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Op ed piece by David L. Kirp, a Berkley professor. The business models that are proliferating in educational thinking and assessment does not work, and the greatest determiner of success are the interpersonal relationships of students and teachers, students and students, and teachers and teachers. Adding more and new technology has not been successful because of this. Rewarding "good" schools with merit pay while closing and punishing those in areas of poverty because they are "failing" schools without instituting known programs that engender success is a crime in his view.

Op ed piece by David L. Kirp, a Berkley professor. The business models that are proliferating in educational thinking and assessment does not work, and the greatest determiner of success are the interpersonal relationships of students and teachers, students and students, and teachers and teachers. Adding more and new technology has not been successful because of this. Rewarding "good" schools with merit pay while closing and punishing those in areas of poverty because they are "failing" schools without instituting known programs that engender success is a crime in his view.

Great blog post by Jane Hart at Learning in the Social Workplace on Enterprise Community Management for managing and supporting learning within the workplace. It takes the comments by Donna LaCoy in 2012 discussion about how learning is not always a recognized component of work to show that in fact, someone has to manage and support such learning in ECM. Excerpt: his emerging practice is known as Enterprise Community Management (ECM), and is much wider than just supporting one small team or community of practice within an organisation, but is about having responsibility for building and sustaining a community across the whole of the organisation. In fact as ECM can include a significant range of responsibilities, in a large organisation it undoubtedly needs to be undertaken by a number of people. Screen Shot 2013-03-17 at 08.14.02ECM activities are likely to include integrating all social and collaborative initiatives into a common platform planning the new community's strategic approach promoting and supporting its use within training (both online and face-to-face, but particularly within induction/onboarding) helping to support its use for team knowledge- and resource-sharing supporting individuals as they build and maintain communities of practice and other interest groups developing an ongoing programme of both face-to-face and online activities and events - to encourage employee engagement on an ongoing basis helping to model social and collaborative working and learning behaviours as a major part of helping workers use the technology building the new personal and social skills required for productive collaboration in the organisation measuring the success of community in terms of business performance (not just in terms of social activity) Whoever takes on these ECM responsibilities is going to have a significant influence and impact on the business. But more than this, as face-to-face training goes out of fashion an

#change11, blog post by Bon Stewart, May 2, 2012 And here's the rub... "The original MOOCs - the connectivist MOOCs a la Siemens & Downes, and the work of David Wiley and Alec Couros and others - have been, for the most part, about harnessing the capacity of participatory media to connect people and ideas. They've been built around lateral, distributed structures, encouraging blog posts and extensive peer-to-peer discussion formats. Even in live sessions showcasing facilitator's expertise, these ur-MOOCs have tended towards lively backchannel chats, exploring participants' knowledge and experiences and ideas. They've been, in short, actively modelled on the Internet itself. They've been experiential and user-driven. Their openness hasn't stopped at registration capacity, but extended to curricular tangents and participatory contributions and above all, to connections: they've given learners not just access to information but to networks. They've been messy, sometimes, but they have definitely not been business as usual. The problem with EdX is that, scale and cost aside, it IS essentially a traditional learning model revamped for a new business era. It puts decision-making power, agency, and the right to determine what counts as knowledge pretty much straight back into the hands of gatekeeping institutions."

Business models for innovation in higher education

white paper by the Brainyard on "The State of Community Management" for physical businesses

Article in The Chronicle of HE, December 17, 2012 "Coursera and its devotees simply have it wrong. The Coursera model doesn't create a learning community; it creates a crowd. In most cases, the crowd lacks the loyalty, initiative, and interest to advance a learning relationship beyond an informal, intermittent connection." Excerpt: Interactivity and customization are the fundamental advantages of online education. By using technology, we can bridge geographic divides while creating a continuing learning relationship between faculty and students, students and students, and students and the greater society. "Our goal should be to design a customized program that matches technology with a student's day-to-day objectives, not just course objectives or weekly learning objectives. We need to operate on a small scale where the online course or program is calibrated to meet the need of the individual student." Excerpt: "The MOOC model is fine for the informal student or academic dabbler, but it is not the same as attaining an education. Whether face to face or online, learning occurs when there is a thoughtful interaction between the student and the instructor. If the goal is attaining knowledge for a purpose beyond mere curiosity, then the model for online learning has to be a more complex, interactive experience. For that reason, we should be happy to cede the territory of the massification to Coursera. The business school at my institution is developing an online M.B.A. program that emphasizes the critical nature of interactivity in learning. Our next step is to design a dynamic and agile customization component that emphasizes student preferences while advancing the objectives of our institution. We are looking for partners who want to build a platform that allows for profound customization. We want to bring together institutions interested in thinking deeply about the promise of online education for delivering a remarkable learning experience, one that equals-

Article in MindShift, KQED, April 24, 2012 by Nathan Miton. Fabulous because it recognizes that content is one leg of learning stool. Excerpt: But at such a huge scale, what are the digital methods of teaching that work best? Philipp Schmidt, founder of the free online university P2PU, preaches three building blocks: community, recognition and content. Endorsement of peer learning potential Excerpt: The Stanford professors readily admit that some of the students who participated in their online courses provided their peers with deeper, more comprehensive answers than they were able to. The exponential explosion in opportunities for learning. Excerpt: in the past 10 years I've heard people say campus-based education better look out, that this will be threatening to their business model, and I've never really felt that until the last six months. The pace of change in open education is qualitatively different than it was even a few months ago." A new breed of digital pedagogy/andragogy/heutagogy Excerpt: "We probably haven't fully made the transition to digitally native pedagogies and learning approaches," Carson said. "The first generation of distance learning is basically an attempt to move the classroom online, and I think that part of the scalable learning of these massive courses is the breakdown of that model."

Interesting blog post on a business MOOC out of Case Western Reserve in Entrepreneur, Jane Porter, April 25, 2014. Received $69,000 grant to design and deliver it.

Very interesting transcript of interviews with two Wharton professors on impact of MOOCs on their MBA programs. "So, in the last year, when I've taught product design, I've posed to myself the challenge: What can we do in the classroom that can only be done when 60 people are together sharing the same time and location? I have them watch the video offline, and then when we get together, we do a simulation or an exercise or presentations or group work - things that can only be done in that location when we're all together." Excerpt on completion rate: Knowledge@Wharton: Despite the evident advantages, one of the challenges that all MOOCs face is that the completion rate typically tends to be pretty low. I wonder both as teachers and as researchers, what you have learned through your experience that might be relevant to business schools? Ulrich: The completion rate statistic is a red herring. People like to trot it out, but it doesn't seem terribly relevant to me. If you think about what the barrier is to registering for a MOOC, it's literally one click in a Coursera environment. So many people enroll to check it out, to watch a few videos, to see what it's all about. Sponsored Content: My MOOC requires hundreds of hours of effort to complete a substantial design project. Very, very few people are willing to put in hundreds of hours, but many people are interested in learning a little bit about customer needs or aesthetics in design or prototyping, so they watch a few videos. We think pretty carefully in MOOCs about three categories of learners. Those who are just browsing; those who want to view the material but won't do the work; and then those who will do all of the work. So as I say, that narrow completion statistic is not meaningful in terms of evaluating the success of the MOOCs.

Blog post by Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, November 15, 2013, on Thrun's enlightening on MOOC learners failing to complete the courses.

Love this cogent blog post by Jonathan Rees on why MOOCs are failing --because people need the social supports of learning online or in the classroom. published November 15, 2013.

Lisa and Doris - Read Chapter #3

Funny and accurate blog post about MOOC oversell and overfailure of same to HE. By Dave LLorens in Fast Company. Excerpt: ..."MOOCs certainly have a point that online education will not boldly improve live learning unless it includes genuine, specific, individual interaction between students and teachers (run on sentence). That's simply a fact and something to keep in mind as online educations evolves, but it is not by any means a reason why online education "doesn't work." Yet we seem to remain focused on shiny polarizing topics of online versus offline education. MOOCs work, they don't work, etc. It sounds like what they tell you to say as extras on a set when they want a "murmur," Watermelon, cantaloupe. Watermelon cantaloupe. Rhubarb Constantinople. SUMMARY: Even today, MOOCs are the main focus of anyone in any kind of online education capacity, and MOOCs are polarizing in a way that is hurtful to the discussion. MOOCs are also (at least today), only the repackaging of and a new delivery mechanism for traditional education. Being disappointed that MOOCs haven't changed the world yet is like switching over from cassette tapes to CDs and then being disappointed when the CDs don't contain untold and unimagined wisdom. "