Technology/Administrators

The University of Texas at Austin is in negotiations about joining two prominent organizations that offer MOOCs (or massive open online courses), The Texas Tribune reported. The two are Coursera and edX. Texas officials said that the outcome of the negotiations could be announced in a few weeks.

There's a new kind of massive open online course (MOOC), and it lacks an instructor, The New York Times reported. The course will combine existing materials from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCoureware project, quizzes from Codeacademy and study groups from Open Study, and will be coordinated by Peer 2 Peer University. With those services, organizers said, an instructor (while central to other MOOC offerings) won't be necessary. The first offering will be on a computer programming language and is called "A Gentle Introduction to Python."

Coursera, the company that provides support and Web hosting for massive open online courses at top universities, announced Thursday that more than 1 million students have registered for its courses. The company now serves as a MOOC platform for 16 universities and lists 116 courses, most of which have not started yet. The students registering for the courses are increasingly from the United States. Coursera told Inside Higher Ed earlier this summer that about 25 percent of its students hailed from the United States; that figure now stands at 38.5 percent, or about 385,000 students. Brazil, India and China follow, with between 40,000 to 60,000 registrants each. U.S. students cannot easily get formal credit through Coursera or its partners institutions, but some universities abroad reportedly have awarded credit to students who have taken the free courses.

Online teacher education is growing rapidly, according to an analysis published by USA Today. The newspaper found that four large universities (three of them for-profit) have become the largest teacher education institutions in the country, measured by degrees awarded. In the top spot is the University of Phoenix Online, which awarded 5,976 education degrees in 2011, up from 72 a decade before. The top four institutions awarded 1 in 16 bachelor's degree and post-graduate certificates in education in 2011, and 1 in 11 master's and doctoral degrees.

Higher One, a student payment processing service, on Tuesday announced its purchase of Campus Labs, a software company focused on student affairs. Higher One is a publicly traded company that currently dominates the market for debit cards colleges use to disburse financial aid to students, a business that has at times been controversial. The purchase of Campus Labs marks an expansion by the company into a new area.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a United Nations agency, has ordered GoDaddy.com to take four university-branded Web domains out of the hands of a cyber-squatter who was allegedly using the sites to scam students out of cash. Mark "Omar" Quevillon, a resident of Cambridge, Mass., registered the domains Brandeis.me, Tufts.me, UVM.me and Babson.me in an alleged attempt to "sell" access to personalized apps to students, according to WIPO. But the websites have nothing to do with Babson College, the University of Vermont, and Tufts and Brandeis Universities. And so the universities jointly filed a complaint with WIPO, saying that Quevillon has been using their trademarked brands to confuse students and make a quick buck. Although WIPO is not a court, it is empowered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to resolve domain disputes and has the cooperation of domain registrants such as GoDaddy.com. Zick Rubin, a lawyer for the universities, said he does not know how much Quevillon is believed to have made from the scam. The phony websites are still live, but Rubin says GoDaddy.com has been instructed to take them down by Aug. 12 unless Quevillon fights the ruling.