The concept of open badges could also pose a challenge to existing educational institutions, given that they might no longer be the chief conduits for awarding qualifications. Will they fight against the concept of badges or make fundamental changes to become part of the lifelong learning ecosystem, recognising badges in the entry process and awarding badges for more than just the core skills set out by a course, e.g. awarding value badges and recognising badges awarded by peers?
"This site hosts the augmented edition of Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age, a book by Philippe Aigrain, with the contribution of Suzanne Aigrain, published at Amsterdam University Press as a paper book and as an open access digital monograph. On this site, you can access the source code and datasets used in the book, comment on each of the book chapters, run our economic models for the financing of a sharing-compatible culture with your choice of parameters, and run our diversity of attention analysis software on your own datasets."
"Only companies that could claim to be "an open source business" would have all products scoring 10/10 - probably very, very few. A focus on software freedom - the code, rather than the company - is the answer to the issue."
"OpenClass is completely free to use--free of licensing, hardware, or hosting fees. However, though they're using the term "open," the Pearson materials most compatible with the platform will remain copyrighted and fee-for-use."
Speaking of the future of scholarly publishing, and the role of publishers, Velterop says, "The evolution of scientific communication will go on, without any doubt, and although that may not mean the total demise of the traditional models, these models will necessarily change. After all, some dinosaur lineages survived as well. We call them birds. And there are some very attractive ones. They are smaller than the dinosaurs they evolved from, though. Much smaller."
"On Tuesday, Virginia is joining a group of 12 institutions that plan to open their courses to the world, free of charge, through an online platform created by the start-up company Coursera."