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There has been a lot of buzz about MOOC, the free Massive Open Online Course.  To date, many learners have signed up and participated in this form of super-sized open education course

The open source learning management system Moodle has a new mobile companion. Developers at Moodle HQ have released a free app for iOS designed to work with Moodle 2.1 or later.

My Moodle isn't a replacement for the Moodle interface; rather, it just provides some additional tools tailored specifically for mobile users. These include the ability to: Capture video, still images, and audio and upload those to Moodle; Upload images and video from users' existing libraries; E-mail and message participants in users' courses; Add notes about users; Add course participants to users' iPhone contact lists; Get help through MoodleDocs; and Access the full Moodle site. (A separate login for the Web version is required with the version of the mobile app.)

Informalizing formal learning content brings it closer to the learner and provides for more learning that is “accidental,” or unplanned.

ELearning animated assets, for example quick product demonstrations, are ideal for posting to a site such as YouTube or Vimeo. Not only do these sorts of demonstrations provide concise, targeted training but they can also be teasers to draw people to more formal learning, such as a full training course, of which the demonstration is just a part.

Another easy way to informalize formal learning content is to reposition it closer to a product rather than have it stand alone. It is possible to convert portions of a Web-based eLearning course to “digital cheat sheets” and to incorporate these in product documentation, or embed them into the product itself. These can also serve as teasers to draw people back for additional or advanced formal training.

Sending information in advance has obvious benefits, including more time for: research, formulating ideas, and asking other people about their points of view to inform a better discussion. Perhaps more significantly it allows those who are naturally quiet or introspective to contribute more meaningfully.

I’m not arguing that we should ditch technology in the workplace, or for our meetings. Technology has its place in work; of course it does. But as with all things, technology should be there to support human connection — not get in the way of it.

Wired: You’re interested in massive open online courses and have championed Salman Khan’s videos. If these had been around when you were young, would it have affected your schooling? Gates: No. For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good. Now, if you’re the kind of person who gets stuck on Chapter 5 and will give up if you don’t have someone to answer questions, don’t try and pick up the Feynman lectures on physics. That’s true whether it’s online or offline. A MOOC is an attempt to gather a group and encourage students, almost like a typical classroom, forcing you to interact during the lecture so that it kind of wakes you up and keeps you engaged. A hyperlearner doesn’t have to have those things.

Be Proactive

Listen

.  People are now, more than ever, voicing their opinions online to thousands of people through social media channels like Twitter – and they expect companies to respond.

In the schools, too, there is no reward for helping others (indeed, it is heavily penalized). Suppose educational achievement was measured at least partially according to how much (and how well) you helped others. The value of the achievement would increase if the person is a stranger (and conversely, decrease to zero if it's just a small clique helping each other) and would be in proportion to the timeliness and utility of the assistance (both of which can be measured).

Suppose instead students were rewarded for cooperation. Not collaboration; this is just the school-level emulation of the creation of cliques and corporations. Cooperation, which is a common and ad hoc creation of interactions and exchanges for mutual value.  Cooperative behaviours include exchanges of goods and services, agreement on open standards and protocols, sharing of resources in common (and open) pools, and similar behaviours. Imagine receiving academic credit for contributing well-received resources into open source repositories, whether as software, art, photography, or educational resources. Imagine receiving credit for long-lasting additions to Wikipedia or similar online resources (we would have to fix Wikipedia, as it is now run by a gang of thugs known as 'Wikipedia editors'). We can have wide-ranging and nuanced evaluations of such contributions, not simple grades, but something based on how the content contributed is used and reused across the net (this would have the interesting result that your assessment could continue to go up over time).

There is, again, no reason why public service cannot be incorporated into individual assessment. Adding value to fire and police services by means of monitoring and reporting (not the piece-work model of something like CrimeStoppers, but actual prevention), supporting environment by counting birds, sampling water, servicing sports events by acting as a timer or umpire - all these can add to a person's assessment. I'm not thinking of the simple sort of tasks grade school students can perform. Indeed, a person hoping to attain a higher level qualification would need to contribute to the public good in a substantial and tangible way. Offering open online courses (that are well-subscribed and positively reviewed by the community) should be a requirement for any graduate-level recognition. The PhD used to be about offering a unique research contribution to the field; now it's about paying tuition and being exploited as a TA. These three things - helping others, being cooperative, contributing to the public good - are obviously not easy to assess. To be sure, it's far easier to ask students simple questions and grade the number of correct responses. But assessing students in this way, far from measuring putative 'content knowledge', is really an exercise in counting without any real interest in what is being counted. It acts as an invitation to cheat, as it places self-interest ahead of the values it is actually trying to measure.