How's this for "hounding" diploma mills?

GetEducated.com, an online-learning consumer group, managed to purchase an online M.B.A. for its mascot, a dog named Chester Ludlow.

The Vermont pug earned his tassles by pawing over $499 to Rochville University, which offers "distance learning degrees based on life and career experience," according to a news release from GetEducated. He got back a package from a post-office box in Dubai that contained a diploma and transcripts, plus a certificate of distinction in finance and another purporting to show membership in the student council.

GetEducated.com belives Chester is the first dog to get a diploma for life experience. But his bow-wow M.B.A. isn't the first canine college degree: Witness this 2007 story about a police-department dog's diploma.

Here's GetEducated.com's video about the stunt: "Dog Earns Online MBA: A Cautionary Tail."

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A new study contradicts the perception that cheating is more widespread in online classes, finding that students in virtual courses were less likely to cheat than their face-to-face peers.

You can’t make any sweeping generalizations based on the results, since the study only looked at 225 students at Friends University, a private, mid-sized, Christian-based institution in Wichita, Kan.

But the study, “Point, Click, and Cheat: Frequency and Type of Academic Dishonesty in the Virtual Classroom,” adds fresh data to the continuing debate about academic integrity online. The issue is on the minds of many in the distance-education world because the recently reauthorized Higher Education Opportunity Act requires accreditors to monitor steps that colleges take to verify that an enrolled student is the same person who does the course work.

For the new study, researchers surveyed undergraduate...

Thirty years from now, big university campuses will be “relics.”

That was the management guru Peter Drucker’s prediction in 1997. Over a decade later, notes the online-education consultant John Sener, the demise-of-the-university arguments keep piling up.

The latest, "A Virtual Revolution Is Brewing for Colleges," was published on Sunday in The Washington Post. In it, Zephyr Teachout argued that kids heading off to college this year might be part of the last generation for which that means the traditional experience of dorm rooms and tenured professors.

“Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering,” wrote Ms. Teachout, an associate professor of law at Fordham University. “Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot survive.”

Ms. Teachout describes ...

The Utah State University OpenCourseWare project has shut down because it ran out of money, according to its former director, making it perhaps the biggest venture to close in the burgeoning movement to freely publish course materials online.

The project published a mix of digital content -- lecture notes, syllabi, audio and video recordings -- from more than 80 courses before its demise. Its aspiration had been to open up access to materials from every Utah State University course, said Marion R. Jensen, the former director.

Instead, Mr. Jensen was laid off on June 30. And, while the Utah OpenCourseWare Web site remains up for now, it no longer has any dedicated staff and is no longer adding new courses.
 
David Wiley, an associate professor at Brigham Young University and an open-education leader, characterized Utah’s open-course collection as apparently the second-largest in the country, ...

Twitter’s power as a news source became a big story in June’s disputed Iranian elections. Now DePaul University is offering what is apparently the first college journalism class devoted entirely to the microblogging platform.

The course, called “Digital Editing: From Breaking News to Tweets,” will teach students to make sense of the “clutter” of the Internet, “particularly in situations of breaking news or major developing stories,” according to a news release.

Students will learn how to “get the most out of Twitter,” says Craig Kanalley, a Chicago Tribune digital intern who is teaching the class. Part of the focus will be evaluating and verifying material produced by citizen journalists. 

“There aren't many opportunities like this class for students to experiment in this new media space and gain skills that will make them more marketable in the future,” Mr. Kanalley wrote in an...

The debate over how online courses compare with face-to-face ones is old. But readers were quick to re-engage it in response to a Chronicle article today that reported on the findings of a major survey of faculty views about online education.

The survey found large-scale faculty engagement with online teaching but also broad suspicion about its effectiveness. Even among professors who have taught online, it reported, nearly half think online learning is either inferior or somewhat inferior to classroom learning. The study also described the amount of time it takes to teach and develop online courses as a significant obstacle.

One reader wrote about reasons for teaching online in the past: student demand, a focus by the administration, even a sense that getting involved could ensure quality. But this reader decided to stop teaching online in the spring after six years of consistent...

The latest experiment in peer-to-peer education kicks off next month – a new institution in which students will learn in virtual communities using free online materials and social-networking tools.

But now the venture, called University of the People, faces big questions. Among them: Can it get accreditation? And can a college that charges so little and relies so much on self-teaching retain students?

Since it was announced in January, University of the People has accumulated a pile of publicity, spurred by its populist marketing pitch as the “first nonprofit, tuition-free online university.”

“The idea is to reach the hundreds of millions of people who graduate high school, have all the ability and the right to study in an academic institution, but cannot do it either because they don’t have the money or because there aren’t enough institutions,” said Shai Reshef, an Israeli...

Carnegie Mellon University is expanding its open online-learning efforts with a new project focused on community colleges. 

The Community College Open Learning Initiative is the second wave of an educational experiment that gained attention recently from the Obama administration. Carnegie Mellon's work has given about 300 classrooms around the world access to software-enhanced, college-level online-course material in subjects like biology and statistics. These digital environments track students’ progress, give them feedback, and tip off professors about where students are struggling so the instructors can make better use of class time.

Now Carnegie Mellon plans to work with a consortium of community colleges to set up four "high gatekeeper" courses, defined as classes that have poor success rates but are important to getting degrees. The goal is to raise completion rates by 25 percent...

The start of a new online M.B.A. program named after Jack Welch has been delayed because of the retired General Electric chief's health problems, The Chronicle has learned.

The ex-GE leader made a splash in June with the announcement of his Jack Welch Management Institute at Chancellor University, which plans to offer degrees from the Welch-branded program both online and at its Cleveland campus.

But a spinal infection called discitis has hospitalized the 73-year-old former executive since July 5. Mr. Welch, who had been involved in developing the program’s curriculum, was forced to put that work on hold, said Francisco A. Garcia, a Chancellor trustee.

The Welch program is not yet open for enrollment. A new start date will be announced “in the next couple of weeks,” Mr. Garcia told The Chronicle in an interview on Wednesday.

“That’s a testament to the fact that this isn’t just an...

Is your college Twittering to reach potential students?

They're not listening.

That, anyway, is one conclusion you could be tempted to draw from the headline on a new piece of research. “Teens Don't Tweet; Twitter's Growth Not Fueled By Youth,” the Nielsen Company reported in a finding picked up by Mashable.

The figures fit with what Tanya M. Joosten, a lecturer in the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee's department of communication who tweeted about the new numbers, found in a survey of her own students.

“I think most of the students don’t even know what Twitter is, under the age of 25,” Ms. Joosten said in an interview Tuesday. “There’s been no reason for them to be introduced to it.”

Nielsen based its claim on data from a panel of 250,000 U.S. Internet users. People under 25 make up “nearly one quarter of the active U.S. Internet universe,” but in June of 2009 that age bracket ...