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by Eliza Anyangwe, - she opens with an image of Martin Luther King Jr. at the podium: "Martin Lurther King was a great leader. Are there any such figures in higher education?" what she doesn't address is that King relied on local "bridge" leaders to do the everyday work - and that the role of community activists was crucial to King's own success. She starts the live chat with Janine Utell and English prof from Widener Univ in PA (my personal fav expert on leadership qualities is historian Doris Kearns Goodwin); but then gathers leadership-in-the-trenches voices from men: Craig Mahoney (http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/); William H Graves (http://www.ellucian.com); Richard Hall (http://www.dmu.ac.uk); Paul Gentle (http://www.lfhe.ac.uk); Jonathan Ruddle (http://www.maxximconsulting.com); and finally, a woman's voice - last and least - Dawn Freshwater (http://www.leeds.ac.uk)

Mr Shirky lets it all hang out. Good read.

Napster lost the battle but won the war - changing the story and disrupting the cost models; in higher ed our MP3 is the MOOC and our Napster is Udacity...

Napster did lose. What won was DRM-laden iTunes, then Amazon. What lesson will higher education draw from that?

3 vectors of Access, Quality and Cost - and we want to stretch the triangle to have more access, more quality and less cost = "iron triangle" if using traditional teaching methods => unhealthy link between quality and exclusivity in the popular mindset about higher ed; iron triangle can be stretched if we think of higher ed as a system and apply principles of division of labor and specialization (i.e., "unbundle" the professor)

a wise and wonderful essay - especially important for those scholars who might buckle under the bullying and harassment so common in academia but more frightening when open and in the public domain. MOOCs should encourage public scholarship - and help to make it more valued... and of higher quality - but they will need to include in the design that the facilitators modeling advocacy and constructive kinds of alliances for the participants. That is, providing that "institutional commitment" for public scholarship that is thoughtful and intriguing (vs. public showboating).

Status of UCF (2nd largest univ in the US) blended learning and online learning systemic approach for quality to assure improvement - faculty development is required; social-constructivist paradigm and faculty engaged in action research; measure "student success" via grades earned A,B,C and blended does better with web-based or video-based; withdrawal and satisfaction rates nearly the same as f2f tho video has slightly higher; online learning benefits for students = convenience, reduced logistical demands, increased flexibility, information fluency; for faculty = professional devt, flexibility, teaching/research support; UCF expanded capacity, ability to serve students anywhere, buffers competition; online learning costs a little more but provides capacity equivalent to >$64M of classroom construction (which would have an annual operating cost of $4.1M = cost avoidance model), more efficient use of existing CR space, growth with quality

VC investment in education in 2012 is projected to be 4x higher than in 2002

The _Liberal Education_ article is fascinating. Note that the baseline is somewhat contested. Vocational/professional learning is the big driver.

Six Core Challenges lie at the core of the innovative disruption facing higher education: University Model; Structural Model; Funding Model; Cost Model; Business Model; Success Model Seven Areas of Change - The six core challenges noted above are driven by seven areas of rapid change, primarily technological change: The Players; The College Models; The Course Models; Data and Learning Analytics; The Cost: Reduced and Free; Measuring Success; Threats to the Credential

Learning analytics different from big data in "their concern for providing value to teachers and learners (p14)" Research challenges needing to be addressed to achieve ideal scenarios of use: - Develop expertise in the provision of formative feedback and analytics - Develop methods of presenting analytics and visualizing data that are easy to use and understand - Adopt standards for the structure and export of data - Adopt standards for the structure and export of data - Broaden the focus to include not only higher education in formal settings, but also schools, workplace learning, informal learning and lifelong learning - Identify and address the issues around ethics, privacy and ownership of data (p13-14) ABSTRACT: "Learning analytics is a significant area of technology‐enhanced learning that has emerged during the last decade. This review of the field begins with an examination of the technological, educational and political factors that have driven the development of analytics in educational settings. It goes on to chart the emergence of learning analytics, including their origins in the 20th century, the development of data-driven analytics, the rise of learning-focused perspectives and the influence of national economic concerns. It next focuses on the relationships between learning analytics, educational data mining and academic analytics. Finally, it sets out the current state of learning analytics research, and identifies a series of future challenges."

Video recording of Sebastian Thrun's (Google, Udacity) keynote at this week's 18th Annual Sloan Consortium Conference on Online Learning