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At last count, the site had 2,700 audio and video lectures from more than 25 universities; 268 audio books; and 105 e-books. Dr. Colman says he looks for lectures that "take ideas and make them come to life." And so you can learn 37 languages on Open Culture, or stream Jane Austen audio books, Hitchcock films and a John Hopkins biology lecture.

Why pay for test prep? M.I.T. OpenCourseWare has culled introductory courses in physics, calculus and biology, along with problem sets and labs, to help students prep for the Advanced Placement exams. (Not to miss an opportunity, there’s a link to the admissions office.)

back-channel conversations

While keynote speakers and session leaders are speaking, audience members are sharing highlights, asking questions, and conversing with colleagues on Twitter

Ask your students to create accounts on Twitter or some other back-channel tool and share ideas that occur to them in your course. You might give them specific assignments, as does the University of Connecticut's Margaret Rubega, who asks students in her ornithology class to tweet about birds they see. During a face-to-face class session, you could have students discuss their reading in small groups and share observations on the back channel. Or you could simply ask them to post a single question about the week's reading they would like to discuss.

A back channel provides students a way to stay connected to the course and their fellow students. Students are often able to integrate back channels into their daily lives, checking for and sending updates on their smartphones, for instance. That helps the class become more of a community and gives students another way to learn from each other.

Deep learning is hard work, and students need to be well motivated in order to pursue it. Extrinsic factors like grades aren't sufficient—they motivate competitive students toward strategic learning and risk-averse students to surface learning.

Social pedagogies provide a way to tap into a set of intrinsic motivations that we often overlook: people's desire to be part of a community and to share what they know with that community.

Online, social pedagogies can play an important role in creating such a community. These are strong motivators, and we can make use of them in the courses we teach.

The papers they wrote for my course weren't just academic exercises; they were authentic expressions of learning, open to the world as part of their "digital footprints."

Collaborative documents need not be text-based works. Sarah C. Stiles, a sociologist at Georgetown, has had her students create collaborative timelines showing the activities of characters in a text, using a presentation tool called Prezi.com. I used that tool to have my cryptography students create a map of the debate over security and privacy. They worked in small groups to brainstorm arguments, and contributed those arguments to a shared debate map synchronously during class.

we'd like to see a number of things tried so we can have a good discussion that's informed by rational experiment and collected data. Beyond these individual experiments, one class at a time, I think it would be great to have one or two departments really try to integrate an online experience into their core curriculum so we can understand how that works, so we can provide students more options

Many of these first round of MOOCs were produced with a webcam by an individual instructor using a tablet PC. That's on the order of a thousand dollars worth of equipment. Maybe. Certainly, it's extremely inexpensive compared with a laptop 5 years ago. So the cost of the technology is lower. There's good software for editing video -- we're in an era where producing video is similar to word processing. And everyone is used to interacting with people online in different ways than were prevalent 10 to 15 years ago. The kind of discussion you can have online is more sophisticated. People understand social conventions for how to contribute constructively to an online discussion. Those factors really contribute to the effectiveness of a MOOC or a smaller scale online course.

I think we'll see an evolution of a range of different ways of using technology, and probably some expansion of the set of options that a student has. Instead of going off to college, maybe some students will live in their parents' homes or elsewhere and take a first year or two online. Or they'll spend two years in college and finish two years online as they work. There will be different, in effect, educational programs coming out of this phenomenon that offer credit, certification, job placement, and other things beyond the self learning that MOOCs provide. So I think we really are going to see a transformation in the way teaching and learning are developed and delivered

the teacher was no longer there to "punish them" or "grade them down". Instead the teacher was there to help them reach their goal. This is much more of an environment built around success and motivation versus failure.

computers are able to do what computers do well. Humans are freed up to do what humans do best.

Assessment needs to be based on where each individual child started and then grew to and finally ended up in a particular year, versus a snapshot once a year view of an entire school