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One of the areas ripest for innovation is alternative certification of informal learning. Hence, the recent excitement about badges. Badges have incredible potential for providing a viable alternative to the traditional system of credits most universities are tied to by accreditors. It seems to me that there is a critical need for someone to demonstrate that badges are a viable alternative to the traditional accreditation process.

However, because the gold standard for learning credentials is acceptability by employers, any meaningful badges demonstration project will have to operate in this space.

We want to create a collection of badges that a top employer, like Google, will publicly recognize as “equivalent experience.” This goes straight for the jugular, demonstrating that badges are a viable alternative to formal university education.

I worked on “learning objects,” which can be characterized as educational materials designed with the understanding that they will be reused in a broad variety of contexts

humans are too “expensive

the “reusability paradox.

“If you were to hike the Appalachian trail, which would take you months and months, and you reflect upon it, you do not divide the experience into the historic, scientific, mathematic, and English aspects of it. You would look at it holistically.”

In practice, this means the elimination of English, mathematics, history, and science class.

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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.”

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In terms of formal learning, Tony Bates believes that changes can occur within the existing education institutes

Martin Weller points to the importance of academic institutes recognizing digital scholarship, moving away from the inefficient and costly publishing model and moving towards online publications that better promotes interdisciplinary endeavours