Washington, D.C. – We’ve all heard about university-driven open-education projects like MIT OpenCourseWare. These days, though, the push to freely publish course materials and research papers online is increasingly coming from students.

And some of them are bumping into a barrier: their own professors.

This weekend, Adi Kamdar and Parker Phinney joined campus activists from around the country at the Students for Free Culture conference here. Mr. Kamdar belongs to a Yale University student group campaigning for an open-access policy that would make scholarly papers freely available in an online repository (like the one at Harvard University, which has an opt-out rule). Mr. Phinney is prodding Dartmouth College to develop an open-courseware site for lecture videos and other materials (like the ones at Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

They're both idealistic sophomores ...

IBM announced plans on Wednesday to make its software available to colleges via a Web-based "cloud" service that the company says will make it easier for professors to incorporate technology into their classes.

But is the splashy cloud announcement corporate puff?

As IBM describes it, the company is working initially with 20 colleges to help them use software for things like analyzing data and building Web sites. By hosting it remotely in the "cloud," IBM will allow professors the convenience of logging in online to work with the software free without having to install and maintain it themselves. The hope is that by making it easier, many more will start to use the technology.

"It's going to be used by medical schools, it's going to be used by business schools -- all kinds of disciplines are using our software today," says Mark Hanny, an IBM vice president.

But after perusing the IBM...

Rich Pickett is in tears.

The San Diego State University chief information officer has been flying people and supplies back and forth to Haiti since last week. Now, as he talks to a reporter by phone from Florida before stepping into “the bird” for yet another flight, it’s the image of one child that leaves him struggling to speak. 

He had taken down some balls on one flight. A fellow relief worker distributed one to children. “She noticed that the boy who had it, dropped it,” Mr. Pickett says. “And she turned to look and noticed the reason he dropped it is because his arms were gone. So it bounced on the ground. And he used his feet and just juggled with it.”

San Diego State U. Rich Pickett (right) is using his mandatory furlough days to fly people and supplies back and forth to Haiti.

It's one of many moving moments from a journey that began when Mr. Pickett asked...

Thomas McNeal wants students to become "geohistorians."

In the latest effort to turn cellphones into learning tools, his Geo-Historian project at Kent State University plans to put students to work creating multimedia content about historic sites.

The technology behind this idea is a program that ties the information to a bar code. Then you could leave that bar code on, say, the memorial commemorating the 1970 Kent State shootings. Visitors could get access to the student-produced audio and video clips by scanning the bar code with their cellphone cameras.

"All of the students have it now," says Mr. McNeal, director of the desktop-videoconferencing project at Kent State's Research Center for Educational Technology. "Instead of being afraid of it, we’re going to show teachers and parents that they can embrace this."

Mr. McNeal is particularly interested in working with elementary- and...

When customers visit Amazon.com, the Web site lets them sample parts of books for free. Some open-education advocates think this try-it-before-you-buy-it idea offers an answer to one of the biggest questions facing the movement to publish course materials free online: What business model can support giving away your content?

New research takes a close look at what happened when one institution, Brigham Young University, experimented with granting free access to the content of some of its distance-education courses. The study examined the cost of opening up those materials and the impact their publication had on paid enrollments, a concern for institutions worried that giving away free courses could cannibalize their ranks of paying students.

The data suggest they needn’t worry. Opening the courses “provided neither a large positive marketing effect that boosted enrollments nor a large...

The Maryland Higher Education Commission has decided not to reconsider its decision to bar University of Maryland University College from offering an online community-college administration degree to in-state residents, The Sun of Baltimore reports.

The commission had ruled that the program would duplicate a similar offering at Morgan State University. It was an apparently unprecedented decision in online education, one some observers think may have repercussions in other states. State university leaders had urged the commission to reconsider the matter.

Colleges saw a 17 percent increase in online enrollment, with more than one in four students taking at least one online course in the fall of 2008, according to the findings of an annual survey published on Tuesday by the Sloan Consortium.

The growth rate eclipsed last year's 12-percent increase and dwarfed the 1.2 percent growth rate of the overall higher-education student population. The report, which has become a widely cited benchmark of distance learning, found a total of more than 4.6-million online students overall. That's up from about 3.9 million the previous year.

Despite this surge, the data suggest that not enough institutions have taken online education into account as they conduct planning around issues like how to deal with budget cuts and space shortages, says A. Frank Mayadas, a special adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

"They have to wake up and begin to...

Bill Gates praises the potential of online learning today in his annual letter about the priorities of his foundation, which has a $34-billion endowment.

The Microsoft Corporation chairman says he's a fan of the movement to publish course materials free online. He seems especially impressed with online systems that gauge students' knowledge and give them specific feedback, a specialty of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. But while he acknowledges the work of open-content aggregators like Academic Earth, Mr. Gates wants to see better organization of the vast course materials on the Web.

"The foundation has made a few grants to drive online learning, but we are just at the start of this work," Gates writes. "So far, technology has hardly changed formal education at all. But a lot of people, including me, think this is the next place where the Internet will...

The University of Rochester spent about $200,000 to get an institutional repository up and running in 2003. The hope was that professors would rush to fill it with the fruits of their research.

For the most part, they didn’t.

The problem: The repository was a faceless digital container that failed to highlight individual professors or help them manage their article-writing process.

Now, after studying professors’ habits, library officials hope they’ve solved those problems by creating new, freely available open-source institutional repository software. The idea is to get professors and graduate students to contribute their papers and dissertations to the repository by combining it with a Web-based workspace that accomplishes lots of other stuff they need to write up that research. Stuff like creating folders, managing files, and collaborating with colleagues. Also, they get to showcase the...

"The Horizon Report," an annual guide to tech trends, comes out next week. And it’s predicting a new technology king: open content.

After failing to make last year's “Technologies to Watch” list, the open-content movement now joins mobile computing as the two trends most likely to enter mainstream learning in the next year, says the report, from the New Media Consortium and Educause.

“Far more than a collection of free online course materials, the open-content movement is a response to the rising costs of education, the desire for access to learning in areas where such access is difficult, and an expression of student choice about when and how to learn,” the report says.

When it comes to mobile devices, the report notes that gadgets like smartphones and netbooks are already taking hold on many campuses, whether as tools for fieldwork or storage for reference materials. But the authors...