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 need.” Many online courses have already been created, she pointed out. Why not start from existing material?

Joel Kolberg, a U. of Wisconsin at Milwaukee student, does some of his coursework online. Colleges would get help offering online...

Madison, Wisc.—The University of Illinois at Springfield capped online classes at 20 students each more than a decade ago, concerned that more would burn out professors. But does that limit make sense today?

During a distance-education conference here, Ray Schroeder, a Springfield online-learning guru, raised the prospect that his university and others may have to reexamine online-enrollment restrictions as budget pressures mount.

"Quite a few institutions are going to look at that, to see if they can let in 25, or maybe a few more, students, rather than opening additional sections of classes," said Mr. Schroeder, director of Springfield's Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning.

A class of 25 sounds like a luxury in an environment where an institution like Arizona State University has talked about cramming 1,000 students into lectures. But the volume of one-to-one feedback in online...

In eight hours, these words will disappear.

Well, not quite. But that's the premise behind a new system that makes electronic communications like e-mail messages and Facebook posts "self destruct" after a set period of time.

The University of Washington computer scientists who developed the prototype saw it as a way to maintain privacy in a world where more and more private information is stored on the Internet, beyond our control.

But before you start getting all Mission Impossible on any work e-mails, you might want to check your university's policy on record retention. Lawyers with whom the Washington team has consulted said the prototype, called Vanish, is "ahead of the law in many ways," said Roxana Geambasu, a doctoral student who worked on the project.

"The state university, for example, has these requirements to retain all e-mails," she said. "It's not very clear if using Vanish ...

The Pentagon’s research agency has historically maintained a tight relationship with the computing research community. Civilians may recognize some results: the Internet, personal computing, and high-performance computer graphics, says the University of Washington’s Edward D. Lazowska.

But that relationship “has become less close in recent years,” says Mr. Lazowska, the university’s Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering. The situation dominated a House hearing in 2005 after The New York Times reported that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, had scaled back financing for basic computer-science research at universities and instead was increasing money for projects that are classified or that promise a more immediate payoff.

Now new leaders are taking over the agency. And Mr. Lazowska says “we’re looking forward to restoring” a...

Milwaukee— With a 2-year-old daughter, two jobs, and a stethoscope stashed in the console of his Chevy Blazer, Joel M. Kolberg is one busy working adult.

Homework? The emergency medical technician plunks down his laptop on a checkered tablecloth in the frat-house-style lounge of a Milwaukee ambulance station. It’s as good a place as any to squeeze in late-night posts to one of his occupational-therapy class discussions.

“For a while last year, I wouldn’t go home for like three days,” says the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee graduate student. “I’d go to work. Go to school. Come here. Shower. Go back to work.”

For years, some universities have dreamed of border-defying online programs that vacuum up tuition dollars far beyond local students like Mr. Kolberg. But now a growing number of institutions like Milwaukee are ramping up their efforts to attract working adults in their...

Prosecutors are reaching out to universities that may have been victims of spammers who allegedly culled e-mail addresses from more than 2,000 colleges and bombarded students with messages.

It’s the latest twist in a story that broke in April, when prosecutors announced the indictment of two brothers who allegedly used the University of Missouri computer network in a national spamming operation. The spammers are said to have deployed extracting programs that harvested more than eight million student e-mail addresses.

Martin Manjak, information-security officer at the State University of New York at Albany, said that a “U.S. Department of Justice Victim Notification System” e-mail message he received last week was the “first such notice we had received” from the department. He was one of nearly a dozen people from universities around the country to discuss the notifications in...

Arnold, Md. — If you work at a community college that teaches cybersecurity, it pays to be located in the backyard of a spy agency. Just don’t ask Kelly A. Koermer what’s inside those dark towers at Fort Meade.

“Not sure,” laughs the Anne Arundel Community College administrator as she drives past the National Security Agency’s headquarters at the Maryland base.

She points out other highlights of the restricted region: an employees-only exit off the highway, a sign that warns of military dogs, a large ball-shaped device that she figures is for radar signals. And another area that “must be really important, judging by the barbed wire,” says Ms. Koermer, director of computer technologies at the college.

Community colleges like Anne Arundel want to train people to reach the other side of that fence — legitimately, as workers. With Barack Obama stressing the importance of such colleges ...

Online students are much more likely to drop out of courses than their campus-based peers, according to a new study that confirms earlier research on what has been a longstanding concern in the distance-education industry.

The study, conducted by two researchers from East Carolina University, examined graduate-level online and campus programs in two subjects, business administration and communication sciences and disorders.

In the business-program sample, 43 percent of online students dropped out, compared with just 11 percent of campus students. In the communication program, 23.5 percent of the online students abandoned their studies while just 4 percent of students in bricks-and-mortar classes jumped ship.

The researchers cautioned that their study, published in the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, was limited to selected programs at one research university in...

A prominent Johns Hopkins University laboratory engaged in government cybersecurity research recently suffered its own Internet attack.

The Applied Physics Laboratory, in Laurel, Md., took down its external Web site after finding “penetration from an unwanted source” on the site, according to the Baltimore Sun.

The lab’s engineers and scientists conduct military and space projects, with about 20 percent of the research sponsored by NASA, according to The Sun.

The attackers didn’t breach the lab’s internal network or gain access to classified information, a spokeswoman, Helen Worth, told the newspaper. But Ms. Worth described the intrusion as the most serious to date for a Web site that had previously experienced smaller attacks.

All the site’s computers will be scanned and the site will likely be down for “a couple days” as information-technology officials conduct a review, she ...

Hewlett-Packard’s Jim Vanides has 11 new reasons why tablet PC’s are better for teaching than whiteboards, Smartboards, and overhead projectors.

HP makes the tablets — laptop computers that let you write on their screens with a stylus — so the company has a stake in tempting professors to buy the gadgets.

But Mr. Vanides, who is responsible for HP’s higher-education grants, draws on the experiences of grantees to make his case for the tablet PC and digital projector in a new list on his blog.

He argues that, in contrast with a whiteboard, you don’t have to erase to keep going — helpful for students who aren’t fast note takers. You can also teach while facing your students, the better for managing them. —Marc Parry