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This made Stanford the latest of a handful of elite American universities to pull back the curtain on their vaunted courses, joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare project, Yale University’s Open Yale Courses and the University of California at Berkeley’s Webcast.Berkeley, among others. The difference with the Stanford experiment is that students are not only able to view the course materials and tune into recorded lectures for CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; they are also invited to take in-class quizzes, submit homework assignments, and gather for virtual office hours with the course’s two rock star instructors — Peter Norvig, a research executive at Google who used to build robots for NASA, and Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science at Stanford who also works for Google, designing cars that drive themselves. (M.I.T., Yale and Berkeley simply make the course materials freely available, without offering the opportunity to interact with the professors or submit assignments to be graded.)

MOOCs question the value of teaching as an economic value point.”

When control over information shifts from organizations to individuals, considerations of new models in universities is required, as evidenced by historical transitions of information-based institutions. As an industry fundamentally concerned with “creating and communicating information” (Carey, 2009,

Recognition of only formal learning is a needlessly limiting mindset currently held by higher education.

Many of the assumptions that inform higher education today – such as classrooms, textbooks, physical space, co-location of educators and learners, pairing of research and teaching, bounded curriculum – are called into question by emerging learning theories and technologies.

Anderson (2009) suggests a number of activities that characterise the open scholars, including that they create, use and contribute open educational resources, self-archive,

From my own experience I would propose the following set of characteristics and suggest that open scholars are likely to adopt these.

Leslie (2008) comments on the ease of this everyday sharing, compared with the complexity inherent in many institutional approaches:

all learners, at all levels, collaborate; but how they do it, the degree to which they do it, and the relative importance of the collaboration shifts with their increasing know-how. Bottom line: as people move up the mastery ladder and their capabilities grow, predominant learning strategies change.

as learners become more competent and experienced, and especially as they approach master/expert levels, learning embraces much more of a “pull” strategy, where learners take what they need from the repositories of knowledge, tools, and advice available to them. How they navigate these resources is increasingly a decision they make.

. Putting too little structure on entry-level learners may make learning more difficult, confusing, and demoralizing for them.

Teaching presence is much harder to facilitate as learners do not necessarily have contact with the educator, but it is the teaching presence that heightens cognitive presence (Annand, 2011).

This research showed the importance of making connections between learners and fellow-learners and between learners and facilitators. Meaningful learning occurs if social and teaching presence forms the basis of design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive processes for the realization of personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes.

The type of support structure that would engage learners in critical learning on an open network should be based on the creation of a place or community where people feel comfortable, trusted, and valued, and where people can access and interact with resources and each other.

Good eLearning is about design, not software

When approaching a project, ask: “What is it you want people to do back on the job?” Then, “What does successful performance look like?” “How will you measure that?” Design that assessment first. Then design the instruction that leads to that goal.

instructional design and visual design are different things. Visual design is just as important (and it isn’t about making things “pretty”), and it needs to be done before the development phase begins.

Introverts are to extroverts what American women were to men in the 1950s -- second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent.