Students will be able to take a lot more online courses at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee this fall. But they will pay more for the privilege, according to an article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The university will charge as much as $275 per course on top of regular tuition.

The university now is offering 90 more online classes than it did last fall, for a total of 366 online courses, the newspaper says. It also reported complaints from one student about the extra fee for an online class, because he did not feel he had the resources to wait a year for that class to be offered on campus again.

But the newspaper quoted the university's provost, Rita Cheng, as justifying the fees by saying that students were paying for the convenience of taking classes early. "I don't see that as a penalty," Ms. Cheng told the Journal-Sentinel. "I see it as an option students have if they...

When I wrote last week that the American Chemistry Society was taking most of its print journals into digital form to reduce costs, I couldn’t help wondering if the society would pass the savings on to university scientists and libraries. (I also used the phrase “digital-only,” which was wrong. There will still be print; more on that in a moment.)

It turns out they will, after a fashion. The society sent out an announcement today saying that if institutional libraries cancel their print subscriptions and move to Web-based editions by September 30, they will get a rebate — in a year. Specifically, they will get a coupon equal to 30 percent of their 2009 print purchase price, and they can apply that to their 2010 Web edition renewals. So the libraries get a break if they renew their subscriptions for next year.

But if they want to keep both digital and print subscriptions, libraries...

The American Chemical Society, which publishes several dozen academic journals, is moving to end print editions and produce journals only online. The move was noted by the journal Nature in late June after someone sent it a copy of a memo from a chemical-society official, but unfortunately you can’t read the complete report unless you pay a fee to subscribe or buy one-time access.

And that’s precisely the issue—making money online, and losing it in print—that drove the chemistry society’s decision, according to a recent story in Ars Technica, which you can read in full, at no charge. The Web site notes that the journal publisher said, in the memo, that “printing and distribution costs now exceed revenues from print journals.” Plus, scientists seem happier reading online, the society thinks. So this summer, all but three of its journals will become digital-only. No word on whether ...

The LA Scholars program is starting an effort to place undergraduates from Los Angeles Southwest College into internship positions in the video-game industry. “That it’s video games is a popular lure,” said Rebecca M. Goldberg, co-director of career and welfare development for the South Bay Center for Community Development, a program sponsor. She points out that the game industry is local, so there are opportunities for local students.

The program, also supported by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and LA Youth at Work, receives money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 as part of the recent federal stimulus bill.

“We saw about 600 students in our initial screening process for the LA Scholar program,” said Elmer A. Bugg, dean of work-force development and corporate relations at the college. “We’ll probably place about 100 students in the video-game industry.” ...

Of the four universities linked originally by the proto-Internet in 1969, two of them were part of the University of California system: the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara campuses. Now, as the system grapples with a staggering budget crisis that might close institutions and forever alter what’s considered one of the crown jewels of public education, a proposal comes suggesting that salvation lies in going online.

A new cyber-campus “would have selective admissions; tuition somewhere between community college and the on-campus UC price, part-time and ‘anytime’ options and lectures by the best faculty from the entire UC system,” wrote Christopher Edley Jr., dean of the law school at the system’s Berkeley campus, in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. “Our online students might miss the keg parties, but they would have the same world-class faculty, UC graduate student instructors, and...

The number of colleges offering applications for their students’ iPhones seems to grow every day. Campus maps, class schedules, and bus routes are some common ones. Now the Medical College of Georgia is pushing apps into new territory: health science education.

Starting today, student with iPhones or iPod Touches can download a calculator that will let budding opticians or ophthalmologists determine intermediate and near vision prescriptions as well as the proper lens curvatures of glasses or contacts. Students can also get an app that determines proper cholesterol levels, another that lists medical abbreviations, and a device called the Medmath Medical Calculator — which churns through 135 common medical calculations, such as cardiac output, Apgar score, and the Abbreviated Mental Test score.

The medical college worked with Terriblyclever Design, a software company founded by...

The campus: a haven of green quadrangles and footpaths winding around academic buildings, largely inaccessible to car traffic—and to Google Maps’ “Street View” feature. It has been busy providing closeup photos—taken from cars—of buildings around the world.

Now through the genius of high technology—mounting a camera on a bicycle or pedicab—campuses are within Google’s reach. Today eSchool News reports that that pedal-powered vehicles have been trawling the grounds at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of San Diego, and the California State University at San Diego.

The streetscape service has raised hackles and concerns about privacy in other countries. Germany asked the company to erase faces, house and license place numbers from photographs, and Greece rejected Google’s request to photographs city streets until it received more reassurances about privacy.

The move...

A Tech Therapy listener wrote in to Warren Arbogast and Scott Carlson recently to ask what to do about a boss who is, shall we say, out of it.

“What one should do with a boss or supervisor that is out of date, otherwise known as a dinosaur? I have observed mass confusion due to the fact that the ‘manager’ is incompetent and clueless to new technology and terminologies. He orders the wrong equipment and places all responsibility on people other than himself. He refuses to move forward and has been phoning it in since I have worked here….”

The Tech Therapists offer some advice about going to human resources and going over the boss’s head — and they also raise a contrarian point: Maybe your “dinosaur boss” is the boss for a reason.

In his commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania on Monday, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and chief executive, had words of wisdom for graduates: Use live search.

Not Microsoft Live Search, of course. Mr. Schmidt meant a different competitor—the real world.

“Turn off your computer,” he told the Class of 2009. “You’re actually going to have to turn off your phone and discover all that is human around us. Nothing beats holding the hand of your grandchild as he walks his first steps.”

The complete speech is available on YouTube. But Mr. Schmidt, whose company owns the video site, would probably recommend that you don’t waste a lot of time watching it. —Josh Fischman

Microsoft, a company always interested in young software developers, likes to encourage them to tackle real-world problems. (They have to use Microsoft products to do so, of course.) That’s the goal of its worldwide student competition, the Imagine Cup, and the U.S. winners were announced earlier this month. The top three places went to teams with students from four different colleges and one high school.

The winner was Team MultiPoint Web, three brothers from Oregon who attend Georgia State University, Portland Community College, and Tigard High School. They built a set of free or inexpensive Web-based learning activities that allow multiple students to use one computer at the same time.

The first runner-up was also the first all-women team to reach the finals in the cup’s seven-year history. From DePauw University, Team MangoBunnies developed software that helps HIV and AIDS...