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In October, Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, got a quirky request on YouTube. A hyperactive instructor in a plaid jacket posted a video inviting her to do a Skype interview with his “World Regions” geography class at Virginia Tech.

Ms. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate often compared to Nelson Mandela, might have ignored this plea were it not for how the video ended. The camera pivoted from the instructor, John Boyer, to an auditorium filled with some 3,000 students. They leapt from their seats, blew noisemakers, and chanted her name as if the Hokies had scored a touchdown.

It worked. On December 5, Ms. Suu Kyi, who last month won election to Parliament after spending much of the past two decades in detention, took questions from Mr. Boyer’s students via Skype. “I cried a little bit,” says Alex Depew, a senior. “I’m not gonna lie.”

The moment marked the biggest coup yet in Mr. Boyer’s experiment with supersizing the classroom. Conventional wisdom deems smaller classes superior. Mr. Boyer, a self-described “Podunk instructor,” calls that “poppycock.” He’s exploring how technology can help engage students in face-to-face courses that enroll from 600 to nearly 3,000 students.

(Read the rest of this story at www.chronicle.com.)

For years, some analysts have argued that ready access to Pell Grants and federal loans actually props up colleges prices. That’s because institutions have little incentive to charge anything beneath the floor set by available financial aid. A recently launched for-profit institution, New Charter University, is trying to change that equation, by offering online courses so cheap that students shouldn’t need to borrow. Read my story about the school here.

Higher education’s spin on the Silicon Valley garage. That was the vision laid out in September, when the Georgia Institute of Technology announced a new lab for disruptive ideas, the Center for 21st Century Universities. During a visit to Atlanta last week, I checked in to see how things were going, sitting down with Richard A. DeMillo, the center’s director and Georgia Tech’s former dean of computing, and Paul M.A. Baker, the center’s associate director. We talked about challenges and opportunities facing colleges at a time of economic pain and technological change—among them the chance that many universities might follow Borders Bookstores into oblivion. Read the Q&A here.

The Chronicle profiles a dozen people doing some of the most innovative work at the intersection of technology and higher education. Articles by Jeff Young, Jennifer Howard, Nick DeSantis, and myself. I tell the stories of Carnegie Mellon’s Candace Thille (Treating Higher Ed’s ‘Cost Disease’ With Supersize Online Courses) and George Mason’s Dan Cohen (A Digital Humanist Puts New Tools in the Hands of Scholars).

Liberals would be well-served, says Jonathan Haidt, to wise up about conservatives’ gut feelings. In this week’s Chronicle Review, I profile the moral psychologist, happiness guru and liberal scold. A sidebar explores the controversy over Haidt’s claims about liberal bias in the field of social psychology. And a graph lets you see where you fall on the moral spectrum. Also, see some reaction to these articles in The American Conservative, The Atlantic, and Reason.

Millions of learners have enjoyed the free lecture videos and other course materials published online through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project. Now MIT plans to release a fresh batch of open online courses—and, for the first time, to offer certificates to outside students who complete them.

The credentials are part of a new, interactive e-learning venture, tentatively called MITx, that is expected to host “a virtual community of millions of learners around the world,” the institute will announce on Monday.

Here’s how it will work: MITx will give anyone free access to an online-course platform. Users will include students on the MIT campus, but also external learners like high-school seniors and engineering majors at other colleges. They’ll watch videos, answer questions, practice exercises, visit online labs, and take quizzes and tests. They’ll also connect with others working on the material.

The first course will begin around the spring of 2012. MIT has not yet announced its subject, but the goal is to build a portfolio of high-demand courses—the kind that draw more than 200 people to lecture halls on the campus, in Cambridge, Mass. MIT is investing “millions of dollars” in the project, said L. Rafael Reif, the provost, and the plan is to solicit more from donors and foundations.

Ten years ago, MIT galvanized the open-education movement by giving away free learning materials from 2,100 courses. But some universities are moving beyond publishing online syllabi and simple videos. They now provide virtual tutors and automated feedback through interactive projects like the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University and the free online computer-science courses at Stanford University. MIT’s new venture is a step in that direction.

If Stanford’s experience is any indication, the potential pool of participants could be vast. Back in November, roughly 94,000 students enrolled in Andrew Ng’s open course on machine learning there.

(Read the rest of this story at www.chronicle.com.)

Educators have long held that the interactions between students and professors defy simple reduction. Yet in several areas of campus life, colleges are converting the student experience into numbers to crunch in the name of improving education.

Think of it as higher education meets Moneyball. In the movie, Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane reinvents his struggling baseball team by analyzing statistics in new ways to predict player success. In education, college managers are doing something similar to forecast student success—in admissions, advising, teaching, and more.

In one Harvard calculus class, even who you pair up with for group discussion is determined by a computer, one that tracks how well students are doing on the material.

The software records Ben Falloon’s location in the back row and how he answers each practice problem. Come discussion time, it tries to stir up debate by matching students who gave different responses to the most recent question. For Mr. Falloon, the system, called Learning Catalytics, spits out this prompt: Please discuss your response with Alexis Smith (in front of you) and Emily Kraemer (to your left).

Getting data down to frontline students and instructors like this marks a shift for an industry that often focuses on pushing numbers up to accreditors and trustees, says Mark Milliron, formerly of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which backs college data-mining.

“I know more about my 11-year-old son’s sixth-grade basketball team than the average college faculty member knows about their incoming class, in terms of key variables that are going to make them successful or not successful,” he adds. “It is a sin that that is the case.”

(Read the rest of this story at www.chronicle.com.)

The spread of technology designed to combat academic cheating has created a set of tricky challenges, and sometimes unexpected fallout, for faculty members determined to weed out plagiarism in their classrooms.

In the latest development, the company that sells colleges access to Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection program that checks uploaded papers against various databases to pinpoint unoriginal content, now also caters directly to students with a newer tool called WriteCheck, which lets users scan papers for plagiarism before handing them in.

Meanwhile, faculty members at some colleges are adopting a reverse image-search program called TinEye, which lets them investigate plagiarism in ­visual materials like photos and architectural designs.

Cheating is nothing new. But as the ­frontiers of academic policing continue to advance—some 2,500 colleges now use Turnitin—faculty members are being pushed to confront classroom conundrums: Should they scan all papers for plagiarism, and risk poisoning the classroom atmosphere? Should they check only suspicious texts, and preserve harmony at the risk of missing clever cheaters? Could Turnitin and technologies like it lead to more plagiarism, since professors might depend on their imperfect results rather than vigorously investigate suspicious material on their own?

(Read the rest of this story at www.chronicle.com.)

Wylder Fondaw struggled with an online Latin class in high school. So when he arrived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this year, he hesitated at studying a language online. But the freshman had no choice: At his skill level, if he wanted to take introductory Spanish, an online class was the only option.

Instead of showing up in class four times a week, Mr. Fondaw conjugates verbs on a computer program in his sparsely furnished dorm room. He attends a live class every Tuesday afternoon—but it, too, is virtual. The class convenes via Web-conferencing software. If students want to answer a question, they click an icon that depicts a raised hand.

Even as online education booms, fully digital language classes like Mr. Fondaw’s remain uncommon. But North Carolina’s experiment­—driven by growing demand for Spanish instruction, limited classroom space, a shortage of qualified instructors, pedagogical innovations, and cost savings—is one of several efforts nationwide that are starting to map an online future for teaching languages.

(Read the rest of this story at www.chronicle.com.)

My latest Chronicle story is a profile of the physician-philosopher Raymond Tallis. The scrappy British polymath aims to cure academe of two illnesses: “Neuromania” and “Darwinitis.” Neuromania is the notion that to understand people you must peer into the “intracranial darkness” of their skulls with brain-scanning technology. Darwinitis is the idea that Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory can explain not just the origin of the human species—a claim Tallis enthusiastically accepts—but also the nature of human behavior and institutions. Tallis’s opponents call him a propagandist who resorts to caricaturing the ideas he attacks. If you don’t feel like wading through the whole story, check out the quick version in this podcast.