Kaplan University has added to the growing pile of data and anecdotes that suggest that soaring gas prices and a sinking economy are fueling a boom in distance education. Many institutions, as the Chronicle reported last month, say their online summer enrollments have jumped significantly, compared with last summer’s, and that fuel prices are a key factor in the increase.

The university, part of Kaplan Higher Education Corporation, which serves tens of thousands of students both on campuses and online, just released the results of a survey of about 3,500 online students. Sixty-six percent of them reported that the economy played a role in their decision to go back to school. Thirty-nine percent of them said the main reason they choose an online university was to save money on gas. Nearly a quarter of the survey respondents estimated that they were saving between $500 and $999 by not...

Higher education may be the number one customer for fast Wi-Fi networks in the coming decade, according to a new business analysis. The company Allied Business Intelligence says in the new report that colleges will be early adaptors of a wireless network standard called 802.11n, which speeds data several times faster than do many networks today. It also allows for more access points while reducing the chances of interference.

Universities have great demands for bandwidth, as professors put more material on video and students expect to be able to download it easily and quickly to their laptops. A commonly-used current wireless standard, 802.11g, doesn’t have enough capacity to allow students to do what they want—stream lots of video, for instance—as fast as they want it. So anticipating future demand, many institutions are building networks to the “n” standard. It’s expensive, the...

A federal appeals court has given the company that manages a set of lucrative technology patents for the University of Rochester another chance to pursue its infringement claims against Microsoft. The ruling reverses a lower-court finding that said the university-based inventors intended to mislead the patent office.

The patents cover a technique for computer-driven printing technology known as Blue Noise Mask. A company called Research Corporation Technologies, in Arizona, has the rights to commercialize the patents from the university and has collected tens of millions of dollars in royalties for the university by licensing the patents to companies.

In a ruling released late last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said a district-court judge in Arizona had erred when he

Bragging rights for having the best library-science program in the United States and Canada — if a market-research-firm survey limited to 75 universities confers bragging rights — belongs to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Illinois’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science got the most votes in Research and Markets’ annual survey of academic libraries. The company, which is based in Ireland, asked survey participants to list the top five academic library-science programs in North America, on the basis of scholarly output and effectiveness in preparing professional librarians for practice.

After the Illinois school, the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill tied for second place.

In addition to the reputation of teaching programs, the survey asked some questions about libraries themselves. How much do...

Campus computers are energy hogs. Whether they are dorm room devices or large college data centers, computer processors suck in huge amounts of electricity and give off a lot of heat. What is an energy-conscious (and budget-conscious) CIO to do?

The California State University-Monterey Bay has some ideas. On their education and technology roundtable, Ready2Net, which is both Webcast and broadcast on TV, they tackle computing, energy and the environment.

Casey Green, founder of the Campus Computing project, moderates a panel that includes CIOs from Washington State, San Diego State, Bryant Universities, as well as executives and specialists in high-tech energy conservation from Pacific Gas and Electric and Cisco Systems.

Another place to find useful ideas is The Chronicle’s latest Tech Therapy podcast, “How Green Is Your IT?” Tune in, turn on, and drop your big carbon footprint....

With a tool from Google that tracks searches, researchers from Ball State University have uncovered a few patterns in the way that consumers search for health information.

The report, released yesterday and available free from the university, shows that the time of year and the health problems of the rich and famous influence what health topics people research on the Internet, according to the investigators from the university’s Center for Media Design.

The researchers used Google Trends, a tool that tracks public searches and holds data going back to 2004.

Information on diet and exercise peaked around New Year’s Day, says Peter Ellery, one of the researchers. That’s not shocking: it’s New Year’s resolution time.

The researchers also learned that illnesses reported by celebrities led to more searches about such diseases. People in the public eye have always been able to draw ...

If you are planning a lecture on the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, you might want to spruce it up with some free new software. Classroom Presenter, the program that lets professors using a tablet PC write on their electronic slides, and lets student scribble back for real-time feedback, is now available in Chinese. Richard Anderson, the University of Washington computer scientist who has led the development of the program, says more languages are coming. Translation features for multilingual classrooms? That’s a taller order of interactivity. Maybe by the next Olympiad. —Josh Fischman

Can Moodle change the student-professor relationship for the better? The learning environment and course management software just might, and make education more democratic and participatory, says Luke Fernandez, assistant manager of program and technology development at Weber State University, in Utah. He muses on the educational effects of Moodle in a post on Academic Commons.

Mr. Fernandez went to Moodlemoot, a conference of Moodle users, last month in San Francisco. He heard that the software embodies a philosophy, one that emphasizes learning as something accomplished socially, through interacting with peers, rather than through isolated inquiry.

“I wasn’t sure I wanted a philosophy of education built into the software I used in my class,” Mr. Fernandez writes. “After all, what if I subscribed to some other teaching philosophy? Wouldn’t a more agnostic technology be...

When colleges report their computer systems have been breached, the motives of the intruder usually remain murky. Not so at Georgia Highlands College last week. Christopher Fowler, a student, allegedly hacked into the system to change his grades, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

Mr. Fowler was arrested by agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and charged with computer trespassing and unlawful eavesdropping. (He also allegedly broke into the college’s voice-over-Internet telephone system.)

The college administration sent an email to staff and faculty, explaining that a faculty member had noticed unusual activity on his computer account. Someone had apparently logged on to the college system using his identity. That prompted inquiries by the IT department, who—suspecting a breach—called in specialists from the University System of Georgia and Kennesaw State...

More than a year after he was given six months to live, and after 10 months during which he touched millions over the Internet with his last lecture and helped write a best-selling book about life, illness, and hope, Randy Pausch died today, the Associated Press reported. Mr. Pausch, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, was 47.

In September 2006, Mr. Pausch was told that he had incurable pancreatic cancer. His last lecture, at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007, about achieving childhood dreams, drew international attention and was viewed by millions on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet.

It also spawned the book The Last Lecture, written with Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Last month Mr. Zaslow told an audience of college officials at The Chronicle’s Executive...