major college-football games. The site was launched in March.

On its

How's this for "hounding" diploma mills?

GetEducated.com, an online-learning consumer group, managed to purchase an online M.B.A. for its mascot, a dog named Chester Ludlow.

The Vermont pug earned his tassles by pawing over $499 to Rochville University, which offers "distance learning degrees based on life and career experience," according to a news release from GetEducated. He got back a package from a post-office box in Dubai that contained a diploma and transcripts, plus a certificate of distinction in finance and another purporting to show membership in the student council.

GetEducated.com belives Chester is the first dog to get a diploma for life experience. But his bow-wow...

Students at far-flung campuses can now participate simultaneously during lectures with the push of a button.

The University of British Columbia recently completed a trial of a new satellite polling system by i>clicker, which sells student-response systems. The new system allowed students on three campuses, all part of the university's Distributed Undergraduate Medical Program, to respond to questions in a simulcast lecture . I>clicker hopes to make the product widely available by January 2010.

Clickers allow teachers to electronically “poll the audience” (as in TV game shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?). They first appeared in classrooms about five years ago as a means to increases student participation in large lecture courses. The company claims that this is...

Madison, Wis. – OK, maybe backlash is too strong a word.
 
But some distance-learning leaders are starting to raise questions and concerns about President Obama’s new online-education proposal, a great course giveaway that would pump $500-million into freely available Web-based courses.
 
Are new courses needed? Would students get help working through them? Would their privacy be protected as they use the material? All of those issues came up here during last week’s Annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning.
 
Janet Poley, president of the American Distance Education Consortium, argued that course development wasn’t a “terribly high...

Students will be able to take a lot more online courses at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee this fall. But they will pay more for the privilege, according to an article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The university will charge as much as $275 per course on top of regular tuition.

The university now is offering 90 more online classes than it did last fall, for a total of 366 online courses, the newspaper says. It also reported complaints from one student about the extra fee for an online class, because he did not feel he had the resources to wait a year for that class to be offered on campus again.

But the newspaper quoted the university's provost, Rita Cheng, as justifying the fees by saying that students were paying for the convenience of taking classes early. "I don't...

Making a class presentation. Joining a fraternity. Rising from freshman to senior.

They all come with the traditional college experience, and you’ll find all of them referenced in the National Survey of Student Engagement.

But what about online students?

A new study from the University of Phoenix probes how the growing ranks of e-learners understand – or don’t understand – the widely used annual survey. Its question: Can the report, known as “Nessie,” capture the experience of students who don’t set foot in a classroom?

Yes and no, depending on the learning model, says Phoenix.

Some distance educators cheered last year’s Nessie, the

St. Louis — Gail Weatherly has gotten phone calls from women near tears over their situations.

They’re taking care of kids. They can’t afford child care. They can’t make it to regular classes. And they don’t know about online learning, said Ms. Weatherly, distance-education coordinator at Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacogdoches, Tex.

Ms. Weatherly hopes such women could one day benefit from a project being developed by a scattered group of women involved in distance education.

Their work centers on a social-networking Web site that would allow women to share information about online education and serve as mentors to one another. It’s called the Collaborative Online Resource Environment for Women (Core4women), a still-in-the-works effort that Ms. Weatherly and her...

An American Association of University Professors official blasted the business model of online education in a recent interview with Alabama’s Times Daily.

“The economic underpinning of a lot of online education is that it amounts to slave labor,” said Martin Snyder, director of the AAUP’s Department of External Relations as well as its Planning and Development Office.

The context for the quote was a story dealing in part with problems faced by faculty in online education, such as compensation and workload. Most who teach online courses “are part-time professors who can’t get full-time work and are forced into taking a lot of part-time positions in order to try to make an equitable...