A for-profit web site bases its business model on mining the internet for and then posting publicly available lectures from prestigious universities–and officials from at least one campus are reviewing the arrangement and reserving judgment.

Academic Earth, which launched in January, has more than 1,600 web-based video lectures from campuses nationwide, including Yale, Stanford, and MIT. Richard Ludlow, CEO of Academic Earth, said the site only uses videos posted under the Creative Commons license, which allows for-profit business to use the lectures, but not for commercial reasons.

Ludlow, who visited with MIT officials last week, said the videos would not be monetized unless university officials agreed to incorporate advertisements with the lectures. In those cases, revenues would be shared with the school.

It won’t have classrooms. Or dorms. Or even professors, not in a traditional sense.

And no tuition either.

Still, the University of the People, a Pasadena-based venture envisioned as the first global, online, peer-to-peer university, will be a real institution of higher education, complete with students, teaching and learning, its founder says.

And Shai Reshef, the Israeli entrepreneur behind the idea, said the response has been overwhelming since news of his in-the-works university spread last month. Hundreds of students from all over the world have e-mailed wanting to apply, and hundreds of professors want to volunteer — and admissions won’t even open until April.

“We’re unable to answer all these people,” Reshef said in a recent interview, throwing his hands apart to indicate the explosion of interest.

For now, the nonprofit University of the People is sharing office space with Cramster, an online study community that Reshef also heads. In fact, it was through Reshef’s work with Cramster, in which students and others work together to solve math and science problems, that he decided the peer-to-peer model might also work for online college classes.

Through Cramster “I learned how powerful social networking can be for learning,” he said. “It was like a great revelation for me and I said, ‘Wow, we can use it for academic study.’ “

After spending 10 years in the U.S. Navy, Kenric Scarbrough got a sobering start to his civilian career. He was laid off in January, just months after he found a job as a boiler technician — one of the victims of the worsening economy.

But Scarbrough, 29, is trying to get back on track by doing much more than scanning employment boards and circling help-wanted ads.

The Charleston, South Carolina, resident is working toward an online bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering technology.

He’s hoping to more than double his previous salary of $32,000 once he graduates from Excelsior College.

“I was doing nuclear engineering in the Navy,” Scarbrough said. “It was something that I wanted to continue to do, and I wanted the degree to go with it.”

Scarbrough is not the only one turning to online education to ride out the recession.

The ability to pause and rewind podcast lectures gave the upper hand to college students in a recent study that compared the performance of students who attended a lecture in person and those who viewed it from iTunes University.

The study, “iTunes University and the Classroom: Can Podcasts Replace Professors?,” was conducted at the State University of New York Fredonia. It called for some introductory psychology students to watch a recorded lecture available online and others to attend a traditional classroom lecture.

Students who watched the lecture podcast–available from the iTunes U online video library–scored an average of 71 percent. Students who sat through the 30-minute classroom lecture scored an average of 62 percent, according to the study.

Dani McKinney, the study’s lead researcher, said test scores were most dramatically affected by note taking. Students who watched the video lecture and took notes, McKinney said, scored an average of 15 points higher than their peers in the lecture hall.

“They listened to [the podcast] over and over,” said McKinney, a Fredonia psychology professor since 2006 who completed the iTunes study with researchers Jennifer Dyck and Elise Luber. “Listening passively doesn’t get anything accomplished. It’s not enough to just do rote memory and repetition.”

According to Will Richardson (2008) “Our students must be nomadic, flexible, mobile learners who depend not so much on what they can recall as on their ability to connect with people and resources and edit content on their desktops, or even more likely, on pocket-size devices they carry around with them” (p. 18). As I agree with that assessment, it became disturbing to read House Bill 363, introduced to the General Assembly of Pennsylvania on February 11, 2009, to ban students’ possession of “telephone paging devices, commonly referred to as beepers, cellular telephones and portable electronic devices that record or play audio or video material” on “school grounds, at school sponsored activities and on buses or other vehicles provided by the school district.” There are only two exceptions, those being if students are members of a volunteer fire company, ambulance, or rescue squad or if students need beepers or cellular phones due to a medical condition of an immediate family member (Cruz, 2009).

It’s easy to find teacher reactions to the bill. I’d join the ranks of those opposing it. A ban on mobile devices would thwart innovation in schools. Beyond the difficulties of enforcing such a law, if passed, Pennsylvania would be added to a list of states banning the very tools that have the potential to motivate learners, individualize learning, add to the options that teachers can employ for immediate assessment of group learning in the classroom, and, in general, prepare our youth for the competitive global society of which they are a part. Yet, there are courts, such as a state appellate court in New York (Broache, 2008), that have upheld school cell phone bans on school grounds for reasons that primarily have to do with control, security, and discipline.

Thus, the issue is two pronged: that of administrators charged with overall school safety of our children and that of the educators who desire some degree of academic freedom to wisely select whatever it takes to prepare every student in their charge with 21st century skills within a safe environment. Which side do we take? Can we make both sides happy? What are potential challenges and opportunities for learning via mobile devices? It’s time to explore.

Almost every day for the past six weeks, 7-year-old Becky Wilson has turned on her laptop, made sure the built-in webcam was working, and started a live video chat. Her bright blue eyes peer into the camera, and her face widens into a smile: Time for class!

Becky is a leukemia patient, and her illness often keeps her away from her fellow students at Jamestown Elementary School in Arlington County. But through a video linkup using a second laptop at the school, she has been able to join her first-grade class almost every morning in solving math problems, listening to poetry and working on group projects.

More than 100 colleges have set up channels on YouTube, and this week the popular video service unveiled a new section that brings together all of that campus content in one area.

It had been difficult to find college lectures on YouTube, since they are generally far less popular than the site’s humorous and outrageous clips, and so they do not show up in lists of the most viewed videos on the site. Although YouTube has long had an education category, it relies on users who post videos to decide whether to categorize their videos as educational, and as a result the definition of education is very broad. The new YouTube EDU page includes only material submitted by colleges and universities.