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The most high-tech classrooms in India are not at a university but at a technology company's training facility.

To make up for those perceived deficiencies, Indian companies spent more than $1-billion last year on corporate-training programs for new employees, according to an industry group that has been pushing for change at universities.

Each classroom bears the name of a famous innovator—Archimedes, J.P. Morgan, Steve Jobs. In a morning class in the Benjamin Franklin classroom, I observed about 100 students learning the Unix programming language. Each seat had its own PC, and most students had opened a copy of the instructor's PowerPoint presentation and followed along on their own screen, sometimes scrolling back to see what they had missed, sometimes looking ahead.

For years observers have predicted a coming wave of e-textbooks. But so far it just hasn't happened. One explanation for the delay is that while music fans were eager to try a new, more portable form of entertainment, students tend to be more conservative when choosing required materials for their studies. For a real disruption in the textbook market, students may have to be forced to change.

saying that e-textbooks should be required reading and that colleges should be the ones charging for them

radical shift

Can the nonprofit world create a national digital library to put America's collective intellectual wealth within everyone's reach?

the idea of "a Digital Public Library of America," envisioning it as "an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources" drawn from the country's libraries, archives, museums, and universities.

the biggest obstacle to the Digital Public Library, in his view, is not money but "finding our way through our baroque copyright laws," especially those that govern so-called orphan works, whose copyright status is unclear.

Universities are turning to social networking to create online learning communities that mix serious academic work, and connections among working scholars, with Facebook-style fun.

write and share blogs, join subject groups, and participate in academic discussions

"You may not want to friend your dean on Facebook, but you still want to be connected to your dean

John A. Douglass, the paper’s author, says the state should create a centralized online university

California Higher-Education System Needs Drastic Reforms, Report Says

new program aimed at harnessing technology to prepare students for college and get them to graduation

the first wave of grants will focus on four areas: blended learning, open courseware, learning analytics, and increasing engagement through interactive technology like games and social media.

By 2018, 63 percent of all job openings will require postsecondary education, according to the foundation. But fewer than half of Americans have earned a college degree by the age of 30.