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"Who will attend to the skills gap and create stronger linkages to the workforce? This book illuminates the great disruptive potential of online competency- based education. Workforce training, competency-based learning, and online learning are clearly not new phenomena, but online competency-based education is revolutionary because it marks the critical convergence of multiple vectors: the right learning model, the right technologies, the right customers, and the right business model."

"This report offers practical design advice to public managers and political leaders who are facing complex, dynamic public challenges involving multiple stakeholders on issues or problems where there is no clearly defined solution. In these situations, open project approaches have the potential to spark large-scale activity that could fundamentally change society."

BC Open Textbooks is an initiative started by the province of British Columbia in Canada. It is open textbooks adapted and created by BC faculty. It's difficult to tell which texts are complete and ready for use as Tony Bates incomplete text that I created another post about appears on the same page with complete texts (eg Chemistry, Biology Geography.) All the texts can be modified through Creative Commons licensing. This project has been creating concern for publishers who stand to loose business in BC and other provinces if the texts get adopted outside of BC. Initially, the project was focused on creating "a collection of open textbooks aligned with the top 40 highest-enrolled subject areas in the province. A second phase was announced in the spring of 2014 to add 20 textbooks targeting trades and skills training." Initially they looked for existing Creative Commons books they could adapt and they adapted 8 textbooks. From inception to fall 2014, 2244 students have used their open texts for a savings of $353,000 or $157 per student. The aim is to reach 200,000 students annually so they are at .6% and save each $900-$1500/year, still quite a way to go. Wondering how much this project is costing taxpayers, I googled and found this article http://www.ousa.ca/2013/04/24/textbooks/ which claims $600k-$1m/year. So the government has spent $1.2 - $2 million to save students $350k over the past two years. Still a long way to go to break even. In summary, 65 texts published, 45 adoptions, 2244 student users, for a savings of $353k to date. If this was a traditional textbook publishing company, they'd soon be out of business if they weren't already.

Thank for sharing, I believe that the conclusions that this article leaves us are not surprising, although yes very interesting. "Recently, the Babson Survey Research Group and Pearson conducted a survey of nearly 8,000 faculty members in higher education to find out more about how faculty are using social media. While we often post infographics showing trends or results from specific studies here at Edudemic, I found the results of this survey particularly interesting - perhaps because they were so different from what I expected." Julia Echeverria

You are so, so lucky. Here in South Africa, we are regressing, not even looking at online textbooks, but trying to reduce textbooks to only one per subject. The textbook crisis: http://mg.co.za/article/2013-08-23-00-south-africas-hidden-textbook-crisis and the regressive "solution" http://mg.co.za/article/2014-10-10-single-textbook-option-slammed. It is very frustrating for me, knowing all the possibilities, but not having any agency to get through to the authorities here.Llibraries are also failing horribly in advocating for the solutions that ARE available.

Our mission is to represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines. This mission will be carried out through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation. Through a shared interest in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards...

Our mission is to represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines. This mission will be carried out through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation. Through a shared interest in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards... Read full article >

Our mission is to represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journal and book publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines. This mission will be carried out through exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation.

Executive education courses are most schools' main sources of income. They are often customized and sold to private corporations, covering business trends such as big data and leadership. Moocs are seen by many in the education sector as a direct threat to MBA and master's programs, offering similar content developed by tenure or tenure-track professors, but free of charge.

Remember when the for profit university rose to a new prominence a decade or so ago, and everyone you knew flocked to the University of Phoenix to finish their degree and get a fabulous new job? I hope the MOOC doesn't turn into that. The hope was that it would enable those isolated by distance and means would elevate themselves thru their use. Sadly, according to findings by Forbes, it's mostly white, educated, employed American males taking them. I wonder which carries more weight with hiring managers--the MOOC-taker, or the traditional paying student?

The change has come more slowly to books than it came to music or to business correspondence, but by now it feels inevitable. The digital era is upon us. The Twilights and Freedoms of 2025 will be consumed primarily as e-books. In many ways, this is good news. Books will...

when I take a book in my hands, I always start with smelling paper (old or new), can we do the same thing with technology?

I do like physical book in my hand, but I find e-books more convenient either when I am writing my research paper or I want to read certain book right away. I heard that more and more universities are supporting e-book system, and getting rid of physical textbooks due to costs and other reasons. A lot more e-books will become useful in the future. I think paper books will exist, but it will be rare in the future.

I followed a trail about Wikipedia that led me to their funding model. This is an interesting rebuttal to their strategy of asking users for donations atop the page (sort of a PBS/NPR model for those in the US). Interesting to think about how advertising or marketing might play into the Wikipedia model, and how it might change the dynamic of the conversation.

Thanks for the post! I also thought it was interesting to read the arguments for and against an ad-driven business model at the link below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Funding_Wikipedia_through_advertisements A limited advertising model actually makes a lot of sense to me. I think the real obstacle to changing business models is how passionately and adamantly Jimmy Wales has rejected even the future possibility. Strong wording sound heroic, but not allowing some flexibility could greatly limited Wikipedia's positive impact.

This is an article on some of the darker aspects of digital identity.

"Like many millennials today, Yale classmates Henry Luce and Briton Hadden left their jobs to create a startup. They found newspapers dry, longwinded and boring and thought they could do better by presenting stories in a faster paced, more personality centered format. In 1923 they launched Time magazine and it became a runaway success."

"The greatest challenge for publishers today is to create new business models. Unfortunately, most haven't even begun the process due to misplaced nostalgia for distribution revenue. In that sense, paywalls represent the greatest threat to old-line publishers."

And also due to the inherent feature of every human being of being resistant to changes. And all of that without taking into account some economical interests.

Knowledge is becoming an increasingly recognised asset within business. But what exactly is it? This short animation guides you through the main terms you'll come across when discussing knowledge, including tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge, codification and diffusion.

Back to basics. In order to evolve knowledge, we have to re-ask ourselves what we think it is.

This video does a good explanation about the difference between data, information, and knowledge. In our class discussions, we talked about the differences too, which I never knew there were any. So data is just the facts of the world, information is capturing data within the context, and knowledge is what we know about plus our experiences.

"Open data could add up to $3 trillion worth of economic activity per year worldwide, according to a study by McKinsey Consultants. But in the race to liberate thousands of data-sets from the government and business sectors, the African continent is seen as lagging behind. "

If there is any continent that needs Open Data most, it is Africa. African needs transparency and accountability, which are the core foundation of Open Data, to create meaningful change on the continent. But making data available and Open is just the initial stage of accomplishing something. The challenge here is how to ensure that the people of Africa have knowledge of the information and are ABLE to ACCESS the information. What use is information when still limited Internet access, scarce electricity, and other ICT infrastructure, including language barriers continue to act as roadblocks to accessing Open data? Wow!! Just when I finished this short posting, the light went off. Couldn't access the Internet. Everything is dead. I have being waiting 30mins, 1hr, 2hrs, 2hrs 45mins … and now its 4hrs and my laptop battery power is running down. ALAS!! Finally power is restored after 4hrs 49mins for me to make my post. You feel me? This is not the exception, and this is not a coincidence but the norm

Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute, and Google's top rated Futurist Speaker. Unlike most speakers, Thomas works closely with his Board of Visionaries to develop original research studies. This enables him to speak on unusual topics and translate trends into unique business opportunities.

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As throngs of pro-democracy protesters continue to organize in Hong Kong's central business district, many of them are messaging one another through a network that doesn't require cell towers or Wi-Fi nodes. They're using an app called FireChat that launched in March and is underpinned by mesh networking, which lets phones unite to form a temporary Internet.