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Washington State is creating a new online institution through a partnership with Western Governors University. Gov. Chris Gregoire signed a bill (HB 1822) on Friday establishing WGU Washington, which had been touted as a way to expand access to education without spending state money. The arrangement is similar to an earlier deal struck between the State of Indiana and the nonprofit online university.

There appears to be one key difference, though. Indiana students can use state financial aid toward WGU Indiana programs. The news release announcing WGU Washington mentions the availability of only federal, not state, financial aid. Previously, Washington legislators had amended the measure to ensure that students at Western Governors would not receive state financial aid unless a policy to grant such aid was approved by the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Board. The worry was that WGU would drain resources from other colleges.

Wired Campus

Youngstown State University has been plagued by a Web mimic. Officials alerted the campus community last week to a Web site that appeared to be masquerading as the official university Web site, according to the Youngstown State student newspaper The Jambar.

The administration was alerted to the Web site ysu.com, whose content has since been deleted, when a Youngstown State student unsuccessfully tried to log in, according to the student paper. The official university site is ysu.edu.

Officials at Youngstown State speculated to The Jambar that the site owners might be looking to obtain the log-in credentials for any students, faculty, or staff fooled into thinking they were on the official site. If that strategy worked, the site’s owner could have gained access to user accounts on the actual Youngstown Web site. Another possibility, officials said, is that the site could have been a scheme to get the university to buy the domain name, to end the confusion. It’s listed for sale for $…

Wired Campus

On May 16, the trial phase is scheduled to begin in a copyright-infringement case brought by publishers against Georgia State University, involving faculty use of copyrighted material in their courses. Publishers Weekly reports that the judge supervising the case dismissed several claims brought by the publishers’ group but allowed one count to stand.

Although the recently derailed Google Books settlement has dominated the news, the Georgia case, Cambridge University Press et al. v. Patton et al., may have a profound effect on how much previously published material professors can safely use.

Wired Campus

California State University is running one of the nation’s largest pilot studies of e-textbooks, involving thousands of students on five campuses, and one of the biggest findings so far boils down to the cliché the devil is in the details. Whether or not students liked their digital textbooks depended on what rules publishers set on how the digital books could be used.

“Every publisher has a little bit different terms and conditions,” said Gerard L. Hanley, senior director of academic technology services at California State University’s office of the chancellor. Such rules, including whether a student can print the whole book or only a portion of it, or whether the text can be downloaded to a computer or only accessed online, “really impact the students’ ability to use the content,” he added.

The university system has prepared a preliminary report on the project, which Mr. Hanley summarized for The Chronicle but declined to share until a more detailed report is available in a few…

Wired Campus

Max Hailperin passed on this story to the SIGCSE-Members list.  He added that: “About 40 students will graduate from the program in May. But that will leave about 40 who haven’t. They hope to get those students through within two years. But even if they do, the students may be forced to take upper-level computer science classes from faculty who may not have taught them before.” Interesting that Aviation was going to be cancelled, too, but the local business community worked to save that program. But not CS.

It’s been a bit blue in Minnesota State University’s computer science department.

But it’s not hard to understand why.

“Everyone in the department has either been fired, retired or has resigned,” said Dean Kelley, one of those faculty members. “Two took retirement — one effective last year, one this year — one who was on a leave of absence and has resigned. As for the remaining three, the word they used was ‘retrenched.’”

Computer science as a functioning program at MSU will…

Computing Education Blog