Stanford University got lots of attention for inviting the public to participate in a series of free online computer-science classes. One thing that's drawn less notice is how some of the technologies that help facilitate those mega-classes are changing the experience for Stanford students learning the same subjects. Now a Stanford student is provoking a debate on those innovations, with a blog post critiquing the rigor and format of the "flipped classroom" teaching method deployed in his machine-learning course. In one version of that course offered to Stanford students, the traditional teaching format was inverted, with lectures presented through online videos and optional once-a-week class meetings devoted to problem solving with the professor. The videos, plus auto-graded assignments, were also offered to the public in the free online version of the machine-learning class. As of...

A New York University professor's blog post is opening a rare public window on the painful classroom consequences of using plagiarism-detection software to aggressively police cheating students. And the post, by Panagiotis Ipeirotis, raises questions about whether the incentives in higher education are set up to reward such vigilance. But after the candid personal tale went viral online this week, drawing hundreds of thousands of readers, the professor took it down on NYU's advice. As Mr. Ipeirotis understands it, a faculty member from another university sent NYU a cease-and-desist letter saying his blog post violated a federal law protecting students' privacy. The controversy began on Sunday, when Mr. Ipeirotis, a computer scientist who teaches in NYU's Stern School of Business, published a blog post headlined, "Why I will never pursue cheating again." Mr. Ipeirotis reached that...

Dear University Leaders: You might want to think twice before clicking "send" on your next e-mail. WikiLeaks, scourge of governments worldwide, now has a copycat for academe. And the new group is itching to publish your university's deepest secrets. Its Web site, UniLeaks, debuted this month with a pair of open letters to university leaders in Australia and Britain. The Australian activists who run UniLeaks are pushing for openness in the face of what they see as the corporatization of higher education. They complain of unprofitable courses abolished, employees made less secure, and students reduced "to mere customers or clients of the university." UniLeaks has yet to back that bluster with any blockbuster scoops. But the site's main administrator says it has received an "overwhelming" amount of correspondence from Britain-based students and academics. That support includes at least...

If you work in education technology, get ready. The Gates money is coming. Waves of it.

This fall the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and several partners will announce a new project aimed at harnessing technology to help prepare students for college and get them to graduation. The senior program officer leading that effort is Josh Jarrett, a former software entrepreneur with a Harvard M.B.A. who joined Gates after five years with the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. In an interview, he previewed that program and offered his take on the online-learning scene.

Q: You’ve teamed with Educause, the college IT group, to start a program called Next Gen Learning Challenges. Describe the project.

A: What we envision is a multiyear, multiwave program, where every six to 12 months we issue a new set of challenges. And we’ll issue a set of challenges this fall around shared open-core...

SunGard and Blackboard have largely kept out of each other's turf, with Blackboard dominating the market for course-management systems and SunGard focusing on administrative software for student records and other tasks.

Now SunGard is crossing that line. For the first time, the administrative software company will directly sell a course-management system to colleges and universities.

SunGard is making the play through a deal with rSmart, a for-profit company that packages, supports, and hosts freely available software that has been produced through a collaborative "open source" process. Under the partnership, SunGard will sell subscriptions to rSmart's version of Sakai, an open-source course-management system developed by universities.

The arrangement puts SunGard's muscle behind that project at a time when a growing number of colleges are considering open-source systems. SunGard...

Nothing works.

That's the disheartening suggestion of a new Kennesaw State University study about retention strategies in online education, soon to be published in the International Journal of Management in Education.

Students drop out of online classes at rates 15 percent to 20 percent higher than traditional ones, according to earlier research cited in the study. Kennesaw State saw that problem reflected in its own classes, so a group of the university's professors set up a study to find the best strategies that might improve retention.

Using undergraduates in a business course as their test subjects, the professors experimented with lots of techniques that previous research had suggested could help. For example, they called students at home. They quizzed them on the syllabus. They made more of an effort to steer them through the virtual classroom. They pushed them to develop personal ...

MIT is exploring ways to make money off online learning. But the institute says it has no plans to raise cash by sticking its pioneering MIT OpenCourseWare project behind a paywall, a possibility raised in a news report today.

"That's news to me," Stephen E. Carson, external-relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare, said when Wired Campus called him up to learn about the supposed paywall. He added, "The content that’s available on MIT OpenCourseWare will continue to be free and available as it always has been."

Charging for access to basic content would be a radical shift for MIT OpenCourseWare, which has attracted millions of users to free academic materials like lecture notes, syllabi, and videos.

But some less radical possibilities have been discussed, Mr. Carson says. These include the idea of layering premium services on top of the free content, such as opportunities for user...

Thousands of students are enrolling in gigantic open online courses.

Would students go for vast open online study groups, too?

OpenStudy, a start-up company spun off by Georgia Tech and Emory University, is betting the answer to that question is yes. Its Web site is the latest effort to create a social platform for independent learners who want to help each other study the huge trove of educational materials published free online by universities like MIT.

“Our mission is to make the world one big study group,” says Phil Hill, chief executive of OpenStudy, whose founders include Ashwin Ram, a Georgia Tech professor, and Preetha Ram, an Emory University dean.

The free site opened to the public last week. It has 3,000 users so far, including a pilot project with MIT that suggests OpenStudy as an option from the Web sites of several open courses.

Here's how it works: Users ...

Pro: I get to sleep off the hangover.

Con: I already skipped the class twice. 

If you're a student, chances are you've faced a dilemma like this. Well, you no longer have to leave the risks up to chance. That's the idea behind a new online calculator, which purports to help students decide whether skipping class is a smart move, based on their answers to a series of questions.

Since its creation in February, the site has made 18,430 calculations. 

“It started out as a joke between me and some of my friends,” Jim Filbert, its creator, tells the University of Maryland at College Park's student newspaper. “It wasn’t until April that I saw there were more people using the calculator than I thought.”

Does this thing actually work? We have no idea. But check out Campus Overload, where Jenna Johnson gave the site a hypothetical spin on a class called "Zombies in Popular Media." 

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg doesn't like all those headlines about social-network uprisings among Facebook's old student base. This week Facebook threw a bone to students, in the form of a new "Universities on Facebook" page. The idea is to help students better use the site for campus activities like newspapers, dorm groups, and student government. In an announcement, Facebook called the page an attempt at "reconnecting" with students.

"The very existence of a page like this serves as a reminder of how Facebook has changed—where it was once a site designed by and for universities, they are now a specialized audience with a page catering to their specific needs," blogged VentureBeat.

Still, this project doesn't seem nearly as controversial as the "community pages" that had college marketing types freaking out back in May. By one account, at least, those are "still a big mess."