Philadelphia—Start-up technology companies have some gripes about higher education. One is that universities routinely make it hard for the public to access basic data, like course catalogs and book prices at the campus bookstore. Another is that when trying to sell services to a college, like a Web service that allows faculty members and students to organize and share their research and online readings, companies can’t find the people who make the purchasing decisions.

Those complaints got a high-level airing Thursday at Educause, at a round-table discussion with Aneesh Chopra, the U.S. chief technology officer, who cautioned them that the gathering was not a pity party and “we are here to get things done.” Also listening was James H. Shelton III, the assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement at the Department of Education. University CIOs were also in the circle, as well as officials from giant software companies, such as SunGard Higher Education, that provide the technology backbones for most universities.

Everyone seemed to want to provide tools for student success, including putting more information from education records in students’ own hands, and the participants pointed lots of fingers at institutions that were getting in the way. Officials from SunGard spoke of an “educational positioning system,” like a GPS, in which students would hold their own course records, sometimes from multiple colleges, and be able to tell what courses they needed to take to reach a particular goal. “Why isn’t that happening?” Mr. Chopra asked. Institutions hold their own data and don’t share, a SunGard official responded. College CIOs shot back that it was SunGard’s own systems that made it hard to exchange data. The tone was not antagonistic, but it was clear that opinions differed.

Younger companies took shots at the larger higher-education ecosystem. Michael Staton, CEO of Inigral, whose Schools app—run through Facebook—lets colleges build a social network among newly-admitted students, said, “I spent two years crawling college Web sites to get basic course-catalog information, and the sites made it incredible difficult.”

Mr. Staton is one of the driving forces behind Startup Alley, an area in the giant Educause exhibit hall where small and lightly-financed companies can try to attract attention. Many people working for those companies echoed his complaint about colleges. David Adewumi started OneSchool with the idea of selling colleges a mobile app that would provide students with course information, professor contacts, and campus news. The company also wanted to give students information about textbooks so they could shop for the best price. But that information proved incredibly difficult to extract.

Victor Karkar, CEO of Scrible, an online reading and research-organizer service, said he found that university purchasing procedures for a service like his were so tangled and widely distributed that he had trouble finding those responsible for evaluating his product and saying “yes” or “no.”

At the round table, Mr. Chopra pointed out analogies to health care. Doctors and hospitals often maintain different records on the same patient and don’t share them with each other or the patient. “But all of their different systems can at least produce a simple text file,” he said. “That’s inter-operable.” In fact, the Veterans Administration created a blue button on its Web pages that let patients download those amalgamated records, he said.

“I promise you we can do a blue button in education,” he said. “Which university will be part of a coalition of the willing to make this happen?” A technology official from Oakland University raised her hand, followed by officials from Georgetown University and Montgomery College. “Great!” said Mr. Chopra. “Can we get an e-mail listserv going in the next 30 days? Then let’s launch in 90 days.”

As for course catalogs and bookstore data,  college officials said they were hindered by the formats of their enterprise software provided by companies like SunGard and Oracle. Mr. Shelton demurred. “You all have a lot of collective buying power,” he said. “Make it clear what standards you want.”

The meeting broke up, and the two federal official headed for Startup Alley to meet more education entrepreneurs. Later in the day, Mr. Chopra tweeted (@aneeshchopra on Twitter) that “Jim Shelton and I left Educause with 3 big ideas.” One was a blue button for student transcripts; the second was to have start-ups ask universities for proposals on ways to “liberate” student data; the third was for his office to release a memo to universities providing guidance on open-data requirements.

Philadelphia—When Pearson officials talk about their new learning-management system, OpenClass, they like to mention Google. They note that the software is distributed through Google’s App marketplace, and say that it was inspired by Google’s popular e-mail and Web services platform. Pearson drops the company’s name so much that many college officials assume that Google is jointly building the new system, something that officials have long speculated that the search company might one day do.

But other than routine help it gives to any app in its marketplace, Google is not directly involved with the new learning-management system, and Google officials say they have no plan to jump into developing learning software.

“There were some misleading headlines with the Pearson’s announcement,” said Tim Drinan, a Google spokesman, when asked to clarify the nature of the relationship at the company’s booth at the annual Educause technology conference. “What it’s not is it’s not a joint release, and it’s not a shared product,” he added. “They built it with really nice integration with our systems. We worked with them as we do with a lot of vendors.” He characterized the help as “very common.”

In an interview, Adrian Sannier, the senior vice president of product at Pearson Learning Technologies, characterized the arrangement this way when pressed by The Chronicle: “Here’s what that relationship is. We approached Google with the idea of a free LMS. Google responded positively by saying, Hey, we would like an LMS that was very tightly integrated with Google apps. And so our engineering team and their engineering team got together, and they worked together over a period of about six months to expand the set of API’s to make the best leverage of the set of connections—to understand the ways in which the thing can be used the best. And then we executed that in the marketplace in a way that’s well adapted to the Google model.”

As far as future cooperation: “Going forward we want to continue to work with those guys to make it more useful, broader, and deeper connections.”

Pearson’s system is not the only learning-management system offered in the Google Apps Marketplace, and it is not the first. Others listed in the directory include CourseDirector LMS, Engrade Gradebook & LMS, and Haiku LMS.

Mr. Sannier says that Pearson and Google did agree to help promote each other’s products. As a result, Pearson officials have given presentations about OpenClass at Google’s booth here at Educause, and a Google official appeared briefly at a Pearson briefing about the LMS.

At that session the Google official, Obadiah Greenberg, noted that college officials have long asked whether the company would build a learning system of its own. “One of the No. 1 questions we get is, When are we going to build an LMS?” he said. He added that Google is a platform company and has no plans to get into the LMS market.

Philadelphia—The University of Southern California places a premium on synchronous online education. Students fire up their Webcams and participate in live virtual classes.

But those live video feeds are opening a debate about classroom decorum, pushing the university to create new guidelines for “Netiquette.”

Barking dogs, wailing babies, a naked spouse—all have made cameo appearances in USC online classes, said Jade Winn, head of library services for USC’s education and social work schools, during a talk about online education at the Educause conference here.

Ms. Winn recalled one pajama-clad student who rolled over in bed, turned on a Webcam, and tried to attend class lying on a pillow. Another distraction: students crunching bowls of cereal.

“It’s just a whole level of being in someone’s home, that you don’t take into consideration,” Ms. Winn said in an interview after her talk.

The university plans to start taking it into consideration with a new Netiquette guide. The goal is to spell out up front what USC won’t tolerate. A spouse parading naked behind a student clearly isn’t kosher—but where else do you draw the line?

“The smaller things, like the dogs in the background and the babies crying, we have two sides on that,” Ms. Winn said. “And we really are still hashing it out. I feel that you can’t muzzle the dog during class time.”

Have other Wired Campus readers dealt with this issue? What kind of Netiquette distractions have come up in your classes, synchronous or asynchronous? Share your stories in the comments below.

This year has seen a substantial increase in the number of colleges offering mobile apps for campus resources and services. But the use of Web-based services, known as “the cloud,” for administrative services is growing slowly, according to a national survey of campus-technology leaders.

Only 37.1 percent of the 496 colleges that responded to the survey reported that they did not have a mobile app and were neither planning for one for this academic year nor reviewing one for the future, the Campus Computing Project found. The results are scheduled to be released today at the Educause conference, in Philadelphia.

The survey also found that lecture-capture systems, which instructors use to record what happens in their classes, are becoming more prominent. Public four-year colleges saw the biggest growth, with just over 6 percent of classes using a such systems, up from 3.7 percent last year.

The most important IT issue confronting campuses over the next two or three years, according to the survey, is hiring and retaining qualified IT staff.

Some other noteworthy trends in campus technology are the spread of social media, the push toward electronic books, including textbooks, and budget cuts in IT services.

In the survey, 77.5 of the institutions reported maintaining a Twitter account, and 90.9 percent said they maintain a campus page on Facebook. The majority of institutions also keep up a presence on YouTube and iTunesU.

Campuses in the Clouds

Despite a buzz among higher-education leaders about using Web-based services, the actual adoption of cloud services among colleges remains low, according to the survey.

Only 4.4 percent of the colleges reported that they are converting to or are now using cloud services for administrative services, and 6.5 percent said they were converting to or now using cloud services for storage and archiving.

One service, however, is rapidly shifting to the cloud: student e-mail. Some 68 percent of the colleges surveyed said they used cloud-based e-mail providers, such as Google, Microsoft, and Zimbra. The winner so far is Google, accounting for 56.3 percent of campuses that used a cloud e-mail provider, followed by Microsoft, at 41.4 percent, and Zimbra, with 2.3 percent.

Learning-management systems are also starting to shift to the cloud, with 27.8 percent of colleges converting to or now using the cloud for that purpose.

College officials feel they have good reason to be wary of the cloud, considering it a security risk, since it often means giving up control of the servers where key data are stored, said Kenneth C. Green, founding director of the survey. “I think for many IT officers there is a risk assessment involved,” he said. “The way campuses make decisions versus corporations—they’re often willing to let someone else go first.”

Some college officials are considering teaming up to negotiate better rates for cloud services, hoping to reduce costs. Even so, Mr. Green doubts that  there will be a big jump from this year to next. “It’s more of a three- to five-year story,” he said.

Philadelphia—Technology is unbundling the university. In five years, students will mix online and in-person courses, professors will rely on new course formats and modules from multiple colleges, and the library will be dispersed. On Thursday a panel of Chronicle reporters will talk about these trends at the Educause tech conference here. We’ll dig into the big challenges presented by each of these changes, and we’ll share stories about how universities are successfully dealing with them.

Most of the 5 p.m. panel, moderated by Senior Editor Josh Fischman, will consist of a Q&A with the audience. But if you can’t join us in Philadelphia, we still want to hear from you online. Watch a live video stream of the session here. Ask us questions on Twitter using the hashtag “unbundledU.” Or share your thoughts in the comments below.

To kick off the conversation, we’ve put together a collection of stories. Each one delves into a theme that our tech writers will be discussing during the panel.

Stories by Marc Parry, staff reporter

Tomorrow’s College

Free Online Courses, at a Very High Price

Will Technology Kill the Academic Calendar?

Stories by Jeffrey R. Young, senior writer

A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man ‘Academy’ on YouTube

Actually Going to Class, for a Specific Course? How 20th-Century

When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom

Stories by Jennifer Howard, senior reporter

Tomorrow’s Academic Libraries: Maybe Even Some Books

New Forms of Reading and Publishing Take Center Stage at Ithaka Conference

What You Don’t Know About Copyright, but Should

Reader Choice, Not Vendor Influence, Shapes Library Collections

Philadelphia—When Pearson, the giant education publisher, announced last week that it was launching a free, cloud-based learning management system called OpenClass, the news prompted tough questions from college technology officials. Would this system accommodate other popular software? Who would have control, Pearson or the colleges? Would it be hard to integrate the product, which will be released later this year, with a student information system?

Wednesday at Educause, the higher-education technology meeting here, Pearson began answering some of those questions—although some of the answers remained a bit vague. In an early-morning statement, it announced partnerships between OpenClass and Turnitin, the popular plagiarism-detection software, and CourseSmart, the e-textbook and digital course materials company. As for some of the other queries, The Chronicle put them to Matt Leavy, chief executive of Pearson eCollege. Here’s what he had to say:

Will colleges be able to control how OpenClass is upgraded and whether to accept new features? Mr. Leavy said that because OpenClass is hosted by Pearson, it can change quickly as a system and put in small upgrades rapidly. “With that said, we also recognize that it’s important to allow institutions and professors to have control over when and how things do change in the learning environment,” Mr Leavy continued. “For that reason, many of the updates we release in OpenClass will be done through an ‘opt in’ process.  We’ll let customers know when new features are available so they can try them out and ultimately decide when they’re ready to adopt them.”

What about ease of importing and exporting content? Will OpenClass use industry standards for this? The Pearson system will use standards developed by the education community, Mr. Leavy said, specifically ones with names and abbreviations that only a CIO could love, like the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (Scorm),  IMS, and Common Cartridge; the important thing about these systems isn’t the names but that they make it possible to exchange information between systems made by different companies.

Can OpenClass be integrated into a college’s student information system simply, since those systems are key to instructors and usually governed by an institution’s security policies as well as federal privacy laws? “We are committed to providing a platform that is open to integration at many levels—including student information systems,” said Mr. Leavy. And Pearson intends to do that using the standards just mentioned, he noted.

Of course, the gap between good intentions and good implementation has swallowed many software packages. Whether OpenClass leaps deftly across it or stumbles and falls will start to become clear in a few months, when Pearson releases documentation for all these features—and rolls out the system itself.

Professors who use Blackboard’s software have long been forced to lock their course materials in an area effectively marked, “For Registered Students Only,” while using the system. Today the company announced plans to add a “Share” button that will let professors make those learning materials free and open online.

The move may be the biggest sign yet that the idea of “open educational materials” is going mainstream, nearly 10 years after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology first began giving away lecture notes online. Blackboard made the change after college officials complained that the company’s software, which more than half the colleges in the country use for their online-course materials, was holding them back from trying open-education projects.

The president of Blackboard’s learning division, Ray Henderson, plans to send an e-mail to customers today that effectively modifies the company’s contract with colleges. In the old contract, colleges could have been charged extra for every additional person who viewed course materials placed on the Blackboard software platform (because license fees were set based on the number of potential users). Now that has been “liberalized” so that any outsiders who are invited to look in will not bring extra charges to a college, says Mr. Henderson. “If it’s non-revenue for you, we understand it’s going to be non-revenue for us,” he says.

Mr. Henderson said that in the past 18 to 24 months he has heard increasing requests from colleges officials to allow sharing. He said that he wanted to make the change sooner, but that it is easier for him to win the argument now that the company, which was publicly held, has been sold to a private-equity firm, Providence Equity Partners.

“This is something that is easier to do as a private company more easily than as a public company because the risk of being misunderstood by investors is less,” says Mr. Henderson. “The investor community was skeptical about that and worried” about an open policy, he says, adding that in the new ownership model, “we had to tell three people about that at Providence, who immediately got it.”

One key to Blackboard’s new “Share” feature is a partnership with Creative Commons, which offers licenses for free content. When professors choose to make their courses free, they will be presented with options to easily attach a Creative Commons license, something they otherwise would have to do manually.

Cable Green, director of global learning for Creative Commons, says that incorporating a sharing option within Blackboard will have a significant impact on the number of professors who make their course materials free.

Mr. Green says he is in discussions with other companies that make course-management systems to persuade them to add similar features to their products. “My goal is to have this kind of option in every commercial learning-management system and also open-source ones,” he says.

Several colleges that have been trying out iPads in the classroom will be sharing their experiences at the annual Educause conference, which kicks off Tuesday in Philadelphia. The officials plan to talk about what they’ve learned, though most still say it’s too soon to judge the long-term potential of tablets in teaching.

At least four sessions at the conference focus on teaching experiments with Apple’s popular gadget, and The Chronicle caught up with the presenters to get a preview of their planned remarks.

Pepperdine University, for example, has been experimenting in a few courses, where some students are given iPads loaded with reading materials and applications, and others stick with laptops and traditional printed books. The initial findings show that iPads increase engagement and collaboration, acting as a facilitator for more easily sharing information, rather than the clunky barrier that a laptop can sometimes be in a group setting.

When observing classrooms with and without iPads, the difference ranged from barely noticeable to a stark contrast,  said Dana K. Hoover, assistant CIO for communications and planning at Pepperdine. The most noticeable difference was how students in the iPad classes moved around the classroom more and seemed to be more engaged in the material.

“The goal is specifically to see if the iPad has the potential to impact student performance on learning outcomes in the classroom,” says Ms. Hoover. “Our secondary goal is to see if we can produce some sort of formula for success.”

The study, which began last fall, is now in its third and final semester and is in the data-collection phase. At the conference, Ms. Hoover and a colleague will be presenting some of the preliminary results from their study. The main findings they will discuss, which they did not have when Ms. Hoover was interviewed, will be results from a quiz comparing students in sections with and without iPads.

Colleges have taken a variety of approaches to their iPad experiments.

Oberlin College, a private liberal-arts institution in Ohio, is also in its third semester of its iPad program, and Forrest H. Rose, an instructional technologist at the college, says it values the immediacy the iPad brings to the classroom by giving students an easily transportable tool to use on field trips and in other group settings. But since Apple designed the tablets to be a single-user device, some professors have found issues with having multiple students lean over the machines to try to use them together. And on top of that, some students at the college have been reluctant to embrace the technology in the classroom, saying they prefer pen and paper.

Others, such as those in a music-theory course, seemed more open to a device that let them go paperless to carry around their sheet music. For those students, the iPad applications enhanced their music classes by giving them more options for composing music. But in other classes, such as writing composition, some students said the iPad proved to be a hindrance for detailed note taking and drafting papers.

“Technology isn’t at the forefront here because we’re a small liberal-arts school,” Mr. Rose said. “There have been mixed reactions and there has been some pushback.”

But for the most part the experiment has been a success, officials say, and the college’s technology center has been looking for a way to keep the devices in the classroom beyond the end of the study.

At the Universities of Cincinnati and of San Francisco, officials chose to give iPads only to faculty members, which proved to have both advantages and disadvantages.

For San Francisco researchers this meant they were able to get the devices into more classrooms, reaching up to 40 faculty members to date. But after hearing all the feedback, they’ve decided to run another iPad study, says Kenneth Yoshioka, a graphic, media, and training specialist at the university. Next time the study will include students as well.

At Cincinnati, where the study is also exclusive to faculty members, researchers say the experience has been useful so far, particularly in science and engineering courses because there are a number of useful, interactive apps available for these subjects as compared with the humanities courses.

“We’re looking for people who have clear goals in mind based on what they’re going to do in the classroom,” says Carolyn J. Stoll. They choose the faculty members carefully and purposefully, focusing on the individual’s pedagogical goals and analyzing the methodology.

The university, Ms. Stoll says, is now looking at purchasing new types of tablets to add to the study, and they have no end date for the experiment in sight.

One sign of the growing presence of technology on college campuses is the rising numbers at the annual meeting of Educause, which kicks off Tuesday in Philadelphia. This year more than 7,300 people are signed up to attend, up from 6,500 at last year’s meeting.

The bulk of the attendees work as technology leaders on campuses, though many others represent the 266 tech companies setting up booths at the show to persuade colleges to use their products to support teaching, research, or administrative functions. (This year’s attendance is not technically the largest ever, but officials say it is “near peak,” which in this economy, counts as a kind of record.)

The Chronicle’s Wired Campus team will be there to file reports on new ideas, as will representatives of the ProfHacker blog.

All week long, the conference will offer sessions on campus technology trends—so many that printing out the program exhausted our printer’s paper tray. To get a sense of what all those panels are about, we decided to make a “tag cloud” of all the session titles from the conference (see above).

“Learning” appeared most frequently (probably a good sign for an education conference). More specifically, officials I’ve talked to recently said they were eager to hear about the latest in the battle to provide course-management systems to campuses, ideas for using “the cloud” (or, Web-based services), and examples of interesting mobile applications for teaching (for smartphones or tablet computers).

What do you see as the biggest trends in education-technology? Is all this gear helping learning?

Oh, and there’s one more indicator of how big the show has gotten: @Educause_Hulk, a Twitter feed purporting to be from the eight-foot-tall green superhero. All the messages are in all-caps of course.

Washington — Big-scale collaborations and digital-era collection strategies took center stage at the Association of Research Libraries’ membership meeting, held here last week. The library directors and others who attended heard about ambitious research and preservation projects like the HathiTrust digital repository and the proposed Digital Public Library of America, plans for which are moving ahead.

They also heard from librarians and scholars about how they operate in a hybrid research environment that’s partly but not entirely digital. The meeting was followed by a forum—organized by the association and by the Coalition for Networked Information—that took up the theme of “21st-Century Collections and the Urgency of Collaborative Action.” Think big but don’t overextend yourselves, and work together whenever you can: Those were the takeaways of the collective sessions.

Charles J. Henry, the president of the Council on Library and Information Resources, gave a recap of the work that’s been done so far toward building the Digital Public Library of America. (On October 21, the National Archives will host a plenary meeting here about the proposed library.) “Library” is a misnomer in this case, according to Mr. Henry. “The DPLA would be much more of a federation of existing objects. It wouldn’t own anything.” Its big contribution, he said, would be to set standards and link resources. “It has to be a project that can respond to the most varied and disparate types of questions,” he said. “The user has to drive this.”

In a presentation about another large-scale effort, the HathiTrust digital repository, Ed Van Gemert, deputy director of libraries at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, talked about the benefits of participating in such a collective endeavor. For instance, his institution has found that it’s almost three times more expensive to store materials locally than it is to store them with HathiTrust, Mr. Van Gemert said. It’s time to move beyond the “pay by the drink” model, he said. “We’re seeing, at every level, more and more collective decisions being made,” he said, describing the overall research-library environment. “We simply can’t afford to do work separately than could be done collectively.”

But ambitious collaboration has its risks, as attendees heard during at a session called “Opening Up Orphan Works.” (Orphan works are those subject to copyright but whose rights holders can’t be identified or found.) That panel included an overview of the legal action recently brought by the Authors Guild and other groups against HathiTrust over the fate of millions of scanned works in the repository. Jonathan Band, a lawyer who specializes in copyright and works closely with the association, described the lawsuit as “peculiar.” But he also said it “may be symptomatic of a bigger change among publishers and authors, who for a long time were reluctant to sue universities and libraries.”

Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, gave the audience some insights into what it’s like to do research in the current environment, where many resources are available via a simple Google search—but many are not. Mr. Kurzman specializes in the Middle East; his most recent book is The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists (Oxford University Press). Many of the primary sources he uses are not digitized yet. “In the world I study, there are no e-books,” he said.

Several groups in the Middle East are digitizing a lot of material, Mr. Kurzman added. He mentioned the Biblioteca Alexandrina in Egypt, for instance, and an organization based in Tehran that has been building a database of Iranian periodicals from the last 15 years. That work adds to what’s already available via Google Books, HathiTrust, and other resources.

He pointed out that researchers now also create and share digital resources themselves via social-publishing sites such as Scribd. “It’s a form of librarianship, I suppose, that is outside of copyright control and outside of the institutional apparatus that you all are professionals are making available to us,” he said.

Presentations from several librarians made it clear that they, too, are finding new ways to work. Trevor Owens is an information technology specialist with the National Digital Infrastructure and Information Preservation Program, or NDIIPP, at the Library of Congress. He talked about the need for collection-level tools that allow scholars and curators to see beyond catalog records.

Mr. Owens described Recollection, a free platform built by NDIIPP and a company named Zepheira to give a better “collection-level view” of libraries’ holdings. The platform can be used to build interactive maps, timelines, and other interfaces from descriptive metadata and other information in library catalogs. So, for instance, plain-text place names on a spreadsheet can be turned into points of latitude and longitude and plotted on a map.

At the final session, on “Rebalancing the Investment in Collections,” H. Thomas Hickerson, vice provost and university librarian at the University of Calgary, said libraries had painted themselves into a corner by focusing too much on their collection budgets. Investing in the right skills and partnerships is most critical now, he said. “The comprehensive and well-crafted collection is no longer an end in itself.”

John V. Lombardi, president of the Louisiana State University system, told librarians that they shouldn’t rush to be the first to digitize everything and invest in every new technology. “Everybody underestimates the cost of innovation,” he said. “Instead of rushing in and participating in a game where you don’t have the muscle, you want to stand back” and wait for the right moment.

Ever blunt, Mr. Lombardi used humor to make his point. When people ask him for money, he said, his first question is, What will that project do to make the university more competitive? “If you can’t persuade me that the work you’re doing is going to make us more famous, we’re not going to be interested in investing in you,” he said. “Is that wise and profound and good? No. It’s stupid. But that’s the way it is.”

His concluding comment: “The football team is allowed to run a deficit of $3- to $7-million. And you’re not.”

Why Education Start-Ups Fail: Education is a big market for entrepreneurs and investors, but not in the way they often think, writes Avichal Garg. Many entrepreneurs think they can use technology to make education better for a relatively wealthy audience in the United States. They would have more success focusing on making education cheaper for poor Americans or students in Asia, and tempering their goals to grow quickly, Mr. Garg writes.

OpenClass Reviewed: Pearson Education announced last week that it would join with Google to start OpenClass, a free learning-management system. But how well does it work? A tester at the University of Wisconsin, Rovy Branon, says close integration with Google is what makes the product so intriguing. Another tester, Gary Ritter, praises the flexibility of OpenClass’s communication tools.

Software Skepticism: An article in The New York Times casts a critical eye on the effectiveness of software in instruction. Although it focuses on K-12 education, it singles out Carnegie Learning, an adaptive learning company that was recently bought by the University of Phoenix.

Educause Guide: The Knewton blog offers several guides to higher education’s main technology conference, Educause, which starts next week. The guides include a Twitter directory of speakers and tips to make the most of the conference.

Crosstalk is a weekly feature on Wired Campus that links to some of the best online conversations and ideas about technology in higher education during the past week. Send ideas to josh.keller@chronicle.com.

A new effort will help college newspapers add paywalls to their Web sites, enabling editors to collect donations or charge subscription fees to frequent readers of online editions.

The digital-subscription company Press+ and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will cover the start-up fees for adding a meter system to the first 50 campus papers that sign up.

So far, most of the newspapers interested in adopting the system do not plan to charge on-campus users, and many plan to simply ask for donations from off-campus readers rather than making payment mandatory.

The project follows recent high-profile moves by national and local newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Dallas Morning News, to require readers to pay for access to certain online content.

Boston University’s Daily Free Press introduced a system for donations a few weeks ago, and it has already brought in some additional revenue, said Annie Ropeik, chair of the paper’s board of directors.

“We were skittish at first of the idea of an actual paywall that would lock you out,” Ms. Ropeik said. “But once the donation idea came up, it seemed like a no-lose situation for us.”

Ms. Ropeik, a senior at the university, said the paper is struggling to cover costs and it’s hoped that the donation system will help, even if it doesn’t net big revenue.

A few college newspapers are experimenting with charging for content. Oklahoma State University’s Daily O’Collegian was the first campus newspaper to charge for online content. Under its model, any non-student outside a 25-mile radius of the college must pay $10 a year for access to more than three articles a month.

Jeff Jarvis, a blogger and professor of new media at the City University of New York, said he can’t fathom why a campus newspaper would want to charge readers, even to only those off campus. Most college newspapers, he said, accrue little cost because their labor is voluntary and the printed paper, if there is one, is generally paid for through student dues.

But to Gordon Crovitz, the co-founder of Press+, the idea is not only about financial gain, but also offers a way to teach student journalists about new business models.

“The student journalists running college newspapers who hope to have a career in journalism are very aware that the traditional media model is broken,” he said in a statement. “This generation needs to find new revenue streams, including new ways to collect revenues from the readers who get the most value from the access.”

For Boston University’s Daily Free Press, though, Ms. Ropeik said her paper’s new policy is all about the money. The donation page on the Web site, she said, is a way to reach out to current donors in a more obvious way, and perhaps get others to support the paper as well.

Mr. Jarvis said college newspapers should instead model their ideas on Facebook in trying to find new revenue streams.

“Rather than experimenting with paywalls and trying to learn from that,” Mr. Jarvis said, “I think colleges would be much better off asking, ‘What would Mark Zuckerberg do?’ ”

Incoming students at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science this year are getting a new kind of welcome-to-campus perk: Free data storage, for keeps.

The service, called LifeTime Library, works on students’ personal computers, allowing them to automatically archive files and folders. The data are preserved on the Web, where students can search for files by name or by date saved.

Students can continue to use the online storage locker after they graduate, and the plan is for the program to remain free, said Gary Marchionini, the school’s dean. About 60 incoming students out of a total of 160 have signed up for the first year of the program, he said.

The idea is to “help students learn to manage their digital lives,” Mr. Marchionini said. Dealing with large amounts of online data is a big part of what students learn at the School of Information and Library Science, and the LifeTime Library can serve as a teaching tool for students to figure out the best ways to organize reams of their own digital information.

For example, two of courses will focus at least in part on ways to make the service more useful. Mr. Marchionini hopes that with student input, the program will soon be able to save every version of a file—such as, say, a Word document that has been edited multiple times. Perhaps the program will be able to archive mobile phone data, too, or crawl a student’s Facebook page, Mr. Marchionini said (the public parts only, of course).

The school has no plans to scan what students are putting in their digital archives, though it retains the legal right to do so, and students must adhere to an acceptable use policy. “It’s not our intention to go looking for abuses,” Mr. Marchionini said.

The school has at least doubled its data-storage capacity, but much more space will be needed to keep the service sustainable in the long run, the dean said. He’s hoping he can get alumni donors on board.

As the program continues, not only will more students stash their data, but users may well store more than they would have otherwise. That makes it hard to know how much storage will be needed—and therefore how much the school will have to pay to maintain the service, Mr. Marchionini said.

For now, though, these 60 graduate and undergraduate students get to back up their files free. And, later on, if they’re feeling nostalgic, they can dig through their old work.

Faced with criticism over how it identifies “orphan works,” the HathiTrust digital repository acknowledged that its procedure is “flawed” and said it was working to fix the problems before it makes those works more widely available. A work is considered an orphan if it’s subject to copyright but its owner can’t be identified or found.

HathiTrust planned to release the first batch of books in its Orphan Works Project next month. Access would still be limited to users of the repository’s partner libraries, and rights holders would still be free to claim ownership.

John Wilkin, the trust’s executive director, said the project will proceed once his group has ironed out the identification procedure. Mr. Wilkin also said that the decision was not a response to a lawsuit filed on Monday by the Authors Guild.

The guild, together with two foreign writers groups and eight individual authors, is suing HathiTrust and five universities over the fate of millions of scanned works in the repository. The plaintiffs said that they were worried about the security of the files, and that HathiTrust and its partners had engaged in unauthorized scanning and distribution of that material.

This week, the authors’ group also announced on its blog that it had found the rights holders of several books included on HathiTrust’s initial list of orphan-works candidates.

Describing the guild as sounding “gleeful” in its posts, James Grimmelman, an associate professor at New York Law School, said on his own blog that the guild’s experiment had cast serious doubt on HathiTrust’s procedures. The results demonstrate “that HathiTrust’s orphan-tagging workflow cannot be relied on to identify genuinely orphan works with sufficient confidence to be usable,” he wrote in a post called “HathiTrust Single-Handedly Sinks Orphan Works Reform.”

HathiTrust said it took the criticisms seriously and would proceed with the Orphan Works Project once it had addressed them. “The close and welcome scrutiny of the list of potential orphan works has revealed a number of errors, some of them serious,” it said in its statement. “Once we create a more robust, transparent, and fully documented process, we will proceed with the work, because we remain as certain as ever that our proposed uses of orphan works are lawful and important to the future of scholarship and the libraries that support it.”

A graduate of the University of Missouri and his brother were sentenced to three years of probation after using the university’s computer network in a national spamming operation that hit more than 2,000 colleges and bombarded them with messages, The Columbia Daily Tribune reports. In 2009, The Chronicle reported that Amir Ahmad Shah and Osmaan Ahmad Shah were charged with using their operation to sell more than $4-million in products and damaging the university network. Their sentence included several months of home detention and a stint in a halfway house, plus forfeiture of property worth nearly $500,000.

Jill Wykosky, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, needed to make some antibodies, but she couldn’t do it all herself.

To help find a lab partner, she tried a new Web site called Science Exchange, posting an ad there saying she needed someone to make peptides to be used as “antigen for monoclonal antibody production.” Within a couple of days, she had bids from seven or eight companies.

She said the site was much faster than the alternative—asking around and e-mailing potential partners for rate quotes. “It’s a huge timesaver,” Ms. Wykosky said.

Ms. Wykosky is one of more than 3,000 researchers who have signed up for Science Exchange in the month since it opened.

Some of the early results have surprised the site’s co-creator, Elizabeth Iorns, an assistant professor at the University of Miami. For instance, about half the people who have signed up are from outside the United States.

The site functions like a marketplace, linking researchers who need to outsource parts of their work with people from institutions and companies who can provide that help. The providers bid, the researchers pick the bid that suits them best, and Science Exchange takes about a 5 percent cut (that percentage drops for bids worth more than $5,000).

The idea for the project came from Ms. Iorns’s own problems outsourcing research to other institutions. “The hardest part was paying” for such services, Ms. Iorns said, because universities often don’t have a protocol for how to pay for outsourced research.

This is not the first effort to use the Internet to link researchers to the facilities they need, but the “market aspect” of Science Exchange makes it different, said Edward G. Derrick, chief program director for the Center of Science Policy and Society Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The site’s model has raised questions for Michael R. Rossi, director of the Cancer Genomics Shared Resource at Emory University’s Winship Cancer Institute. Mr. Rossi thinks researchers may get into trouble with the National Institutes of Health and other institutions that support them if they pay a third party a fee to find outsourced work. “That really could become a big problem,” Mr. Rossi said.

Ms. Iorns, though, said she has been in contact with the NIH’s National Center for Research Resources, and she said officials there have been enthusiastic about the idea. “This is something they’ve really wanted to set up for some time,” she said.

Mr. Rossi said he has used the Web site, answering another researcher’s call for help. “I’m not going to be on this every week,” he said, because the university usually has its own research to pay attention to. Here and there, though, his lab’s core facilities become available.

The site does have “great potential” to connect people with places in a way that hasn’t been done before, Mr. Rossi said, particularly for researchers at smaller institutions.

Chegg, the textbook-rental company, announced on Thursday that it was buying Zinch, a Web site that matches students with colleges and scholarships. The acquisition is Chegg’s latest move in its expansion from renting textbooks to becoming a wide-ranging student portal. “This is the beginning of a connected student network that we hope to build into a giant platform,” Dan Rosensweig, Chegg’s CEO, told All Things Digital. “We want to have a student using us all the way through for a 10-year span, from high school on.”

A game-changing e-textbook project at Indiana University—in which the university requires certain students to purchase e-textbooks and negotiates unusually low prices by promising publishers large numbers of sales—now has the participation of major textbook publishers, and university officials plan to expand the effort.

Today McGraw-Hill Higher Education announced that it has agreed to join the project, which has been in a pilot stage for more than a year. A handful of other publishers—John Wiley & Sons; Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group; W.W. Norton; and Flat World Knowledge—have signed on to the effort as well.

Here’s how it works: Students in a select group of courses are required to pay a materials fee, which gets them access to the assigned electronic textbooks or other readings for the course. The university essentially becomes the broker of the textbook sales, and because it is buying in bulk and guaranteeing a high volume, officials say they can score better prices than can the campus bookstore or other retailers.

How good are the prices? Bradley C. Wheeler, the university’s vice president for information technology who is leading the e-textbook effort, says that students save more money through the program than they would if they bought a printed book and resold it at the end of the semester (a common practice among cost-conscious students). A McGraw-Hill official said the deal gave the university a 20 percent discount off its usual e-book prices.

Mr. Wheeler also said that the university’s deal with publishers gives students access to the e-textbooks for a longer period of time than publishers traditionally allow for electronic copies. Typically, the digital textbook files self-destruct after a set period of time, usually a semester or a year. For e-textbooks at Indiana’s program, students are allowed to read the electronic copies for as long as they are enrolled at the university.

The university put out a call for proposals last year asking publishers to participate, and Mr. Wheeler said he still hopes to sign on more publishers. He said persuading the publishers to agree to the price and access terms took some doing, and he described the negotiations with McGraw-Hill in particular as “a very long discussion.”

Officials from McGraw-Hill say that what led them to join was that the model helped them encourage use of the company’s new digitally enhanced textbooks, including its McGraw-Hill Connect line of titles that include online quizzes for students and other features.

This is the first time McGraw Hill has signed an institutional subscription for its e-textbooks, but it hopes to sign similar deals with other universities, said Tom Malek, vice president for learning solutions for McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

He said the Indiana model will help solve another problem faced by professors—that their students often wait to purchase textbooks and are therefore not ready to do assignments at the beginning of the semester. “Now everyone has the materials on the first day of class,” said Mr. Malek.

Each professor at Indiana can decide whether to participate in the e-textbook project. So far 22 courses have done so, and last month the university released a report outlining how those professors and their students (1,700 in all) liked the arrangement. It included data from surveys of students in 12 of those courses—1,037 students.

More than half of them—about 60 percent—said they preferred the e-textbook to a traditional printed copy. But the satisfaction varied wildly by course. In one case, only 36 percent of students preferred the e-textbook, though officials say students in that course were unhappy because the professor made little use of the required textbook so they felt they got limited benefit from the required fee. In another course, 84 percent of students said they preferred the e-textbook to print.

Slightly more than half of the students surveyed—about 55 percent—said they read less of the e-textbook than they would have read from a printed copy, while 22 percent said they read more from the e-textbook than they would have from a printed copy.

Officials were watching closely to see whether students simply printed out the e-books and read from those paper copies. According to system logs, 68 percent of the students printed no pages, while 19 percent printed more than 50 pages.

The report makes it clear that the university is pushing forward with the project: “In summary, we believe that the future is digital and that this model is an important step towards that future.”

Have you heard that higher education is a scam? That accusation is racing around YouTube these days, in a video that has been viewed more than two million times.

The hourlong video, College Conspiracy, was produced by a group called the National Inflation Association, which warns of a coming era of hyperinflation and recommends converting personal wealth to precious metals. The video features slick animation, an ominous soundtrack, and interviews with indebted students and critical professors.

The video’s main argument: “College education is the largest scam in American history,” and university leaders care only about “lining their own pockets” rather than helping students.

Most college officials would undoubtedly dispute those charges, and question some of the facts rattled off in the video. But the video’s popularity highlights a growing frustration among members of the public with the soaring costs of education at a time of rising unemployment.

Many students have posted their own video rants complaining that they felt duped by college. One recent graduate burned his undergraduate diploma on a grill and posted the video to YouTube. Another student who plans to graduate soon called his degree “worthless.”

The producers of College Conspiracy did not return calls and e-mail messages requesting comment. One professor who appears in the film, Karl Klein, an associate professor of computer studies at Onondaga Community College, said he was not aware of how the interview would be used when he talked to a member of the National Inflation Association.

“I would have called it something like, ‘Is There a College Bubble?’” he said. “But I think there are some things in that video that we need to think about and talk about, and I’m not sure there is a real good conversation taking place in higher education about cost.”

The group’s video is not the first to use the s-word—scam—in describing colleges. A Chronicle blogger, Richard Vedder, did so in December.

The University of North Carolina has a special message for students who want to access the dorm’s Internet network: “UNC-CHAPEL HILL IS BLOCKING FILE-SHARING THROUGHOUT STUDENT HOUSING.”

That’s at the top of a Web page which pops up on laptops that have file-sharing programs, when they connect to the university’s network. Students aren’t allowed to access the Internet until they’ve uninstalled the offending software or request an exception that the university is calling a “hall pass.”

The pass is an agreement the student signs that says he or she has a file-sharing program but “any copyright violation linked to a device registered under my name will result in an automatic referral to the Dean of Students office.” They also agree to learn what does and does not violate copyright law.

Officials hope the new policy will both prevent students from getting into legal pickles and help the university cut the costs that come with complying with the Higher Education Opportunity Act, which requires institutions to follow up on complaints about copyright infringements on their networks.

The university has already seen a big drop in the number of dorm computers that use file-sharing software, from about 1,000 last year to about 50 this year. Of those 50, about half have opted for the hall pass. The other half remain quarantined and unable to access the network, officials say.

A total of about 11,000 computers are on the dormitory network. The university never learns what is downloaded via the file-sharing programs—just whether or not a computer has those programs.

Until this year, every time a student on the network received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act violation notice, an information-technology employee would contact the student to explain what had happened, and ask the student to take an online course. “All of that added up to a significant amount of time and effort,” said Stan Waddell, the university’s information-security officer. He estimates North Carolina spends $40,000 a year dealing with copyright infringement, and manpower roughly equal to half of one employee’s week, every week of the year.

North Carolina no longer has the time or the resources. It has laid off more than 50 information-technology staffers in the past three years, because of budget cuts.

Tracy Mitrano, director of IT policy at Cornell University, where she also directs the computer-policy and -law program, said she can see why costs would drive a college to consider blocking file-sharing software.

But not every college would want such a wide-ranging prohibition, Ms. Mitrano said. Engineering and science-heavy institutions would have a hard time, for instance, because those fields often require a lot of file-sharing. Cornell, she says, wouldn’t do it because it would violate a student code that emphasizes “freedom with responsibility.”

Regardless of the institution, college students often don’t have solid grasp of copyright laws, don’t know how to properly uninstall programs, “or just have too many other things on their minds to take this issue seriously,” Ms. Mitrano said.

At North Carolina, students who get caught often used to claim ignorance, said Chris Williams, who manages the dorm network, known as ResNET. “Many of them would say that they didn’t know it was illegal,” he said.

Now, ignorance is no longer a defense. “They’re not going to pass go, they’re not going to collect $200,” said Jim Gogan, North Carolina’s director of networking.