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.”

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,...

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...

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...

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 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...

"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...

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...

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...