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Teaching with Facebook is a way for me to engage my students, since many of them will be on the site before, after, and during any lecture. More than engagement, using Facebook allows me to build a bridge between my classroom curricula and what my students are doing outside the lecture hall. I must admit that student expertise with digital media often exceeds my own, and my attempts at using Facebook function as a common language that sets up my classroom as an experimental space allowing students to take risks, make connections, and participate with an alternative teaching style. As much as there are a number of other Facebook educators—there is even a Facebook groups for educators—I am certain that on my university campus I am the only instructor using this social network. My university administration has accused me of subverting our institutional course management system. They are correct. Facebook may be a commercial enterprise, but I argue that students can maintain a Facebook identity after they leave university. The work done in our lecture as represented in our Facebook group is something that lasts beyond a typical university course management system. In other words, access to the information, discussion, links, and learning is not cut off once the course is over.

As MOOCs cast their eye to the developing world, very minor tweaks matter a great deal, such as the ability to allow students to download, rather than only stream course videos. But even more major ones are coming, including edX’s plans to start open-sourcing its platform in the next few months, which could allow even more universities to post online courses, and software programmers around the world to experiment with customized interfaces.

“We need to make sure we are making tools that make it easy to create new content, so it’s not only someone at MIT or Stanford who creates.” Relevance, as he notes, is one of the biggest motivators for students.

One of the major challenges for MOOCs—which so far mostly come from U.S. universities—is to tailor the content of courses to a diverse worldwide audience with any number of combinations of language, educational, motivational, and cultural backgrounds. Critics fear the rise of big box education from only a few elite institutions in Western nations, and worry these may not fit the different learning styles in different nations.

The purpose of the iPortfolio is for you to reflect on, and demonstrate evidence of your learning achievements, by drawing on experiences both within and beyond the formal classroom.This application enables you to upload evidence of your learning - photos, videos or audio clips - straight to your iPortfolio!iPortfolio is available to all Curtin Students and Staff. More information available at http://iportfolio.curtin.edu.au

srooms. The Gainesville Sun reports that the University of Florida is offering an online course called "21st Century Skills in StarCraft," which requires student to play the real-time, multi-player online strategy game "StarCraft" for up to two hours per week.

University of Florida is offering an online course called "21st Century Skills in StarCraft," which requires student to play the real-time, multi-player online strategy game "StarCraft" for up to two hours per week.

Forget uni, teach yourself, learn more, have fun.

Teach yourself at your own pace and learn what you want, when you want. Keep up to date, buy a few good books, get on Twitter, read articles and have a genuine passion and interest and you’ll do a better job than any university will do.

Design and education

New study reveals the prime motivators behind why people follow brands If you’re still looking to justify your social media activity to the board, perhaps the following stat will help: 97% of people say that social media has influenced their decision to make a purchase of a brand or product. Pretty emphatic. And one of several very interesting findings from the team at get satisfaction. They’ve recently released a new infographic on why people follow brands. If part of your role is encouraging people to follow your brand, then it’s worth having a look.

The change will allow instructors to publish and share their courses — syllabi, handouts, and so on — under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY).

This will mean that, for the first time, content in Blackboard will be available to those who aren’t registered for a course — learners not enrolled, learners not on campus. Professors will be able to share their material to Facebook and Twitter.

Blackboard also says that it’s revising its policies so that institutions that do open up their course materials this way don’t incur any additional licensing costs when people access the materials, even via webinars and the like. That means non-traditional, non-enrolled, non-revenue generating students will be able to access the material as “guests” without forcing schools to pay more.

"CK-12 basically looked at STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] and broke it down into the 5,000 fundamental concepts, and they mapped them all together," Chakrapani says. "It's not about creating a textbook and every three years putting out a new edition so you can capture more revenue. It's about thinking how a student learns."

"And then you go back at the end of year with teachers, see what students struggle on, and revise and improve the book. Each year, the text gets better."

Free educational resources -- like a university course on Coursera, for example -- may be available for students to use at no cost, but students cannot reuse, remix, or repurpose that course content however they'd like. By contrast open-source materials like CK-12's materials are not only free, but can also be freely repurposed in any way a student or teacher sees fit.