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January 9, 2013 by Jeffrey R. Young "...Setting the Price The company also revealed more details about how it would award certificates and how much it would charge for them. Students who want a verified certificate will have to decide early in the course and pay upfront. Paying that fee will put students on what the company is calling the "Signature Track." The company and colleges are still struggling to decide what to charge for the certificates, though in its latest announcement Coursera said the price would run $30 to $100. "It's a huge decision: You're essentially setting a market," said Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, in an interview this week with The Chronicle. "No one has ever priced this before." Officials also stressed that they would offer financial aid to students who demonstrated that they could not afford the fees but could benefit from the verified certificates. Ms. Koller said Coursera would continue to offer free unofficial certificates to students who passed some of its courses. So why would someone pay for the verified certificates? Peter Lange, provost at Duke University, which plans to offer one of the courses in the new pilot, said each free certificate would have a clear disclaimer on it: "It says something to the effect of, We cannot vouch that the person who got this document took the course or did the work." The new Signature Track could mean serious revenue for Coursera, and for the 33 partner colleges that will get a cut of it. Exactly how the colleges will divide that revenue is still being worked out, it seems. Mr. Lange said the question was on the agenda at the next monthly meeting of Duke's Advisory Committee on Online Education." So, when Coursera staff offered free Statements of Accomplishment as "Recognition" to the volunteers of the Global Translator community, they did so in full awareness of their lack of value and of the mentioned disclaimer

"We now require captcha on many social features, such as following people, joining groups, etc. For a very nominal fee, you can upgrade yourself to "Social Membership," which would grant you full social features without capcha, plus a lot of other goodies. We expect to stop the vast majority of the spammers with this simple measure. We'd like to elaborate more about Social Membership and its pricing and our thoughts behind the decisions. As long-time Diigo users know, Diigo is a personal knowledge management tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community on the other hand. While it is perfectly fine to use Diigo solely as the former, we do believe that the value of the knowledge-sharing community could be substantial, as the number of active users increases, and as the spam is minimized. As a result, we have decided to set the social membership annual fee at $5/year on Oct 1, 2014, and will increase the price gradually thereafter according to a pre-determined formula, as the number of active social members increases. To reward existing users, an attractive promotion price of $2/year will be available until Oct. 1, 2014. For future years, you will continue to pay the low annual price you paid in the first year, as long as your credit card stay valid for automatic renewal. We have also taken this opportunity to re-adjust our pricing plan to better align users needs with our business model. Existing basic and premium users will be automatically upgraded to Standard in the new pricing plan."

Attenzione a quel "new pricing plan" https://www.diigo.com/premium che limita drasticamente il numero dei gruppi per le formule meno care, ma non è chiaro cosa succederà ai gruppi creati con formula gratuita.

"he courses will be free to teachers, and for those who want a verified certificate, there will be a $50 fee. Coursera will verify that the teacher actually completed the course and participated fully along the way."

"Livemocha is a social network service that supports language learning through audio-visual lessons and peer tutoring tools. Launched in September 2007, the platform has over 5 million registered members from over 200 countries. Lessons are provided for 36 different languages. While the standard lessons are freely accessible for registered users, the platform also offers "premium content" for a fee. Livemocha is more than just "Rosetta Stone on the Web." A unique selling point of the educational Web community is its collaborative approach to language learning: Members of the Livemocha community do not only learn a foreign language, they also tutor other community members in their native language. Users are encouraged to form learning tandems and offer feedback on their partner's speaking or writing exercises. The Livemocha platform supports this peer learning practice through comment features, voice recording and social awareness tools. For ETC Journal, I interviewed Clint Schmidt, Livemocha's Vice President of Marketing and Products. Clint has an impressive success record of developing marketing and product functions for a variety of high-growth Internet companies, including Half.com, eBay and ZoomIn.com, India's leading photo sharing and printing site. Clint holds a BSE in Entrepreneurial Management from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania."

"4. Titles 4.1 Content Rejection and Removal We may, in our sole discretion, at any time, and without notice to you (a) reject Content; or (b) remove, or refuse to list or distribute any Content on or from any CreateSpace E-Store, Amazon Property or other sales channel. You will remain liable for all fees and other amounts that you may owe under this Agreement in connection with any Title or Content we remove because of a violation of this Agreement or our Content Guidelines. You may withdraw your Title from the Services at any time, but we will have 30 days from the date of a Title's withdrawal (or termination of this Agreement) to remove all applicable Content. However, we may fulfill any Customer orders pending as of the date we remove such Title from the Services. If we request that you provide additional information relating to your Content, such as information confirming that you have all rights required to permit our distribution of the Content, you represent and warrant that any information and documentation you provide to us in response to such a request will be current, complete, and accurate. You authorize us, directly or through third parties, to make any inquiries we consider appropriate to verify your rights to permit our distribution of the Content and the accuracy of the information or documentation you provide to us with respect to those rights."

Chris Hoofnagle, director of BCLT's privacy programs | 3/6/13 "...We need to be less infatuated with "the cloud," which to some extent is a marketing fad. Many of the putative benefits of the cloud are disclaimed in these services' terms of service. For instance, a 2009 survey of 31 contracts found that, "…In effect, a number of providers of consumer-oriented Cloud services appear to disclaim the specific fitness of their services for the purpose(s) for which many customers will have specifically signed up to use them." The same researchers found that providers' business models were related to the generosity of terms. This militates towards providers that charge some fee for service as opposed to "free" ones that monetize user data. We should charge our IT professionals with the duty of documenting problems with outsourced services. To more objectively understand the cloud phenomenon, we should track the real costs associated with outsourcing, including outages, the costs of managing the relationship with Google, and the technical problems that users experience. Outsourcing is not costless. We could learn that employees have simply been transferred from the operation of CalMail to the management of bMail. We should not assume that systems mean fewer people-they may appropriately require meaningful staffing to fulfill our needs. As the expiration date of system wide Google contract approaches in June 2015, these metrics will help us make an economical decision. Finally, there are technical approaches that, if effective, could blunt, but not completely eliminate, the privacy problems created by cloud services. Encryption tools, such as CipherCloud, exist to mask data from Google itself. This can help hide the content of messages, reduce data mining risks from Google, and cause the government to have to come to Berkeley officials to gain access to content. The emergence of these services indicates that there is a shared concern about s

Attenzione alla data: alcune cose potrebbero essere cambiate nel frattempo.

January 19, 2016 "Starting today, when you enroll in certain courses, you'll be asked to pay a fee (or apply for Coursera's financial aid program) if you'd like to submit required graded assignments and earn a Course Certificate. You can also choose to explore the course for free, in which case you'll have full access to videos, discussions, and practice assignments, and view-only access to graded assignments. You'll see the options for each individual course when you click "enroll" on the course information page; courses that aren't part of this change will continue to show the options to enroll in the course either with or without a Certificate. Most courses that are part of Specializations will begin offering this new experience this week, and certain other courses will follow later this year."

Ironia: quando ho fatto questo segnalibro, il solo tag raccomandato (dal blog Coursera) che è apparso era "mooc"...

"Last week, the University made its decision final, and announced that it will begin the process of removing all the content on March 15th. To add insult to injury, it turns out that removing this digital library will ultimately end up requiring about five months worth of work- a cost UC Berkeley will be forced to pay."

Articolo "anti-stato" sulla disputa tra Berkeley e il Dipartimento della Giustizia US (DoJ) in merito all'accessibilità dei corsi pubblici di Berkeley. L'autrice ignora deliberatamente diversi fatti: il riconoscimento da parte del DoJ degli sforzi di Berkeley per implementare l'accessibilità, il fatto che i video inaccessibili non verranno cancellati, ma il loro accesso verrà per ora ristretto, ecc,