Universities in Japan and Canada unveiled courses by cellphone last year, and now, in the midst of National Distance Learning Week, the United States has, too.

The Louisiana Community and Technical College System announced yesterday the creation of LCTCSOnline, a new program built in collaboration with AT&T and Pearson Custom Solutions, a branch of the publishing and education company.

Beginning in January, students can register on a single Web site for online courses offered — at $63 per credit hour — by any community college in Louisiana. And they’ll be able to complete their coursework on desktops, laptops, or mobile phones.

“The top barriers for students in obtaining their degrees are geographic access, cost of higher education, and scheduling conflicts,” said Joe D. May, the college system’s president, in a written statement. “We’re excited to be able to bring a greater...

To comply with the newly reauthorized Higher Education Act, colleges have to verify the identity of each of their online students. Several tools can help them do that, including the Securexam Remote Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree view around students, and Kryterion’s Webassessor, which lets human proctors watch students on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.

Now colleges have a new option to show the government that they’ll catch cheating in distance education. Acxiom Corporation and Moodlerooms announced this month that they have integrated the former’s identity-verification system, called FactCheck-X, into the latter’s free, open-source course-management system, known as Moodle.

“The need to know that the student taking a test online is in fact the actual one enrolled in the class continues to be a concern for all distance-education programs,” ...

Ecology and evolutionary biology can lead graduate students to far-off places: Alaska, Mexico, northern Michigan. But qualifying exams — the dreaded “prelims” — happen just the same.

To prepare, seven doctoral students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor held weekly study sessions on Skype, the Internet calling service.

“Without this technology, we could not have bridged the geographical gaps,” Liz Wason, a student who spent the summer at the university’s biological station in Pellston, Mich., said in a written statement. She called Skype “an exciting, real-time way of staying connected and preparing for this important step in our graduate careers.” —Sara Lipka

A law professor at Harvard University has filed a counterclaim against the Recording Industry Association of America, arguing that a statute it is using to sue Joel Tenenbaum, a student at Boston University, is unconstitutional, Computerworld reports.

The RIAA had sued Mr. Tenenbaum for violating the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 — by allegedly copying and distributing copyrighted songs. But according to the law professor, Charles Nesson, that criminal statute cannot be applied to a civil case in federal court.

Mr. Nesson is challenging both the RIAA’s use of the law and the law itself. It gives the RIAA prosecutorial authority and “unbridled discretion” to sue millions of people, he argues, according to Computerworld.

This challenge to the RIAA, the magazine says, is broader than many recent ones that focus on the group’s means of...

No presidential candidate has yet courted the robot vote, but a six-foot-tall humanoid with a square head, flashing eyes, and a Barack Obama T-shirt is campaigning this week at the University of Florida.

Three engineering students — Camilo Buscaron, a sophomore; Bryan Hood, a junior; and Andres Vargas, a graduate student — built ObamaBot in two weeks with spare parts and $250 of their own money, according to The Independent Florida Alligator, the university’s campus newspaper.

The robot is operated by remote control. It stands on a Segway-style powered wheelbase and can rotate 360 degrees, as well as wave its arms (and the campaign signs attached to them).

“We’re trying to get people aware of the early voting and get people to vote who wouldn’t have voted otherwise,” Mr. Hood told the Alligator. “We all know that robots represent change and the future.”

Mr. Hood hopes to endow ...

Students who share files illegally won’t be able to do so for long at Bowling Green State University.

This month the university started blocking the Internet connections of students caught downloading copyrighted files on peer-to-peer programs like Limewire, BitTorrent, and Gnutella, The BG News, the university’s student newspaper, reported this week. For first-time offenders, the suspension lasts 24 hours. For second and third violations, it increases to two weeks and the rest of the semester, respectively.

Bowling Green announced the new policy in e-mail messages and fliers, the campus paper said, but some students were taken aback by their Internet bans.

“Lots were upset and yelling obscenities at first, but now a lot have realized what they were doing was illegal and have removed the programs,” Jordan Jones, a computer consultant at the university, told the newspaper. ...

Where a top administrator seems to endorse a presidential candidate in an e-mail message to students and then denies having sent that message, suspicions of hacking follow.

Elizabeth City State University, in North Carolina, is investigating “the possibility of an unauthorized use” of its e-mail account for Jean M. Sims, vice chancellor of human resources and payroll, according to a written statement from the chancellor, Willie J. Gilchrist.

The Daily Advance, a local newspaper, reported that a message appeared to have been sent from Ms. Sims’s account on September 16 urging students to support Sen. Barack Obama for president. “If you can’t register two voters, talk to two people who may be on the fence, or a McCain supporter, and sway them to become an Obama supporter,” the Advance quotes the e-mail message as saying. “Barack the vote!”

Ms. Sims has denied sending the message.

A mobile computer that reads wireless transmitters, allowing blind people to navigate a city, could serve seeing pedestrians as well, students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor say.

The students have developed Talking Points, an urban-orientation system, to give users context about their surroundings.

“If it caught on, this would be an effective way to tag the whole world,” Jason Stewart, a master’s student at Ann Arbor, said in a written statement. “Anyone with a reader could use it to find out more information about where they are.”

The system’s mobile computers, about the size of paperback books, read Bluetooth tags — on city landmarks and other points of interest — and convey information visually or aloud. Members of the Talking Points community can edit that information, which is stored in an online database.

The project is similar to others — including on...

Class notes are valuable, and a new site is paying students to post them.

On Knetwit, users can create profiles and upload notes for “Koin,” the site’s currency, which is redeemable for water bottles, Frisbees, electronics, or cash. If another user downloads your notes, you score more Koin.

Benjamin Wald and Dean (Tyler) Jenks — two of the country’s “best young entrepreneurs,” according to Business Week — dropped out of Babson College to start the company. Their site moved out of beta testing last week and now features students’ uploaded notes, diagrams, and book-chapter outlines, as well as assignments (like “Is Gay Marriage Ever Morally Permissible,” for an ethics class at Florida Southern College) and quizzes (including several for a business-statistics class at the Georgia Institute of Technology).

Knetwit combines information sharing and social networking much like I Slept...

College seniors know that prospective employers check their Facebook and MySpace pages; now high-school seniors have evidence that college admissions officers browse them as well.

One in 10 admissions officers has looked at an applicant’s social-networking profile, according to a report released yesterday by the test-prep company Kaplan Inc. Of those who peeked, 38 percent said what they saw had a negative effect on their evaluation of the student. Fewer — a quarter — said the effect was positive.

Admissions officers’ decisions to look or not are mostly up to them, Kaplan said. “The vast majority of schools we surveyed said they have no official policies or guidelines in place regarding visiting applicants’ social-networking Web sites — nor are they considering plans to develop them,” Jeff Olson, executive director of research for Kaplan’s test-prep and admissions division, said in ...