Last July, Coursera introduced Signature Track, a fee-based feature that enables students to verify their identity and receive a certificate after completing a course. Faculty members at Yale are welcome to enable Signature Track for their courses as an option, Wright said, but with one catch: The courses also have to be free and open to anyone around the world. Faculty members can skip Signature Track too, if they wish.

To help bridge this gap between school and industry, last spring Facebook teamed up with Jay Borenstein, a computer science professor at Stanford, to launch Open Academy. Open Academy is a program designed to provide a practical, applied software engineering experience as part of a university student’s CS education. The program works closely with key faculty members at top CS universities to launch a course that matches students with active open source projects and mentors and allows them to receive academic credit for their contributions to the open source code base.

n a nutshell, the program works like this: A student team of 3-8 students, potentially spanning multiple universities, is formed A matching process is run that puts a student team with an open source project The team and a “mentor” from the open source project are flown to a location for a weekend ramp up hackathon (the location is Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, CA). The students can work on improving the project in two ways: by knocking out low hanging fruit issues that already exist or by identifying and pursuing new functionality The students will work on projects for between 8-20 weeks depending upon the schedules of the universities involved Univerisity faculty will be closely involved and consult with the mentor when determining final student grades. Expectations will be set with the students that states the coding contributions they make – the quality and ambition of them – will be the main factor determining their grade Start date: January-Feb depending on university Feb 7-9 Hackathon at Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, CA Midterm Acknowledgment (tbd) End date: Mar – Jun depending on university

 http://community.kde.org/Open_Academy

Massive online learning in numbers does not interest me at all; what does is massive amounts of creative effort by perhaps a small core of participants and a lovely long tail of activity by a larger number.