This workshop offered by instructors from the University of Illinois, in collaboration with Bauman Moscow State Technical University will provide participants with the knowledge needed to create, manage and teach high quality, interactive, fully online or Web enhanced courses.

The UK government last week announced an emergency 10,000 extra places at universities this autumn to ease the mounting pressure on the university admissions system - but refused to fully fund the expansion, writes Polly Curtis for The Guardian. The extra students will receive their grants and loans and pay tuition fees, but the universities will get no extra money directly from the government to cover teaching costs.

Tibetan monks and nuns spend their lives studying the inner world of the mind rather than the physical world of matter. Yet for one month this spring a group of 91 monastics devoted themselves to the corporeal realm of science, reports The New York Times. Instead of delving into Buddhist texts on karma and emptiness, they learned about Galileo's law of accelerated motion, chromosomes, neurons and the Big Bang, among other far-ranging topics.

More young students from poor backgrounds in Britain are going to university than ever before, narrowing the gap between rich and poor students' participation rates, new government figures suggest, writes Anthea Lipsett for The Guardian. Statistics on full-time young participation by socio-economic class released last week showed that the proportion of England's 18- to 20-year-olds from the top three socio-economic classes taking degrees fell to 41.2% in 2007-08, from 45.2% in 2002-03. Over the same period, going to university full-time became more common among the bottom four socio-economic groups, with participation rates increasing from 18.1% to 21%.