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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.”

‘Public engagement’ involves specialists in higher education listening to, developing their understanding of, and interacting with non-specialists. The ‘public’ includes individuals and groups who do not currently have a formal relationship with an HEI through teaching, research or knowledge transfer.

This can be realised through specific projects, such as the OER projects many universities are initiating. However, long-tail models only work when there is sufficient content to occupy the tail. In order to achieve this scale of content in a sustainable manner, the outputs listed above need to become a frictionless by-product of the standard practice, rather than the outcomes of isolated projects.

“open educational resources” is a highly context-mediated construct.

From a grant or contract compliance standpoint, the operational definition of open educational resources is often collapsed to:Open educational resource, (n). Any artifact that is either (1) licensed under an open copyright license or (2) in the public domain.

“In the public domain” means that, while the nature of the artifact qualifies it for copyright protection, the artifact is not subject to copyright restrictions.

It isn’t possible or practical to try to control the quality of content and conversation that people publish online -- if it had been possible, there would be no web, no YouTube, no Wikipedia today -- but I contend that it is possible to increase the proportion of the population who know something about what they are doing when they consume or create digital culture.

Although the word “literacy” traditionally refers to the skill of encoding and decoding messages or programs in some medium, the kind of literacy required in a world of mass collaboration necessarily involves a social element as well as a personal skill

Social media literacies combine the skills of coding and decoding digital media with the social skills necessarily to use online tools in concert with others

“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.

Search: Not Worth Printing open source, elearning trends, ethics in technology and education About

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

Are they central or peripheral to practice?

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.

Fitzpatrick argues that journals should throw the door open to all comers, then deputize their readers to usher sound articles to a pedestal and banish bad ones to the margins. Scholarly journals would serve their constituencies better “by allowing everything through the gate, and by designing a post-publication peer review process that focuses on how a scholarly text should be received,” she writes, “rather than whether it should be out there in the first place.”

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.