"Keynote presentation delivered to Simposio Internacional Estado Actual Y Prospectiva De La Educacion Virtual, Bogota, Colombia. Overview of the historical factors leading to the development of massive open online courses, and discussion of what this history can tell us of the sustainability of MOOCs in the future."

The open-source educational marketplace will give everyone access to the best universities in the world. This will inevitably spell disaster for colleges and universities that are perceived as second rate. Likewise, the most popular professors will enjoy massive influence as they teach vast global courses with registrants numbering in the hundreds of thousands (even though "most popular" may well equate to most entertaining rather than to most rigorous).

"Just a handful of students have signed up for the for-credit version of the University of Washington's online courses, but thousands are taking them for free."

"A college's decision to jump on the Coursera bandwagon is aided-and eased-by knowing that academic heavyweights like Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are already on board. As one college president described it to The New York Times, "You're known by your partners, and this is the College of Cardinals." In our haste to join the academic alphas, many of us are forgoing the reflection necessary to enter this new medium. Our resolve to act swiftly belies the serious nature of this next phase of higher education's evolution. There are critical pedagogical issues at stake in the online market, and MOOC's have not done nearly enough to deal with those concerns."

"CourseTalk is what you might expect - an early stage Yelp for MOOCs - a place for students to share their experiences with these courses and a way to discover new courses they'd enjoy. Given that it's still nascent, the platform's design is simple and its user experience is straightforward: Visitors can use the general search bar which is front and center, or peruse through "Top Rated," "Popular" and "Upcoming" verticals, or search by category, like Business, Computer Science, etc."

"Current students who take the free online college courses can earn certificates of completion, but not college credit. However, if MOOCs are determined to be close enough to traditional college courses as to become eligible for academic credit, they could make higher education more affordable and accessible, Ms. Lewin writes."

"This course was really interesting but more like a PBS show. It consisted mainly of a series of interviews that Chuck Severance had done over the years, which he then strung together to make it into a history. While that is all true, it doesn't convey Dr. Severance' contribution to the whole. Clearly, his perspective was essential and his being present at the conversation at the actual points in history made his current insights more valuable."

"Last month in a blog post titled "Better Than a Textbook?", I noted that some faculty find it easier to think about the massive open online courses (MOOCs) provided by vendors like Coursera as "super-textbooks" than as actual courses. Earlier this month, Vanderbilt computer science professor Doug Fisher wrote a guest post for the blog ProfHacker titled "Warming up to MOOCs," in which he described his experiments in using MOOCs in this fashion."

"We should be justifiably proud of the remarkable and enviable triumphs of American higher education. Instead, we find most recent conversations about higher education echoing around this one tiny (and so far trivial) aspect of the complex and diverse ecosystem of higher education. This focus on technological platforms at the expense of actual threats, challenges, and successes robs us of the ability to have sober, informed debates about the proper level and style of investment in higher education. So I suggest we let MOOCs grow and do their best work, learn from successes and mistakes, and stop assuming that they are the simple answer to anything meaningful and profound in the production and distribution of knowledge. The world is just not that simple."

"There are a few other players such as Edx/Classto Go,  CanvasNet and other who have a different model and are worth looking at. But surely, if we are serious about a social commitment to education that leads to a real qualification that will help make an actual change to peoples lives we should be looking at the OER University model."

""It will be harder to get into Minerva than any other university," says Nelson. "You'll have the same criteria for your grades, essay, and application. But you'll get no brownie points for how good an athlete you are, for how much money your parents can donate, or for what state you were born in.""

"Minerva is one of the least-publicized but also most well-funded and audacious of the current crop of online education startups. Funded with $25 million from Benchmark Capital-one of the well-known venture-capital firm's largest-ever investments-Minerva says it will begin accepting applicants in 2015 for an entirely Web-based college program. The resulting undergraduate degree, it promises, will have all the prestige of anything the Ivy League can offer, but at half the cost."

"There are 8 possible monetization strategies that MOOC providers like Coursera, or Learning Management System providers could adopt:"

"Connecting students, teachers and institutions, through an open, online course network."

"These dual characteristics of "open" are also core to Open Educational Resources (OER). Hewlett's updated OER definition begins: "OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others." That is, for an educational resource to be "open" it must be both gratis (available at no-cost) and libre (everyone has the legal rights to repurpose the resource). An OER cannot be freely available or openly licensed - it must be both freely available and openly licensed (or in the public domain) to be an OER."

"When the Legislature convenes in January, my intent is to work with the governor and Legislature to appropriately update the statute to meet modern-day circumstances," he wrote. "Until that time, I see no reason for our office to require registration of free, not-for-credit offerings." But that may not be the end of the matter. If, down the road, Coursera starts charging for the courses or students can earn credit or certificates for them, the state might reassess its approach, he said.

""There are good reasons to be anxious about universities...selling their name in exchange for something, and (suggesting) that the learning is somehow separate, different or less valuable," he said. "If what we've got is not worth anything - is worth giving away free - doesn't that feed into the general suspicion of experts that everyone's voice is equal, especially on the internet?""

"Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota."

"Over 49,000 students registered for the class, over 16,000 attended the first week's lecture, and over 4,900 students earned a certificate at the end of the 10-week course. It would take 32 years of teaching our SI 502 foundations course on networked computing to interact with that many students."

"If you have an exercise bike in the back room, you could be the small selection of people that use it everyday to get fit. But then again, you could be one of many more who bought it in the hope of regular practice but were unable to make it part of your routine. The MOOC or Massive Open Online Course, which has come to prominence this year, often has much the same effect. Students may enrol in the online free courses from prestigious universities in their tens of thousands, but overwhelmingly they bomb out with attrition rates up to 80-90%."