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Twenty-first-century learners have expectations that are not met within the current model of higher education. With the introduction of online learning, the anytime/anywhere mantra taken up by many postsecondary institutions was a first step to meeting learner needs for flexibility; however, the choice and determination of delivery mode still resides with the institution and course instructors. Recently, the massive open online course (MOOC) movement has been introduced as an undeniable force in higher education, and the authors argue that it is distracting leadership from focusing on alternative options for supporting the needs of learners who demand both personalization and real access to learning opportunities. The key element to the MOOC movement is its openness that enables student access to education. In this article, the authors present the multi-access learning framework that envelops the MOOC phenomenon and merges course access modes enabling student choice and agency. The authors report results from a pilot study on one type of multi-access course, where students were able to choose their mode of access. In this case, remote students accessed the course via webcam and joined their on-campus classmates and instructor who were together face-to-face. Implications for multi-access learning in relation to the MOOC movement are discussed.

"The Open Access Button is a browser-based tool that lets users track when they are denied access to research, then search for alternative access to the article.  Each time a user encounters a paywall, he simply clicks the button in his bookmark bar, fills out an optional dialogue box, and his experience is added to a map alongside other users.  Then, the user receives a link to search for free access to the article using resources such as Google Scholar. The Open Access Button initiative hopes to create a worldwide map showing the impact of denied access to research."

"Open access to academic research has never been a hotter topic. But it's still held back by myths and misunderstandings repeated by people who should know better. The good news is that open access has been successful enough to attract comment from beyond its circle of pioneers and experts. The bad news is that a disappointing number of policy-makers, journalists and academics opine in public without doing their homework. Here, at the start of the sixth global Open Access Week, are the six most common and harmful misunderstandings about open access:"

"This post briefly introduces instructional video accessibility and some tools to make videos more accessible."

"Leveraging the revolutionary potential of digital technology to provide access to the world's best faculty members, this new method of dissemination takes what were once exclusive, limited-access, high-priced resources and puts them online for anyone to learn from, freely. Despite its somewhat goofy acronym, this new model has been embraced, sometimes in the face of faculty objections, because of its democratizing, globalizing potential, as well as its effectiveness in improving an institution's reputation for innovation and excellence. I am, of course, talking about Coapi. If you haven't heard of it, the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, which now comprises more than 40, began in 2011 as a way for colleges to coordinate and advocate for open-access policies, which typically require that all faculty journal publications be made available freely online, whether on a personal Web site, institutional repository, or discipline-specific public archive."

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.

Open access as the default sounds ambitious, but is consistent with recent trends, particularly for research funded by taxpayers. A growing number of governments and funding agencies have already embraced mandatory open access requirements, recognizing that if the public funds the research, it is entitled to access the results.

"According to the OSU Web Accessibility Policy (PDF), all content interfaces to be used by Ohio State University faculty/staff, program participants, or other university constituencies are required to be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as amended. This page provides elaboration and guidelines to help OSU developers and purchasing agents meet the Web Accessibility Policy."

"Conflicts arise, however, because accessibility accommodations can sometimes complicate efforts to quickly disseminate flexible learning options to a broad student population. In some cases, institutions are responding to such conflicts in extreme ways. For example, one institution simply took down large volumes of online content that had been provided in the spirit of UDL but that did not meet accessibility standards; in other instances, colleges and universities that feel overwhelmed by a conflict have done nothing at all to address it."

"Accessibility policies frame standards and expectations for how a college or university's programs, services, and facilities serve the needs of people with disabilities. Some policies are aspirational in nature and relatively short on specific mandates, while others are much more prescriptive in stating standards, rules for compliance, and sanctions for behaviors that fall short. Accessibility policies constitute a statement of values that the institutional community subscribes to, and they serve as guidelines for how the institution intends to ensure the equitable treatment of all members of the campus community."

Open education is about sharing, reducing barriers and increasing access in education. It includes free and open access to platforms, tools and resources in education (such as learning materials, course materials, videos of lectures, assessment tools, research, study groups, textbooks, etc.). Open education seeks to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.

They don't see privacy as simply keeping secrets. They understand privacy as controlling information flow. It is rare these days to be able to hide information from absolutely everyone. There are too many technologies that capture images and information. Instead, people control who sees their information. They set their social media profiles to allow certain people to have access but others not to have access. They allow some companies to have their data but do not want others to access it or want it used in some ways but not others. Privacy isn't all-or-nothing - it's about modulating boundaries and controlling data.

"Learning management systems have become the primary delivery platform in most higher education systems for course-related activities such as lecture presentations, readings and assignments, discussions, and quizzes. Until a few years ago, access for learners and instructors with disabilities was either poorly supported or not considered at all in many popular tools. Due to lack of, or limited, accessibility in learning management systems, students were not able to fully or independently participate in key course activities."

Thank you!!

" when access conditions in the research lab do not mirror access conditions in the real world, efficacy studies tell us nothing about the actual efficacy of a product. We have to add a consideration of students' ability to actually access and use (and as I have argued elsewhere, own a copy of) the product to discussions about efficiacy."

"The Internet, increasingly affordable computing, open licensing, open access journals and open educational resources provide the foundation for a world in which a quality education can be a basic human right. Yet before we break the "iron triangle" of access, cost and quality with new models, we need to develop sustainable open business models with open policies: public access to publicly funded resources."

"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.""

Some authors will always prefer CC BY-NC-SA or CC BY-NC-ND, for a myriad of different reasons, and we support their choice to do so - but CC BY is widely considered to be the gold standard for open access, as it allows for maximum re-use and discovery. It is also preferred by many funders, and we continue to be compliant with all open access funder mandates.

"Assumptions about young people's familiarity with technologies risk exacerbating inequality. Access to devices and connectivity isn't equal across all young people, and neither is support in developing skills - from peers, parent/carers, or schools, equally distributed. Socioeconomic status remains a key issue in relation to access, with a small but significant number of young people having very limited access."

"I am ecstatic that one of my articles has been made officially free-to-access. I am excited that a publisher is willing to promote my article that challenges much of mainstream academic publishing. And I respect that a publisher already has systems in place to allow some form of openness (in the form of author manuscripts made open) beside the model that brings them money, and that moreover, they choose some articles to make them open access from their own site, at no cost to the author."

"Key findings from the report include: When publishers bundle a textbook with an access code, it eliminates most opportunities for students to cut costs with the used book market. Of the access code bundles in our sample, forty-five percent-nearly half-were unavailable from any other source we could find except the campus bookstore. This eliminated student's ability to shop around and meant that they were forced to pay full price for these materials. For the classes using bundles, students would likely be stuck paying full price, whereas for the classes using a textbook only, students could cut costs up to fifty-eight percent by buying used online. Schools that have invested in open educational resources (OER) generated significant savings for their students. OER are educational materials that can be downloaded or accessed for free online while carrying many other benefits for students and professors. For example, in Massachusetts, Greenfield Community College's use of OER in three of the six courses in our study meant that students there could spend as little as $31 per course on materials, compared to a national average of $153 per course. Switching the ten introductory classes in our study to OER nationwide would save students $1.5 billion per year in course materials costs."