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This article explains MOOC. This is a massive open online course that allows students to choose their courses and level of participation. 

New technology has allowed students to take MOOCs, which are massive open online courses, for college credit. However, colleges have to make sure that students taking the course away from campus and laptops are not cheating on the final exam. To do this they developed software that colleges can use to monitor students through webcams, screen sharing, and high-speed Internet connections. They can also check out their photo IDs, signatures, and typing styles.

Massively Open Online Courses are the discussion in Open Education -- I think the important thing is that students want to CONNECT around content - it is the relationships and connections that are so amazing more than just the content. People with a common passion are connecting through the content. The content becomes a conduit.  "Consider Stanford's experience: Last fall, 160,000 students in 190 countries enrolled in an Artificial Intelligence course taught by Mr. Thrun and Peter Norvig, a Google colleague. An additional 200 registered for the course on campus, but a few weeks into the semester, attendance at Stanford dwindled to about 30, as those who had the option of seeing their professors in person decided they preferred the online videos, with their simple views of a hand holding a pen, working through the problems. Mr. Thrun was enraptured by the scale of the course, and how it spawned its own culture, including a Facebook group, online discussions and an army of volunteer translators who made it available in 44 languages. "Having done this, I can't teach at Stanford again," he said at a digital conference in Germany in January. "I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I've taken the red pill, and I've seen Wonderland."

An interesting story that describes the changing face of college in America and the global community.  Begins with a very interesting scenario about a young girl taking an on-line physics course in Pakistan and the way her on-line global "classmates" helped her to finish the course after it was blocked by her government.

An article about new, free, online college courses and how they work. Yeah, I'm totally taking one of these.