April 18, 2012, 5:01 am
By Nick DeSantis
Last fall, two Stanford computer-science professors helped create an online course-hosting platform that opened some of the university’s classes to the entire world. Hundreds of thousands of students enrolled free of charge. Their start-up company, which grew out of that effort, now seeks to give millions a taste of top-quality education by expanding its platform to other elite universities.
Coursera, the online-education outfit founded by Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, will grow its course platform through official partnerships with three more top-tier institutions, the company announced today. Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Stanford will use Coursera’s technology to offer a mix of classes including computer science, business, and literature. The young company already serves seven courses, and a…
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April 11, 2012, 6:30 pm
By Nick DeSantis
Before Facebook opened its social network to anyone on the Internet, the platform was limited to college students.
And now, it seems, Facebook is returning to its campus roots.
Today, the social-networking giant unveiled “Groups for Schools,” a college-centric feature that is restricted to users with active .edu e-mail addresses. The feature lets college students create groups for their dorms, majors, or even parties that they’re planning.
Each institution has a main hub, where visitors can search through the groups at their colleges and create new ones. The groups come in three flavors: open, which are available to anyone in that college’s community, closed, which are limited to private members, and secret, which can be viewed only by members.
The extra layer of community means that college students who are worried about their statuses and photos reaching relatives…
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April 11, 2012, 3:20 pm
By Nick DeSantis
The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday sued Apple and five major publishers in an antitrust lawsuit alleging that the companies colluded to fix e-book prices. Just hours later, though, government officials announced that they have reached proposed settlements with three of the five publishers—though the legal fight will continue for the two other publishers and Apple.
At a press conference on Wednesday, the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., said that top executives with the publishers Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster teamed up with Apple “to eliminate competition among stores selling e-books, ultimately increasing prices for consumers.” The Justice Department’s suit was filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The complaint alleges that the defendants conspired to take control of…
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April 6, 2012, 4:38 pm
By Nick DeSantis
A start-up that tried to make studying more social is pressing the stop button.
GradeGuru, the social-studying Web site run by McGraw-Hill Higher Education, has announced that it will close its doors on April 29.
The service, which was part of a group of Web sites putting a Facebook-like spin on studying, gave students small rewards for uploading their class notes. Users earned points for sharing popular notes and redeemed them for cash and gift cards.
“McGraw-Hill’s evolving social-media and education strategy is leaning in a new direction as we continue to revolutionize digital learning,” says a message on GradeGuru’s home page. The message directs visitors who want to continue to share their notes and connect with other students to Chegg’s Notehall and Unigo, a college-counseling network that counts McGraw-Hill among its investors.
Students who used the service…
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April 5, 2012, 11:28 am
By Nick DeSantis
Open-education resources have been hailed as a trove of freely available information that can be used to build textbooks at virtually no cost. But a copyright lawsuit filed last month presents a potential roadblock for the burgeoning movement.
A group of three large academic publishers has sued the start-up Boundless Learning in federal court, alleging that the young company, which produces open-education alternatives to printed textbooks, has stolen the creative expression of their authors and editors, violating their intellectual-property rights. The publishers Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher Education filed their joint complaint last month in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The publishers’ complaint takes issue with the way the upstart produces its open-education textbooks, which Boundless bills as free substitutes for expensive…
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April 3, 2012, 9:59 pm
By Nick DeSantis
Elite American universities maintain their prestige by turning away a huge percentage of applicants every year. And the education entrepreneur Ben Nelson sees an opportunity in this demand for top-flight education: He wants to reach talented students across the world and to build a new university that could remake the image of Ivy League education.
Mr. Nelson, founder of a start-up called the Minerva Project, believes the minuscule acceptance rates at prestigious institutions leave some college-bound students without a place where they can pursue a blue-ribbon degree. So his for-profit enterprise seeks to satisfy that demand by offering a rigorous online education to the brightest students around the world who slip through the cracks of highly selective admissions cycles.
Mr. Nelson said his company, which is calling itself “the first elite American university to be launched in a…
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April 2, 2012, 1:49 pm
By Nick DeSantis
A former University of Louisville nursing student who was dismissed for writing comments about patients on her MySpace page cannot collect damages as a result of being expelled, because she waived her free-speech rights when she signed an honor code that included a confidentiality agreement, a federal judge ruled Monday.
The former student, Nina Yoder, sued the university three years ago for dismissing her after learning of online postings she wrote that referenced her patients, gun rights, and abortion. A district court decision allowed Ms. Yoder to re-enroll, and she earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 2010. Ms. Yoder sought damages from the university, but U.S. District Judge Charles R. Simpson III ruled Monday that she had “had no constitutional right” to write about what she saw as a student because of the honor code’s confidentiality agreement, the Associated Press
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March 29, 2012, 4:32 pm
By Nick DeSantis
Washington — A panel of five experts debated the merits of open-access publishing models in front of a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee today, weighing the implications of a proposed bill that would require the results of federally funded research to be made publicly available within six months of publication.
The bill in question, dubbed the Federal Research Public Access Act, was introduced last month in the House and Senate. It surfaced for the third time since 2006, and stands as an open-access alternative to the failed Research Works Act, which earlier this year sought to forbid federal agencies from mandating public access to privately published research—even if that research benefited from receiving taxpayer dollars.
The hearing was conducted before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.
First …
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March 26, 2012, 4:54 pm
By Nick DeSantis
As more students arrive at college with tablets and smartphones, residential computing networks are trying to keep up with the demands of the data-hungry devices. This trend can strain network resources, a survey suggests, forcing some institutions to upgrade their equipment.
The findings were published last week by the Association for Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education, or Acuta. Of the survey’s 255 respondents, 68 percent said they allowed students unlimited access to their residential networks. Only 19 percent said they limited the bandwidth available to mobile and network devices. Such a hands-off approach can be costly: Half of the respondents said they paid to supply bandwidth but didn’t recover their investment.
The technology administrators said their top concerns were the growing popularity of mobile devices, the increasing thirst…
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March 20, 2012, 6:18 pm
By Nick DeSantis
The traditional academic-publishing industry moves slowly, and scholarly book reviews can take a long time to get printed. So one group of students is trying to speed up the review process and make it more interactive by putting a crowdsourced book review online for anyone to critique.
The reviewers are members of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory’s scholars program, which is made up of undergraduates and graduate students. Their book of choice is Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White’s Race After the Internet, a collection of essays published last October. Hastac scholars wrote reviews of the book’s 14 chapters, and their contributions have been published on the Web for readers to evaluate and add their own takes. The project went live last week.
“These are not just reviews existing on their own in a print journal,” said Fiona Barnett, …
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