Soon, online students at Thomas Edison State College won't even have to be online to complete their course work.

Beginning this fall, students at the Trenton-based distance-education institution will have the option of using a 2GB flash drive instead of a course-management system to prepare for and complete their classes.

The flash drives are part of the college's Mobile Learning Initiative, developed after it discovered many of its students -- who were stationed with the military or frequently traveling -- couldn't access a course-management system on a regular basis.

"When you have students who are constantly on the go, online courses can be a challenge," said Matt C. Cooper, an instructional-technology specialist at the college and one of the course designers. “We tried experimenting with a CD-ROM, but it didn't work. They break, they get lost -- it's static media. That offers a lot of...

The nonprofit group Security on Campus issued a news release this week about a U.S. Department of Education ruling that it said held institutions responsible under Title IX for responding to sexual harassment on the Internet. But the department says the ruling does not have those implications.

The ruling came out of the department's Office for Civil Rights in New York, which investigated Hofstra University, after a student complained the institution did not "appropriately address" her complaints about peers who made sexually explicit and sexist comments about her on the now-defunct gossip Web site JuicyCampus.

According to a letter sent to the student's lawyer, Wendy Murphy, who is also a board member of the nonprofit, the office had "jurisdictional authority to investigate this complaint under Title IX," but found "insufficient evidence to conclude that the university failed to...

University libraries have already pushed to make information more widely available by digitizing their archives and special collections -- and now, searching and requesting information from those works may become easier, too.

At least a handful of universities, including the Universities of Chicago and of Texas at Austin, have started using Aeon, an online request and management system developed by Atlas Systems Inc. of Virginia Beach, Va. Librarians say the software eliminates many of the paper forms and records many use to register patrons and keep track of requests.

The new system, which librarians say is the first of its kind, “is going to save a significant amount of time in statistics and filing paperwork," said Catherine Uecker, rare-books manager at the University of Chicago.

With the software, which is hosted in Virginia Beach and accessed by a Web interface, patrons both on ...

For some people, the quick flashes or bright colors of online advertisements can set off seizures in a matter of seconds.

Now researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison have designed the Photosensitive Epilepsy Analysis Tool—or PEAT—a free software tool that will help Web developers design safer Web pages and advertisements.

About one in every 4,000 Americans has photosensitive epilepsy, said Gregg Vanderheiden, director of the university's Trace Center, where the software was developed. A number of things can trigger this kind of seizure, he said, including mouse-over advertisements that cause large sections of a screen to flash quickly and repeatedly, flashes of bright colors (especially red), and certain patterns.

Thanks in part to an incident involving a televised Pokémon clip that aired in Japan in 1997, video-game designers and broadcast directors have already develop...

A two-year battle over copyright infringement between four students and Turnitin, a commerical plagiarism-detection service, came to an apparent end last Friday in a settlement that prohibits either party from taking further legal action.

The high-school students first sued iParadigms, Turnitin's parent company, in 2007 for copyright infringement, saying the company took their papers against their will and then made a profit from them.The students' high schools required them to use the service, which scans papers for plagiarism and then adds them to its database, which students argued could easily be hacked.

But the students and their lawyers were handed two decisions against them -- first from the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., in March 2008 and again this April from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

The Chronicle reported in March 2008 that the...

'Crowdsourcing,' the notion of using the wisdom of the crowd for sites like Wikipedia, could be making its way into academe as a grading method that holds students more accountable.

A professor at Duke University plans to test just that this fall, when she leaves the evaluation of class assignments up to her students, using crowdsourcing to make students responsible for grading each other.

Learning is more than earning an A says Cathy N. Davidson, the professor, who recently returned to teach English and interdisciplinary studies after eight years in administration. But students don't always see it that way. Vying for an A by trying to figure out what a professor wants or through the least amount of work has made the traditional grading scale superficial, she says.

"You've got this real mismatch between the kind of participatory learning that’s happening online and outside of the classroom,...

By this fall, Taylor Vogt could be connecting to thousands of IBM professionals with just a few clicks through his Facebook page.

Through a Facebook application, which IBM plans to offer in a pilot program in the United States this fall, students like Mr. Vogt, a sophomore at Pace University,  can find mentors to give them practical or career advice, or oversee student projects, said Tim Willeford, a spokesman for IBM.

“We have existing mentorship programs within IBM, so it’s a natural extension that we’re trying to connect experts of multiple disciplines to university students,” Mr. Willeford said. “It’s one of the next steps in education.”

Students would log in to an application that would connect them to IBM experts with similar interests, skills, or career goals. Together they could contribute to message boards, create groups, or develop independent projects. Similar mentor programs...

Students could encounter new verification questions when they log onto Blackboard this fall if their college or university chooses to add on the Acxiom Identify-X service.

The service is the latest response to new regulations, created in the wake of the renewal of Higher Education Act, that require colleges to verify that the person enrolled in an online course is the same person who does the course work. The underlying technology has been used in the financial and banking industries, but now it has been adapted for higher education -- in this case, to verify the identity of students who use Blackboard for their courses.

Acxiom's technology relies on a database of public information that is not stored at or collected by the student's institution. The software "periodically and randomly" poses challenge questions. Unlike the challenge questions typically used for bank and e-mail...

Faculty, students, researchers, and librarians can now create archived collections of Web sites through the California Digital Library’s Web Archiving Service -- a way to preserve information on the Web that could otherwise be removed or deleted.

The frequency with which Web pages disappear is an "inherent vulnerability" for faculty and students presenting papers and research, said Tracy Seneca, the library's Web archiving service manager. It's difficult to validate online sources, she said, because cited links die, on average, three or four years after they were created.

"Government information is disappearing at the federal level and at the local level," Ms. Seneca said. "All it takes is taking that document off of one server and it’s gone."

With the service, clients -- which include the University of California -- can act as curators of a collection of Web sites, choosing which...