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For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the "social injustice" of college tuition, here's a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

"IN late September, as workers applied joint compound to new office walls, hoodie-clad colleagues who had just met were working together on deadline. Film editors, code-writing interns and "edX fellows" - grad students and postdocs versed in online education - were translating videotaped lectures into MOOCs, or massive open online courses. As if anyone needed reminding, a row of aqua Post-its gave the dates the courses would "go live.""

"A recent study by Online Colleges finds that more US college students prefer a hybrid of online/offline education than a pure experience in either direction. This may be a surprise for those that rave about the pros or perils of online classes, but a hybrid learning environment really helps capture the benefits of each."

"'MITx' will offer courses online and make online learning tools freely available."

"While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for courses, the university will announce a new program on Monday allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of charge - and for the first time earn official certificates for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught. "

"A list of all the best places to learn for free online."

Over the past decade or so, the Internet has become a huge source of information and education, especially for those who might be short on time, money or other resources. And it's not just crowdsourced data collections like Wikipedia or single-topic blogs that encourage individual learning; huge corporations and nonprofits are making online education and virtual classrooms a very formal affair these days.

Online versions of college courses are attracting hundreds of thousands of students, millions of dollars in funding, and accolades from university administrators. Is this fad, or is higher education about to get the overhaul it needs?

Oliver Burkeman went to Texas to the South by Southwest festival of film, music and technology, in search of the next big idea. After three days he found it: the boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has disappeared

"Massive Open Online Courses might seem like best way to use the Internet to open up education, but you're thinking too small. Technology can turn our entire lives into learning experiences. 5 Comments "

"When campus president Wallace Loh walked into Juan Uriagereka's office last August, he got right to the point. "We need courses for this thing - yesterday!""

The Ri Channel is a new online project by the Royal Institution showcasing the very best science videos from the Ri and around the web. Alongside highlights from recent Ri events, the Channel features re-digitised footage from the Ri archive and a range of high-quality videos from filmmakers and scientific institutions across the UK and beyond. The project continues the Royal Institution's charitable mission to "connect people to the world of science".

The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother. Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month.

"It was about 12 or 13 years ago, that we decided to design a class website template. It seemed that student materials were heading online and at Melbourne Business School we opted for a faculty-designed solution. For those days, it was pretty slick and it was the main template used for about a decade. A few years ago, wanting more features the School moved to Blackboard. And when I got to the University of Toronto there Blackboard was again. My kids' school uses Blackboard. It is everywhere and it is terrible. While it has all the features you could want and it has some integration with University systems, it is very cumbersome to use. So much so that I kept its use to a minimum for my course this semester and opted for my own WordPress hosted solution."

Wikipedia stands as an undeniable success in online participation and collaboration. However, previous attempts at studying collaboration within Wikipedia have focused on simple metrics like rigor (i.e., the number of revisions in an article's revision history) and diversity (i.e., the number of authors that have contributed to a given article) or have made generalizations about collaboration within Wikipedia based upon the content validity of a few select articles. By looking more closely at metrics associated with each extant Wikipedia article (N=3,427,236) along with all revisions (N=225,226,370), this study attempts to understand what collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and macro-structural writing, leading to the conclusion that most articles in Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of the community but, rather, represent the work of relatively few contributors.

"The UK's first massive open online course platform will focus on promoting student discussion and debate in an effort to stand out from the Mooc crowd, according to Simon Nelson, its chief executive. FutureLearn will offer "something fresh, something different", he told Times Higher Education, including being optimised for use on smartphones."

cyberbulling y otras artes para molestar a alumnos

The Arab Social Media Report (ASMR), produced by the Dubai School of Government's Governance and Innovation Program, is the first in a quarterly series that will highlight and analyze usage trends of online social networking across the Arab region.