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"This course was really interesting but more like a PBS show. It consisted mainly of a series of interviews that Chuck Severance had done over the years, which he then strung together to make it into a history. While that is all true, it doesn't convey Dr. Severance' contribution to the whole. Clearly, his perspective was essential and his being present at the conversation at the actual points in history made his current insights more valuable."

Firstly, everything is a trade-off. If you think that your message really requires a certain format, you accept the consequences, and that is the case here. I develop the premise that an individual subject matter expert can create a rich, interactive e-textbook that is competitive with commercial offerings, and at such low cost that it can be offered to students for free or at very little cost.

The rationale for seeking open terms of both access and use is as follows. Free access provides the literature to at least five overlapping audiences: researchers who happen upon open-access research articles while browsing the Web rather than a password-protected database; researchers at institutions that cannot afford the subscription prices for the growing literature; researchers in disciplines other than that of a journal's intended audience, who would not otherwise subscribe; patients, their families, students, and other members of the public with an interest in the information but without the means to subscribe; and researchers' computers running text-mining software to analyze the literature. In addition, granting readers full reuse rights unleashes the full range of human creativity for translating, combining, analyzing, adapting, and preserving the scientific record, whereas traditional copyright arrangements in scientific publishing increasingly inhibit scholarly communication.

This is a facilitated course that will run for 6 weeks, initially from 19 March - 23 April 2013. Webinars are held Tuesday morning (Americas)/ late afternoon (Europe, Africa). There is an optional weekly lab session on Fridays at the same time of day. To sign up, click 'Start Course' at bottom left.

University professors need to accept the fact that like most fields, education is constantly evolving due to technological advancements. The traditional classroom is changing, but the refusal of many tenured professors to change with it hinders the efficiency of education to improve. The university not only needs to provide incentives for professors to utilize these online resources, but also mandate that they at least be offered. In the next few years, it is unavoidable that some people will prefer and continue to use traditional methods of education. Yet, at the bare minimum, cheaper alternatives to over-priced textbooks and online resources need to be offered and available to university students.

"Would you be shocked if your teacher assigned you to play Minecraft at school? At a few area schools, teachers are doing just that. The Lego-like building game has become a popular tool for classroom lessons as well as life lessons."

The more able students careened through the work at double quick speed but did not seem to understand that they can move on to the next section with no supervision. It proved impossible for me to break their habit of "returning to teacher" for the next part. I was a new teacher for most of them doing something new and in hindsight this is obvious. I did not want to shoo them away - I had only just met them! I had sixteen times thirty second conversations at the start of each lesson - all different - most not needed.

All OMS CS course content will be delivered via the massive open online course (MOOC) format, with enhanced support services for students enrolled in the degree program. Those students also will pay a fraction of the cost of traditional on-campus master's programs; total tuition for the program is initially expected to be below $7,000. A pilot program, partly supported by a generous gift from AT&T, will begin in the next academic year. Initial enrollment will be limited to a few hundred students recruited from AT&T and Georgia Tech corporate affiliates.

"I often find it difficult to convince those in "real" colleges that they are in dialogue with for-profit higher education. After all, they're not "our kind of students". This juxtaposition of MOOCs and for-profits is the first time I think this has worked particularly well. As I said at the lecture, we get to MOOCs by way of the lessons venture capitalists have learned from for-profits' uneven success in penetrating the real currency of higher education: prestige. As the founder of 2tor has been rumored to have said, they can't build prestige so they'll just borrow it from existing institutions."

In 2010, Roberts was a graduate student working for the federal government while teaching introductory psychology at night. He didn't set aside a summer, a month or a few weeks to prepare his book - he created it on a week-by-week basis, often putting sections together late at night or early in the morning. Roberts, who provides his book free of charge to the university's PSYC 100: Introduction to Psychology classes, is part of a national growing open educational resources movement. These resources are published under a Creative Commons license, which allows for free use and sometimes editing, much like Wikipedia. Roberts' psychology textbook draws from free online information, videos and graphics.

"No sooner after I finished the open educational resource did I start to think about edits and revisions that needed to be made to streamline learning for participants. My plan is to build address the "Next Steps" I detail at the end of this post…and then move back to some of the "Bigger Questions" I have at the start of this post. I should be able to have this all completed in the next 3-4 weeks and re-launch it for use by educators."

"Last night, minutes before the Spurs demolished the Heat in Game 3 of the NBA finals, San Antonio's 10-year-old mariachi singer Sebastien De La Cruz offered a wonderful rendition of the National Anthem at AT&T Center. While he may be used to adoring audiences, as seen in last year's America's Got Talent, not everybody liked his performance - he was met with applause in the stadium and scorn on the internet. Apparently, other "Americans" were none too pleased that a "Mexican" was performing the national anthem, a privilege they only consider theirs."

This is an online course to help you understand better how to use technology to enhance your teaching practice. The course is aimed primarily at people teaching at Higher Education level, whether in Higher Education Institutions or Further Education Colleges.

"During the second half of the semester, student work outside the classroom is focused primarily on the completion of specialization badges. Students are encouraged to forge their own path through the course material by completing badges from the following categories: coding, industry analysis, graphic design, user experience, power user skills, and entrepreneurship. In order to earn an A grade on the badge component, students must master at least eight specialization badges. To ensure breadth, all students must complete at least one badge in each category in order to pass the course. (Note: Students were also allowed to pitch their own badges if they could make the case for the badge's connection to course themes.)"

"Even if you routinely teach large courses, a MOOC requires far more time to prepare and execute. To prepare the three lectures offered in a single week, my team spent about 20 hours planning and developing content. I spent an additional eight hours rehearsing my lectures. It took just under four hours to record the video for three formal lectures. I cannot speak to the editing process, because another unit at Georgia Tech does that work, but it usually takes five to 10 days to receive the edited video and get Coursera approval. Even then there is more work to incorporate any quiz links or other "in-class work" that takes place during lecture pauses. Finally there is the "Courserafication" process of uploading and configuring the content for use on our Coursera site. Formatting assignments and other content takes still more time."

" Instructors will offer a "special 'flipped' version of an electrical engineering course ... where students watch online lectures from Harvard and MIT at home." So the good is the flipped part because it's more interactive and dynamic and there's less lecture-based didacticism in the classroom due to watching videos at home? Really? The 1970s just called: they want their Open University courses back. This model perhaps moves the Cal State system forward as it offers more accessibility to content for working adults in a hybrid format. I wish they would just step away from the MOOC terminology, which is, let's be honest, copying and lending out a videotape in another name."

"what if we looked at education from a different perspective? What if we looked at the education and learning for that matter through four quadrants? The top row represents the individual perspective. The bottom row represents the perspective of the collective or group. The left column represents the interior perspective and the right column represents the exterior perspective. The left column can also be thought of as the human perspective and the right is the objective non-human perspective."

Silicon Valley has wielded its growing political clout at the state Capitol to kill a digital privacy bill that would have given consumers access to information about them being collected online. Had the Right to Know Act become law, California would have been the first state to take direct aim at an online industry that stockpiles and trades in a wide range of personal data about nearly every adult in the United States. In a major defeat for consumer groups and privacy watchdogs, AB 1291 will instead become a two-year bill, effectively putting it into a deep freeze until next year.

At one session here at Davos, the presidents of Harvard, Stanford and MIT all readily acknowledged that the experiments in new models of online learning will soon radically disrupt higher learning. One expert suggested many universities are facing the early days of bankruptcy. Another predicted there may only be 10 universities that survive this transition.

The first two-dimensional bar codes, or QR codes, as they're known, were installed Friday at Arpoador, a massive boulder that rises at the end of Ipanema beach. The image was built into the sidewalk with the same black and white stones that decorate sidewalks around town with mosaics of waves, fish and abstract images.