Hailey Schnorr has spent years peering into the bedrooms, kitchens, and dorm rooms of students via Webcam. In her job proctoring online tests for universities, she has learned to focus mainly on students' eyes. Ms. Schnorr works for ProctorU, a company hired by universities to police the integrity of their online courses. ProctorU is part of a…

The largest-ever survey of professors who have taught MOOCs, or massive open online courses, shows that the process is time-consuming, but, according to the instructors, often successful. Nearly half of the professors felt their online courses were as rigorous academically as the versions they taught in the classroom. The survey, conducted by "The…

Mike Potts was halfway through a five-year prison sentence outside Houston when he heard about a program that would help him start a business when even buddies with clean records were struggling to find work. The Prison Entrepreneurship Program, run by a nonprofit group of the same name, works with Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business…

Inside campus libraries and dormitory rooms, thousands of students connect to the Internet not only to study with online systems like Blackboard but also to watch movies and TV shows on Netflix. Computers, smartphones, wireless printers, tablets, iPods, Xboxes, handheld gaming systems, e-readers, smart TVs, Blu-ray players--students now bring an…

Ph.D.'s are used to shelling out tens of thousands of dollars in the name of education. But earning the top graduate degree doesn't mean their spending has come to an end. An industry designed to help aspiring academics manage the job-application process and land tenure-track jobs is growing, and reaping the benefits of a tight market in many…

Families flummoxed about what college will cost them have more information at their disposal than ever before. The Internet offers tuition data, advice on saving and borrowing, and explanations of financial aid. New online calculators let families estimate their bottom-line price at any college. But not all the information out there is easy to…

The e-mail drill was one of numerous mind-training exercises in a unique class designed to raise students' awareness about how they use their digital tools. Colleges have experimented with short-term social-media blackouts in the past. But Ms. Hill's course, "Information and Contemplation," goes way further. Participants scrutinize their use of…

Matt Ivester became notorious on campuses across the country in 2007 for publishing gossip--not about celebrities but about students--on Juicy-Campus, the Web site he created. The site was blocked by some colleges, banned by several student governments, and threatened with legal action by several students who claimed that defaming comments on the…

Western Oklahoma State College's name comes up whenever athletes get themselves in a jam: They've failed a class. They've dropped another. Maybe they're just short on credits. But they still want to play. Western Oklahoma gives them a chance, offering three credits in two weeks--and for less than $400. Almost as appealing: The community college…

Colleges share many things on Twitter, but one topic can be risky to broach: the reading habits of library patrons. Patrons' privacy is precious to most librarians. Yet new Web services thrive on collecting and sharing the very information that has long been protected. This points to an emerging tension as libraries embrace digital services.…

As free online courses draw students to star professors at prestigious colleges, Peer 2 Peer University asks whether instructors are needed at all. This article features Peer 2 Peer University, a three-year-old online institution where students learn together, at no charge, using materials found on the Web. The unusual institution, where anyone…

Scholarly groups have long served as hubs of academic life and the embodiments of their disciplines, but they face uncertain and divergent futures. Some disciplinary associations are struggling to remain relevant and financially viable as demographic and technological changes threaten their traditional sources of revenue. The core of their…

In "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Indiana Jones--perhaps the last heroic professor to appear in a major Hollywood film--survives a series of adventures involving spiders, snakes, treacherous colleagues, and countless Nazis who are determined to recover the ark of the covenant for their "Fuhrer." Apparently the ark has mystical powers. Ultimately,…

The story of one University of Maine student's quest for a reasonably priced textbook reveals just how complicated course materials have become as the textbook industry makes its awkward transition from print to digital. The student is Luke Thomas, a senior majoring in business on the Orono campus, who last semester took a 250-person introductory…

In academe, the game of how to win friends and influence people is serious business. Administrators and grant makers want proof that a researcher's work has life beyond the library or the lab. But the current system of measuring scholarly influence does not reflect the way many researchers work in an environment driven more and more by the social…