The owner of a new Web site wants his search engine to become an easy way to comb through the open courseware of many colleges.

About 1,800 courses, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are indexed on OCW Search for starters, says the operator, Pierre Far. Polling on the Web site, which went online this week, will determine what courses to add next; those at Stanford University are in the lead, and Mr. Far plans to add them in the next few days.

Mr. Far, who is not affiliated with a college, said he created OCW Search after looking for  online material for statistics. He browsed open-courseware Web sites and downloaded some courses, finding some that were useful and others that weren't.

 "This combination of having to browse each university's course collection separately and then having to read through the contents of each course before finding those directly relevant is...

The fragmented world of open courseware should be transformed into "a worldwide resource that's very clear who should use what," Bill Gates said in a speech on Wednesday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Microsoft founder praised MIT as being "at the forefront" in open courseware, adding that he has taken many of the institution's OpenCourseWare classes. But he said some problems have yet to be solved in open courseware, such as how to make courses across campuses easier to find and how to best use interactive features.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is looking at how to help support innovation in open courseware, he said. "What's been done so far has had very modest funding. This is an area we need more resources, more bright minds, and certainly one that I want to see how the foundation could make a contribution to this."

The foundation announced $12.9-million...

Leah Wescott believes that higher education can improve people's lives, but sometimes it can be maddening.

At 4 a.m. one June night, she found a way to vent. Ms. Wescott pulled out her laptop and wrote four pages of Onion-esque satirical headlines by the time the sun came up. Two days later, she bought a domain name, and her satirical Web site, The Cronk of Higher Education, was born.

"I have a lot of meetings, I have a pen, and I have snark," Ms. Wescott wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. "That's my recipe for satire."

"Leah Wescott," a nom de plume, is an instructor and student-affairs administrator at a private university in the Northeast. She creates the Web site's content with two other writers. Inspiration comes from their day-to-day lives.

On Wednesday morning, for example, Ms. Wescott sat through a staff meeting "in which a dozen professionals debated over the...

Middlebury College has announced a partnership that will create online language programs for pre-college students.

The small Vermont institution will invest $4 million—a 40-percent stake—in Middlebury Interactive Languages; their partner in the venture will be the educational-technology company K12.

Language professors from Middlebury, which has about 2,400 students, will work with K12 to create and manage the content of the Web-based language classes. The first courses will be beginner French and Spanish for high-school students, set to be released this summer.

The college believes the project could "revolutionize the way languages are taught and learned in the United States" by allowing students to start learning languages at a much earlier age, said Ronald D. Liebowitz, president of Middlebury College, in a video available on the university's Web site.

"There is a huge language...

A new survey has found that many communications scholars lack confidence in their knowledge of copyright laws in relation to their research.

On Thursday, American University's Center for Social Media and the International Communication Association released a survey of ICA members titled "Clipping Our Own Wings: Copyright and Creativity in Communication Research." The e-mail survey—to which about 8 percent of ICA members, or 387, responded—found that nearly half of all communications scholars were not confident about their knowledge of copyright laws. The survey also found that nearly a third avoided research subjects or questions because of that lack of knowledge, and a fifth abandoned research that was already under way because of copyright worries.

The report's authors say that the abandoned research is perhaps the most important part of the study because it results in unrealized...

Seton Hill University, a liberal-arts institution in Pennsylvania with more than 2,100 students, announced a program on Tuesday that offers an iPad to every full-time student.

Distribution will begin in the fall. Incoming freshmen will also receive a 13-inch MacBook laptop, which Seton Hill will replaced after two years; current sophomores, juniors, and seniors can opt into that program.

The iPad distribution marks the beginning of the university's Griffin Technology Advantage program, which will also include a completely wireless campus, quadrupled bandwith, and faculty training in advanced technologies. Students will be charged an additional $500 per semester in fees for the new technology program, and the university says it has absorbed the cost of the iPads.

"The iPad will lighten the backpacks of Seton Hill University students," said JoAnne W. Boyle, president of Seton Hill...

A study at Arizona State University has found that students had lower reading comprehension of scrolling online material than they did of print-like versions.

The report, "To Scroll or Not to Scroll: Scrolling, Working Memory Capacity, and Comprehending Complex Texts," described how two groups, of 20 students each, wrote essays after reading materials in either in print-like or scrolling formats. Those given the scrolling versions to read had poorer comprehension of the material.

It is harder to keep track of where information is located within an online document versus the more-apparent page markers in a print-style text, said Christopher A. Sanchez, a co-author of the study. He is an assistant professor of applied psychology at Arizona State.

But the scrolling interface of online documents had little impact on the students in the study with high working-memory capacity, or a good...

A student at the University of Chicago says an innocent status update on Facebook led to an investigation by university police.

Joseph Dozier, a third-year political-science and classics student, posted a comment on his Facebook page on December 6 saying "Dreamt that I assassinated John Mearsheimer for a secret Israeli organization—there was a hidden closet with Nazi paraphanelia [sic]. Haha! :-)" Mr. Mearsheimer, who has been one of Mr. Dozier's instructors, is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

Mr. Dozier told The Chronicle that his post referred to the professor's book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which proposes that a coalition of people and groups guide U.S. policy toward pro-Israel stances. The student said his post was making fun of criticism of the book, which discusses the lobby's power and says it has unintentionally harmed Israel....

Wikipedia is advocating for users to add videos to its online encyclopedia, which could give academics a new forum in which to share their multimedia work.

Three nonprofit groups -- Miro, Mozilla Drumbeat, and the Open Video Alliance -- began a campaign this month with support from the Wikimedia Foundation encouraging users to upload videos onto the Web site. Wikipedia asks that videos be short, under 100MB, and comply with the encyclopedia's rules.

Ben Moskowitz, general director of the Open Video Alliance, said he had talked with a number of universities interested in adding their content to the Web site or participating in data mobbing -- using small groups to reach a measured goal such as improving a specific area of Wikipedia. He declined to give names, saying talks are still preliminary.

Mr. Moskowitz said institutions could also see the videos as a beneficial way to teach...

Lee Sheldon wanted to find a way to engage students in his class on multiplayer-game design at Indiana University at Bloomington. So, the assistant professor thought, why not use the course's subject?

Mr. Sheldon's class introduces students to design elements and production requirements for online games. He decided last semester to format the course itself as a multiplayer game.

Class time is spent completing quests (such as presentations of games or research), fighting monsters (taking tests or quizzes), and "crafting" (writing game-analysis papers and a video-game concept document). The 40-person class is divided into six "zones," named after influential game designers, in which students complete group tasks.

Mr. Sheldon says last semester's students performed a full letter grade better in the course than students had under the traditional approach -- the class average was a B...