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Abstract Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) is a system developed at UCLA for coordinating and evaluating peer reviews of student work. In CPR, students review one another's assignments in an anonymous system, providing feedback to other students while also learning how to recognize strengths and weaknesses of their own efforts. Peer review might hold particular promise for MOOCs and other high-enrollment courses that struggle with assessment and feedback, though the benefits of peer review can apply to any community of learners, large or small. The 7 Things You Should Know About... series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

"Published March 21, 2013 Kelly A. Lack As online courses continue to gain in popularity at colleges and universities throughout the country, knowledge about the effectiveness of this mode of instruction, relative to that of traditional, face-to-face courses, becomes increasingly important. A 2009 report by the U.S. Department of Education provides a meta-analysis of studies published up to 2008, examining the relative effectiveness of the different delivery formats in helping various populations of students learn different types of course content. This Ithaka S+R literature review complements that effort. It examines several studies that are not included in the DOE report, focusing on research that compares online or hybrid learning to face-to-face instruction in the context of semester-length, undergraduate-level, credit-bearing courses. The review yields little evidence to support broad claims that online or hybrid learning is significantly more effective or significantly less effective than courses taught in a face-to-face format, while also highlighting the need for further studies on this topic. The value of research of this kind will only grow as even more sophisticated, interactive online systems continue to be developed, and as the current budgetary constraints and enrollment pressures on postsecondary institutions strengthen the case for improving productivity."

"Jeremy Bailenson, who leads Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction lab, says that approach breaks new ground. Communication in virtual worlds has long been limited, he says, by a gap between how realistic an avatar could look and how realistically it could behave. "Second Life had fairly realistic faces, but there was no to way to control them," he says. "High Fidelity has solved that problem." When he recently tried Rosedale's technology, "the experience I got was 'It really feels like there's another person here,'" Bailenson says."

"One of Magic Leap's patents describes how such a device, dubbed a WRAP, for "waveguide reflector array projector," would operate. The display would be made up of an array of many small curved mirrors; light would be delivered to that array via optical fiber, and each of the tiny elements would reflect some of that light to create the light field for a particular point in 3-D space. The array could be semi-transparent to allow a person to see the real world at the same time."