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Just in time for Creative Commons' 10th birthday celebration of its license suite, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) announced a 3.5 million dollar grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a new program - Integrated Digital English Acceleration (I-DEA) - that will help adult English language learners improve their language skills while simultaneously providing career and college readiness training through technology-based tools and resources.

The case shed a light on the competitive world of educational testing and technology, which Pearson has come to dominate. As federal and state leaders work to overhaul struggling schools by raising academic standards, educational companies are rushing to secure lucrative contracts in testing, textbooks and software.

"I think there may be a certain type of learner that this works for - someone who is highly motivated and purposeful, who is seeking out specific knowledge. And someone who does not require much human interaction - because in spite of the rhetoric about personalization, lectures are inherently impersonal, and videos of lectures are doubly so.   So if the MOOC is ushering in a golden age, democratizing access to knowledge, it seems to have hit a bit of a bump. I think the bump in the road is the learner."

"The chart is part of a summary of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded studies by the Education Advisory Board, a business that produces research for colleges. The board looked at seven colleges, mostly regional public universities whose names have not been revealed, and tried to figure out what it costs to teach students. Analysts combed through 250 million rows of data to draw up reports that spelled out the costs of each student credit hour in each section in each department of each college."

"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will require grant recipients to make their research publicly available online -- a multibillion-dollar boost to the open access movement. The sweeping open access policy, which signals the foundation's full-throated approval for the public availability of research, will go into effect Jan. 1, 2015, and cover all new projects made possible with funding from the foundation. The foundation will ease grant recipients into the policy, allowing them to embargo their work for 12 months, but come 2017, "All publications shall be available immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period.""