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he University of Edinburgh’s partnership with Coursera presents us with an opportunity to research the new and sometimes uncomfortable territory that the MOOC foregrounds, a prospect that will allow us to engage meaningfully, critically, and productively with the shifting landscapes of open education

We are attempting to develop a course which initiates reading, critical viewing of films and structured discussion as the primary pedagogical activities.

Participatory practices and customs in the wider social web are integral to this approach, and we’re interested in how the pedagogical modes operating within platforms like Coursera can be productively extended to create more open learning spaces, integrating our work with public services and sites beyond the platform.

“This resolution opens the door to assurances to our students that this kind of prior-learning assessment will be available eventually on all our campuses,” said Ms. Zimpher in an interview.

Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington have enlisted Western Governors University, a nonprofit online institution that uses the “competency” method, to help working adults in those states earn degrees. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are building programs aimed at helping their own adult students redeem their on-the-job skills and knowledge for credit toward degrees. And California may soon use MOOCs to deal with overcrowding in some courses at its public colleges and universities.

“Usually when you have an outside vendor, it’s to deliver something that you don’t know how to do,” she said. “In our case we actually know how to do this, and we know how to do it well.”

“In Washington state, there are over 900,000 adults with some college and no degree,” said Rep. Reuven Carlyle.”

But, he adds, “you can use technology to personalize the instruction and target what their individual needs are. You can fill those gaps, and when you do that and when you empower students to do that … the learning is so much more productive.”

SUNY, of course, is not the place to develop MOOCs, online courses, OER, open courseware or PLAs, so what is important about this announcement? I think the significance lies in SUNY’s scale and SUNY’s approach. SUNY appears to view the Open SUNY program as a method to spread educational innovations throughout one of the largest systems in the country rather than creating a new pilot program or experiment. SUNY has 468,000 students and plans to add 100,000 more. Rather than trying to create a new innovation, the role of the system is to foster innovation and then take the best ideas and make them available to all. Although it’s not getting enough attention, Open SUNY will have an outsized impact on the future of online education in the US. State-wide initiatives, whether driven by the systems or the state government, are becoming one of the biggest factors in how higher education is changing in the US. I suspect that other states will be watching SUNY and adopting this model in part or in whole. Pay attention to Open SUNY – it will matter.

“flipped classroom.”

“The outreach potential is unmatched,” Robinson said. “Hopefully it will increase the number of people impacted by our science.”