A fight between two public universities in Maryland rages on, with state-university leaders now trying to overturn a decision that impeded University of Maryland University College from offering an online program for aspiring community-college administrators to in-state students because it duplicates a program at Morgan State University.

The Maryland Higher Education Commission's October decision gave the historically black Morgan State, which had objected that the duplication would violate civil-rights legal precedents, two years to build an online arm of its own program. It meant that the University of Maryland's University College, a leading player in online education, could provide the program to students everywhere but in the institution's home state.

But the Baltimore Sun reports today that the University System of Maryland's Board of Regents has taken the unusual step of asking ...

It's good for you. No, it's bad for you. It's great! No, it's awful.

It seems like every week there's a new study about whether or not the sky is falling because of Facebook and other Web sites of its ilk. Now the University of New Hampshire offers new research that falls squarely in the sky-is-not-falling category, at least not when it comes to the impact of social media on students' grades.

A survey of 1,127 University of New Hampshire students pursuing various majors found no link between how much time they spend Facebooking, tweeting, and YouTubing and how well they do in college.

The breakdown: 63 percent of heavy social-media users got high grades, compared with 65 percent of light users. The findings held up for academic slouches, too. Thirty-seven percent of heavy users got lower grades, compared with 35 percent of light users.

The university's message: "Parents worried that ...

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is closing a grant program that financed a series of high-profile university software projects, leaving some worried about a vacuum of support for open-source ventures.

Mellon’s decade-old Research in Information Technology program, or RIT, helped bankroll a catalog of freely available software that includes Sakai, a course-management system used by Stanford University and the University of Michigan; Kuali, a financial-management program recently rolled out at Colorado State University; and Zotero, a program for managing research sources used by millions.

Now the foundation plans to eliminate the RIT program as a stand-alone entity, a move that was scheduled to take effect Monday, according to a December letter to grantees obtained by The Chronicle.

Mellon described the change as part of an effort to "consolidate resources" and concentrate on core program ...

If you're wondering what use Google's new Wave tool might have for teaching, one online-learning leader has an answer: combining classes from different colleges.

Think of it like bringing in a guest speaker. But with Wave, which is like e-mail but live and jazzed up with multimedia features, you can build online communities that link entire classrooms for a week or two. And you can do it without the administrative headaches of booking rooms or adjusting class schedules.

Ray Schroeder gave it a try last semester at the University of Illinois at Springfield, one of the first colleges to use Wave for online teaching since the preview version came out in September. For about two weeks in December, he joined his "Internet in American Life" course with a class on energy studies at the Institute of Technology at Sligo, in Ireland. They created a "wave" to discuss the impact of the Internet on...

Regulatory heat. Loan default worries. Bad publicity.

That's the storyline about for-profit colleges lately, but here's some other news: They just keep gobbling up the online-education market.

According to new research from the consulting firm Eduventures, for-profits' share of the 2.1-million-student online sector rose from 39 percent in 2008 to 42 percent in 2009, as the recession drove students back to college and severe budget cuts strained public universities.

That may not seem like a big increase, but you can see how skewed that online penetration is when you compare it with for-profits' chunk of the total higher-education market: about 9 percent. And consider that for-profits' share had been projected to stabilize or even shrink.

Meanwhile, says Richard Garrett, managing director at Eduventures, some nonprofit online pioneers “have stalled.”

"It’s just more competition," he...

You've heard of MIT OpenCourseWare. The free Web site FinalsClub.org, which pays Harvard students to share lecture notes online, piggybacks on that open-content genre — with one twist. Harvard gets little power over what's published.

The two-year-old startup derives its name from the Ivy League university's final clubs. As The Boston Globe wrote Sunday in a lengthy article featuring FinalsClub.org, these are "insular all-male social clubs" known for stashing files of old lectures.

"And just like the Final Clubs' files, the site serves as a crutch for students who haven't bothered to attend class or take their own notes," The Globe said.

Companies selling lecture notes are nothing new. The phenomenon sometimes lands them in court, as happened in the case of a University of Florida professor's battle with Einstein's Notes.

But the difference is that FinalsClub.org doesn't charge. It's ...

The College News Network isn’t much: a bare-bones Web site, expenses totaling $17, and a single advertisement that covered every penny.
 
But the Ohio University undergraduates who founded the college-journalism content-sharing cooperative hope the new wire-service-style Web site can help fill a hole in the student press.

The Web site is Dave Hendricks and Ryan Dunn’s answer to the demise of UWIRE, a popular service that had aggregated articles from student newspapers across the country before it went mysteriously silent this fall.

UWIRE had offered national content that student journalists like Mr. Hendricks, managing editor of Ohio University’s Post, could republish in their local papers. It also served as a platform that promoted studens' articles far beyond the campuses they cover.

“UWIRE may have gone out of business, but what they did was important,” says Mr. Hendricks, 21. “We’re just...

Joel Tenenbaum can bash the Recording Industry Association of America all he wants.

A judge today rejected the industry's request to gag Mr. Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student who was ordered to pay $675,000 to record labels for music piracy, according to a Wired article. The RIAA had accused Mr. Tennenbaum of encouraging illegal music downloading by egging on his fans via Twitter.

"Although plaintiffs are entitled to statutory damages, they have no right to silence defendant's criticism of the statutory regime under which he is obligated to pay those damages," wrote Nancy Gertner, a federal judge for the District of Massachusetts. "This court has neither the desire nor the authority to serve as the censor of defendant's public remarks regarding online file sharing."

The federal judge finalized the $675,000 jury verdict and issued an injunction blocking Mr. Tenenbaum from...

For years, colleges have awarded credit for out-of-classroom learning experiences like corporate training, independent study and volunteer activities. But many colleges can’t afford to train their faculty and staff to evaluate those experiences.

A new online service is intended to help translate outside learning into college credit, which should be good news for adults who want to save money on tuition and speed up their degrees.

The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning announced this week that it plans to design a virtual center that will help colleges assess prior learning, an evaluation process that can involve student portfolios or tests. The service will also offer adults guidance on getting credit for out-of-classroom education. The details of how the evaluation process will function have yet to be worked out, however, and the service is not expected to debut until the spring.
...

A new low for academic life?

A powerful tool to improve conferences?

A shameful act of journalism?

A Chronicle story today about the abuse of Twitter at conferences is touching off an online debate among readers. Dozens of them are arguing about a new trend in academic life: how audience members now “tweckle” speakers by heckling them on the micro-blogging service Twitter.

Meanwhile, several readers pointed out yet another tweckling episode, which was not included in the article. This one involved Danah Boyd of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. More on that here.

Writes one reader: “It appears that the nasty, vicious, backstabbing academic culture has reached a new low with the pack mentality of tweeters who vilify a speaker contemporaneously. Have intolerance and incivility reached the point where humiliating and attacking a speaker who does not 'respect' their time and...