U's AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS - Who owns the online product? This is a top-priority question facing universities today. In the traditional scenario, faculty members owned their courses and when they moved, their courses moved with them. Now, online courses can be used and reused even after the professor leaves. In developing new rules, some schools have drawn a fuzzy line between courses entirely developed by the instructor and ones in which the university has heavily invested in the course. Others are spinning off their university's online operations into separate ventures to get around traditional policies and are developing contractual relationships with everyone sharing in the revenues. (Wall Street Journal, 12 Mar 01)

CRASH COURSE ON INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS - For a crash course on intellectual property rights, Georgia K. Harper, Manager, Intellectual Property Section, The University of Texas System, Office of General Counsel, has prepared a number of Web Tutorials that include: 1) Creating multimedia: Fair use and beyond, including courseware contracts; 2) Copyright in the digital library: Welcome to the center of the digital revolution; 3) Copyright management: Nobody knows what this is about. Find out; 4) Licensing resources: The next copyright frontier; 5) Online presentations: Talks tailored to the audience's copyright concerns - for faculty, students, staff, librarians, artists, administrators. To access the tutorials CLICK: http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/gkhbio2.htm

WIRELESS FOR LANs AND WANs - A number of projects at the University of Carolina at Wilmington are testing use of portable handheld computers and wireless access for both local- (LAN) and wide-area network (WAN) environments. The local-area project, Project Numina, involves LAN wireless access for students with handheld PCs/software/wireless connection to the Internet to use the Web to learn abstract science and math concepts. For the WAN application, response pads allow students to submit answers to teacher questions through Web forms. The system stores student answers in a remote database and displays them in the classroom. (Computer, Mar 01)

COLLEGES TARGET CORPORATE TRAINING - Colleges are looking beyond their traditional learners and tapping the corporate sector to enhance their revenue stream to help in developing their e-learning programs. Many universities have provided executive education programs in the past. These e-learning ventures will allow schools to reach many more clients. NYUonline and Columbia University's Fathom Learning, Cardean University, Columbia Interactive Arts and Sciences, University of Maryland, Duke, Harvard and Stanford are a few of the universities that are moving ahead in this area. (New York Times Online, 21 Mar 01)

INTERNET2 WILL EXPAND TO K-12 - The Internet2 network, which provides high-speed access to nearly 200 research universities, may soon expand to include other colleges as well as K-12 schools. However, Greg Wood, spokesperson for the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development, said the initiative is currently "just a series of discussions going on among a number of organizations in education and networking." He added, "A lot of other steps need to take place before teachers and students can use advanced applications." Those advanced applications could include digital video of teacher training practices, virtual tours of museums, and interactive musical exercises. Several states have also shown interest in connecting their networks to Internet2. Details of the new initiative will be available in the coming months, although the organizations involved have set no official date for its launch. Among the groups involved are EDUCAUSE, the Consortium for School Networking, and the International Society for Technology in Education. (Wired News, 5 Mar 01 - Edupage 7 Mar 01)