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he Ohio Association of Community Colleges (OACC) today announced a new partnership with Western Governors University (WGU) that allows Ohio community college graduates to seamlessly transfer their coursework to WGU while also receiving discounted tuition to the accredited, online university.

WGU will:

Offer Ohio community colleges’ graduates and staff a five percent 5% tuition discount.

With registration opening today (Sept. 29, 2014) on D2L Open Courses, the Web Accessibility MOOC for Online Educators, or #WAMOE, is designed to help e-Learning professionals meet the challenges of compliance with the web accessibility requirements as they pertain to electronic learning environments.

There are weekly modules that are designed to help you improve your web accessibility skills specifically for teaching online

growing recognition that design is not simply about making products attractive

easier to use, fit better into the flow of people’s lives, suit the needs of a broader range of end-users, increase productivity, and even influence emotions (which in turn can influence cognition).

digital higher education – both its software and content – has managed to remain untouched by good design.

The Department took those suggestions, and will be providing institutions with greater regulatory flexibility to design and test new approaches to student financial aid designed to meet the need of these students through several new experiments that will: Enable students to earn federal student aid based on how much they learn, rather than the amount of time they spend in class by providing federal aid to students enrolled in self-paced competency-based education programs. Provide flexibility for an institution to provide a mix of direct assessment coursework and credit hour coursework in the same program. Allow the use of federal student aid to pay for prior learning assessments, which can allow students—including returning adults or veterans—to decrease their time to get a degree.

Institutions that apply for and are granted these limited waivers would be able to have more flexibility over a portion of their federal student aid in order to implement experiments suggested by colleges, universities and the higher education community. Applications for the new experiments will be due in late September

Department is also announcing today that it will collaborate with the Department of Labor to develop a $25 million grant competition for an Online Skills Academy to support the development of a platform to enable high-quality, free or low-cost pathways to degrees, certificates, or other employer-recognized credentials

Many of the 600 or so colleges that are trying to add competency-based degrees are focused on adult, nontraditional students who want a leg up in the job market

in collaboration with specific industry partners, where an employer’s endorsement of the credential can lead to a graduate employee getting a promotion.

ther colleges' forays into competency-based education have been in disciplines with professional licensing and a heavy dose of task-based learning, which seems like an easier fit with academic programs based on mastery rather than time in a classroom.

Facebook is testing new features in its developer community that, if rolled out across the platform, could let anyone on the social networking service teach online courses.

initiative, known as Developers Circles,

The company is working with online education provider Udacity to create training programs for developers who participate in the circles.