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"The New York Times, Slate and Al Jazeera have recently drawn attention to the adjunctification of the professoriate in the US. Only 24 per cent of the academic workforce are now tenured or tenure-track.  Much of the coverage has focused on the sub-poverty wages of adjunct faculty, their lack of job security and the growing legions of unemployed and under-employed PhDs. Elsewhere, the focus has been on web-based learning and the massive open online courses (MOOCs), with some commentators celebrating and others lamenting their arrival. "

"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."

In the interest of full disclosure, I was a participant in E-learning and Digital Culture and it was from that course's twitter feed that I learned about H817 Open Education. I was interested in doing the comparison because my experience in EDCMOOC transformed the way I viewed e-learning. I have not been a participant in DS106, at least not yet, but I did go to the DS106 site, reviewed some of the webpages and listened to the professors discuss the creation and results of the first year of the course.

For week four of the Open University course on Open Education, we were asked to compare MOOC models: either ds106 or the Change MOOC with something from Coursera or Udacity, focusing on "technology, pedagogy, and general approach and philosophy."

"The bottom line is that there really is no replacement for face-to-face interaction between academics and students. Digital and online methods can enrich those interactions, but it seems unlikely they can replace them in anything other than a greatly impoverished way without the investment of considerable resources. No wonder 72% of those who have taught moocs over the past three years believe students who took their classes had not done sufficient work to deserve credit from their institution."

Please join Ivy League LMS experts, Wendy Drexler and Catherine Zabrieske of Brown University for this informative webinar during which they will discuss five lessons they learned in their search for an open access LMS, how they formed their selection committee, involved faculty and students, and why they ultimately selected Canvas as their LMS. Drexler and Zabrieske will also discuss the latest on MOOCs in general as well as specifically how using Canvas Network as a platform for their MOOC "Exploring Engineering" has allowed them to create a more interactive course that engages students and keeps participation high rather than merely providing lectures and quizzes.

Millions of students have signed up for massive open online courses, and hundreds of universities are offering some form of Web-based curriculum. Most students aren't paying much for these classes, if they're paying anything at all. So where is all that knowledge-and all the cash-coming from?

These are important questions, and I'm glad I have colleagues helping me try to answer them. But my initial response to these concerns is to respond with a question of my own: Instead of comparing a Coursera course to a traditional college class, what if we compare it to a textbook? This is the question that often pivots discussions of Coursera from skepticism to curiosity.

This video list of insights comes from experts in the field of online teaching. Here is a collection of 8 lessons that might improve your online course!

"If you thought that distance learning was a product of today, then you would be mistaken. In fact, the first distance learning program on record took place in 1728, when a local teacher by the name of Caleb Phillips advertised shorthand correspondence lessons offered by mail! By 1800, the growth of the U.S. Postal Service brought about an increase in the number of distance learning correspondence courses in the country. Remember, mail back then was like email is today - "fast", convenient, and nearly everyone had access. Heck, by 1873, the University of the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) founded a distance learning facility."

Early this morning teacher Don Wettrick found out he's among 8,000 chosen to get a pair of Google Glass - voice activated, Internet-connected eyewear that can be used to film videos, browse the Web or see maps transposed on streets. A pair of the slim glasses will become part of Wettrick's innovations course in the Johnson County school district. Students will test out the glasses and come up with new applications.

in the three years I've been teaching mobile video in a course titled "Information 3.0," even those students who initially say they are very familiar with video later admit that they learned a lot from repeated practice and application of video production skills. In other words, shooting and uploading video to YouTube alone does not a videographer make, at least not in my class of sixty undergraduates who come from any major on campus.

A state-funded project to create low-cost digital textbooks for community-college courses has saved students about $5 million in just a few years, advocates say.

"OpenStax College, the year-old Rice University startup that produces free online textbooks, will more than double the number of fields in which it has titles by 2015, the university announced today. A grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation will allow OpenStax College to add to its current offerings in physics and sociology, and its two new biology books and an introductory anatomy text coming out this fall. The new titles will be in precalculus, chemistry, economics, U.S. history, psychology and statistics, Rice said, toward its goal of producing high-quality open-source books in the 25 most-enrolled college courses. OpenStax says its existing two texts have been downloaded more than 70,000 times so far."

"Discussion of the concept of Massive Open Online Courses as they evolved from the development of open online learning and evolved into a means of offering social and immersive learning online. The context was a discussion of officials from the University College of the North in manitoba, which is mandated to provide learning to numerous communities scattered across a large northern environment. For audio and vidio please see http://www.downes.ca/presentation/314 "

"For open participants in ds106, we can dispense of the entire "I dropped out of another &$*#ing MOOC" because there is nothing to drop out from. No one-pace-for-all ramming speed schedule, no weekly lectures, no multiple guess quizzes. We have a very easy to understand Getting Started Guide, itself with not one way to do this course but TWO, the Fast And Easy Way and the Blogging Way."

"Every semester, quite a few students will remark in the end-of-semester course evaluations that they wish they had gotten more specific, detailed feedback about their projects. Some students also remark that they found it really hard to give feedback, since they just weren't used to giving feedback to other students about their work. So, I've prepared this page to try to give you some examples to look at, helping you to see the MANY ways it is possible to engage with someone else's writing. The key is DETAIL, very very very specific details, rather than general comments like "good work" or "I really liked your stories." The more detailed and specific you can be in your feedback, the more useful it will be for the other person. Here are some examples of Storybook comments from last semester that contain very specific details and vivid, personal observations. Take a look and see what you think!"

"Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty - by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world's biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity."

In retrospect, 2012 may well be remembered as the year when Internet technology enabled the popularity of MOOCs-or massive open online courses-a form of disruptive or transformative education currently growing at a meteoric rate.