Many professors recognize that online education is changing the landscape of academe. But faculty members at several colleges are making it clear that they will not be steamrolled. Philosophy professors at San Jose State University last week wrote an open letter saying they refused to use material from an edX course, taught by a famous Harvard…

In this article, the author discusses digital humanities (DH) and what future it holds for graduate students who are riding the digital-humanities bandwagon. He spoke with several graduate students about their interest in the field: how they got into it and began their first projects. Laura Mandell, director of the Initiative for Digital…

A persistent criticism of the digital-humanities movement is that it is elitist and exclusive because it requires the resources of a major university (faculty, infrastructure, money), and is thus more suited to campuses with a research focus. Academics and administrators at small liberal-arts colleges may read about DH and, however exciting it…

Blackboard has become the Microsoft of higher-education technology, say many campus-technology officials, and they do not mean the comparison as a compliment. To them the company is not only big, but also pushy, and many of them love to hate it. This article reports that a growing number of colleges are switching to Moodle, a free, open-source…

Evolve or dissolve. That advice, from a recent report on virtual universities, played out in two news stories last May 2009. The University of Texas' online division is staring down a deep budget hole as it loses a longtime subsidy. In Utah, budget cuts have killed a 10-campus online consortium. Those and other predicaments reflect the growing…

North Carolina State University may never build another computer lab. Instead the university has installed racks of equipment in windowless rooms where students and professors never go. This article describes a project called the Virtual Computing Lab. Users enter it remotely from their own computers in dormitory rooms or libraries. They get all…

This article takes a look at the rising popularity of professors as the latest YouTube stars. The popularity of their appearances on YouTube and other video-sharing sites is making it possible for classrooms to be opened up and making teaching--which once took place behind closed doors--a more public art. Web video has generated a new form of…

This article describes a virtual world program that Case Western University administrators built using Second Life. It is designed for use by prospective students, who can tour the campus online. The program shows campus buildings, athletic facilities, a diner, and a virtual dormitory with window views of the athletics fields, a feature of the…

Thomas Benton (a pseudonym of an associate professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college) describes most college libraries of today as being clean and well-lighted, with metal shelving, veneered tabletops, and banks of computers. He fears that in 20 years, college students will regard books as a "quaint technology"--the way they now…

The author discusses her experiences using the "Facebook" social networking website, and the evolution of its use from a window on students' opinions and activities, to an uncomfortable forum where response to grades were visible in real time, and because of the instructor's known potential presence, students may have been intimidated from sharing…

Mark David Milliron, founder and chief executive of Catalyze Learning International, believes that all types of educational institutions--from elementary schools to universities--should be having conversations about the way they use information technology. In particular, Milliron believes technology will play a crucial role at community colleges…

To get money flowing from alumni, colleges try to keep them feeling plugged in to their alma mater--even if the "plug" becomes wireless. Bucknell University rolled out a new service this month that pushes cell phone text messages to its 47,000 alumni. So far only a few dozen alumni have signed up for the service. If the service, which is…

This article profiles Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt's new course, "Travel and Transformation in the Early 17th Century." The product of an intense, months-long collaboration between computing specialists, graduate students, librarians, and scholars, the course makes innovative use of all the tools and technical know-how a major university…

This article reports that Canadian medical students, inspired by an online community and an obscure heart condition, have ditched their books and transformed their class notes into a pulsating, hip-hop music video. "Diagnosis Wenckebach"--the name comes from a type of abnormal heart rhythm--was created as just one of many innovative…

When the author read that the history department at Middlebury College had "banned Wikipedia" she immediately wrote to the college's president, Ronald D. Liebowitz, to express her concern that such decision would lead to a national trend, one that would not be good for higher education. She states that Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. It is…