Wisconsin officials tout the UW Flexible Option as the first to offer multiple, competency-based bachelor's degrees from a public university system. Officials encourage students to complete their education independently through online courses, which have grown in popularity through efforts by companies such as Coursera, edX and Udacity. No classroom time is required under the Wisconsin program except for clinical or practicum work for certain degrees.

Our sister course at Stanford is called "Educations Digital Future". The masters students of EDUC 403x were asked to compile a collection of "white papers" summarizing the major themes of the course. They are linked here and are an interesting comparison to "Transforming Education..". Many of their discussions, hopes and concerns were similar to those voiced in our class. There is

Programs and organizations like "UnCollege" and the "Thiel Fellowship" provide low-cost, low accreditation practical alternatives to college. Part of the changing landscape of higher education, perhaps one that reinforces the MOOC revolution. New York Times, "Saying No to College".

Kaggle is a platform for data prediction competitions that allows organizations to post their data and have it scrutinized by the public. In exchange for a prize, winning competitors provide the algorithms that beat all other methods of solving a data crunching problem. Kaggle is in Class is a statistical & data mining learning tool for students.

An Indian firm has created a mobile device platform that "empowers social enterprises (at the bottom of the pyramid) to capture, analyze and process information remotely through smartphones / tablets". I think this is interesting in it's bringing mobile collaboration to some of the most remote places, physically and economically.

A step forward in comprehensive online ed, and also an example of "mashing up" existing offerings by a third party. This guy "thought it would be an interesting exercise to see if it was possible to design a reasonable computer science curriculum using just Coursera courses (a MOOC)."

Updates stats on the largest "Massive Open Online Courses: or MOOC's. Coursera leading Udacity....