The National Center for Education Statistics has released a report on online-learning growth between 2000 and 2008, showing that the percentage of undergraduates enrolled in at least one online class went from 8 percent to 20 percent during that time. Computer-science and business classes were the most popular. This expansion has also been documented in a series of Sloan Consortium reports.

Hacking the Academy, about academe in the digital age, was compiled from blog posts and Twitter messages posted during a single week last year. The book is now out and freely available online, courtesy of MPublishing, the publishing division of the University of MichiganLibrary. It has sections on ‘Hacking Scholarship,” “Hacking Teaching,” and “Hacking Institutions.”

The news that, after what seems like forever, new Internet domain names will be allowed has sparked conversations among college CIO’s and communication specialists about the limits of the “.edu” domain. The news has also provoked serious talk about what might be gained by trading in those three letters strongly linked to higher education for Web addresses like “yourgreatuniveristyhere.com” or even something that ends in “.weberstate” or “.brownuniversity.”

Some observers worry, though, that an influx of new names might dilute the power of “.edu,” which has been the online way to say “a legitimately accredited institution of higher education in the United States.”

Weber State University is among those that have already started branching out, with “getintoweber.com” as an online destination.  It is “a vanity URL we pursued to dovetail with our ‘Get Into Weber’ marketing campaign…

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Reliable comparisons between online-education institutions are notoriously scarce, particularly for prospective students who want to find a college where students are likely to complete their studies and to learn how many years that typically takes. Today a Web site added new data intended to fill that void for 18 colleges, but it still has some gaps.

The site, College Choices for Adults, was created several years ago by a third-party nonprofit technology cooperative, WCET. It has now added information about student retention and completion rates to already-existing data on student demographics and surveys of satisfaction. This data includes part-time and transfer students, which is what makes it unique, said Cali Morrison, the manager for major grants at WCET, in an e-mail.

“What we found was that many adult-serving institutions like we have listed on College Choices for Adults do…

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Western Governors University, the online institution emphasizing competency-based learning, has received $4.5-million to support its recent expansions into Texas, Indiana, and Washington State. The money, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will be used to open brick-and-mortar offices, to market the university to prospective students, and to finance any future expansion in other states, says Joan Mitchell, the university’s director of communications. The grant was made in the spring but announced today.

A jury voted “not guilty” in the trial of an assistant professor who had been charged with battery of a student by allegedly closing a laptop lid on her hands. Frank J. Rybicki, an assistant professor of mass media at Valdosta State University, in Georgia, had been suspended while the trial was under way, but he will be teaching now that he has been cleared, according to university staff and a supporters’ page on Facebook. But only for a year: the university has told Mr. Rybicki that he will not get a contract for the 2012-2013 academic year, according to Inside Higher Ed.

The pioneering effort to share scientific research without the restrictions of journal prices and embargoes, arXiv, turns 20 this month. Its founder, the physicist Paul Ginsparg, reflects on his effort “to level the research playing field” in the August 11 issue of Nature. That’s the kind of expensive journal Mr. Ginsparg originally wanted to work around. We can share some of his published thoughts here.

ArXiv, back in 1991 and still today, focuses on physics. “The original plan was for roughly 100 full-text article submissions each year,” writes Mr. Ginsparg, who works at Cornell University. Today the site gets about 75,000 of these “preprints” every year, and it serves up about one million full-text downloads to about 400,000 users every week. It holds roughly 700,000 texts.

Physicists had no problem jumping ahead of journal publication, Mr. Ginsparg notes, but other fields vary …

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Following a pilot project reported last year in The Chronicle, the South Korean education ministry said it would invest $2-billion to turn all print textbooks into digital form, store them on a cloud-based network, and supply them to students on tablet computers by 2015, the newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported today.