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Empire State College submitted a proposal for Open SUNY after Chancellor Nancy Zimpher announced her "strategic plan." Open SUNY includes SUNY Complete, designed help SUNY students who have left the system without finishing their degree to complete their education, and SUNY REAL (Recognition of Experiential and Academic Learning). Empire State College has been awarded a $500,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation to develop SUNY REAL, which will assess nontraditional learning experiences. In a press release, Zimpher called it "a unique opportunity for military veterans, workers, and others to translate their life experiences into college credit," saying it will decrease time to a degree and save students money.

"The technological tools for transforming existing works have not only multiplied and increased in complexity, but they have also been effectively democratized because of their often significantly reduced cost and near-ubiquitous networked availability. Publishers and editors may no longer stand as primary gatekeepers to most creative works; increasingly, works are assessed in the public sphere through online databases like YouTube, and creators are making more works than ever before. Many such works rely heavily on the public domain, fair use, and the rich cultural soil of previous works for their efficacy and quality."

"MOOCs are characterized by their openness, enabling anyone across the world with an Internet connection to participate.  As a result, most MOOCs have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of participants. An online course with potentially tens of thousands of students is a very different teaching environment than face-to-face courses or even "traditional" online courses.  Teaching strategies practiced in other teaching contexts won't necessarily translate well to this context. Indeed, the sets of choices regarding learning objectives, content presentation, assessment, and instructor-to-student and student-to-student interaction are still being developed in this emergent teaching environment."

I refuse to subject students to every ridiculous standardized test that the state and/or district thinks is important. I refuse to have my higher-level and deep thinking lessons disrupted by meaningless assessments (like the EXPLORE test) that do little more than increase stress among children and teachers, and attempt to guide young adolescents into narrow choices.

The conventional wisdom in education is that any school reform--be it curriculum, instruction, assessment, or teacher professionalism--is most likely to take hold in schools that have strong leadership. The same holds true for technology. Any educator will tell you the most successful implementation of technology programs takes place in schools where the principal sees him or herself as a technology leader.

"Last year, based on our departmental assessment procedures, I determined that I wanted a more subjective way to give feedback to my students. To me, programming is more than just right or wrong code; I want students to develop good habits and styles of programming that use the tool to communicate the process of problem solving, not just the final answers. And I felt that that would be better achieved by giving students consistent verbal feedback, in addition to simple rubric scoring of their work."

As they are acquiring, students take notes, make drawings, make videos of their own, voicethreads, blog posts, Google Docs and sometimes they even use Post-It notes. I may require students to use a particular medium for a follow-up assignment or assessment, but letting them choose what they are going to use gives them more ownership of their learning and naturally moves them on to higher order thinking skills.

"At their best, digital textbooks offer a learning experience that boosts engagement, adapts to student learning, tracks performance and ensures up-to-date content - all while potentially saving costs in the longterm. According to a report from the Digital Textbook Collaborative, which was convened by the FCC and the US Department of Education, the cost of implementing the shift to digital varies from $250 to $1,000 per student per year, but the cost savings from increased teacher attendance, reduced paper costs, online assessments and other factors are estimated to be $600 per student per year. However, some say estimates on cost savings assume tablet prices that are less than actual costs and, without funding support, the upfront costs are difficult for many school districts to manage."

"There's already a lot of research into how we form impressions of people based on facial features alone. We see a picture of someone and almost immediately make an assessment of that person. As much as we know we shouldn't, we judge books by their covers."

" I'm sure many teachers would happily outsource homework grading and assessment to the droids. Blended learning will likely continue to make advances across classrooms as a substitution of teachers' time, though I see it unlikely to dominate instruction, particularly in elementary grades."

"personalized learning that routinely provides opportunities for students to become co-creators and curators of content as part of the learning process should become a normative learning objective and expectation. Assessments that not only allow but expect learners to demonstrate curricular mastery through knowledge application, rather than knowledge consumption, are likely to become increasingly important over the horizon. "

"The infographic below, based on data by CPP, publishers of the Myers-Briggs personality assessment, details the qualifiers for each of the test's characteristics, but furthermore, predicts the psychological types most likely to participate on specific social networks. More extroverts reported using Facebook than introverts, for instance. And people with inclinations toward Feeling spend more time browsing and interacting with people on Facebook, rather than those who tend toward Thinking."

I checked out RateMyProfessors.com, even knowing all the reasons why it's not reliable. Turns out I still warrant a smiley face, but, unsurprisingly, I'm not a red-pepper hottie. Does being a hottie say anything about possible assessments of one's teaching effectiveness? Indirectly, it may: At my college, almost all the hotties are in their 30s and 40s, and my browsing revealed that 90 percent of the hotties got smiley faces, while only 75 percent of the nonhotties did.

"We are using the data from our initial offering of MOOCs to investigate the nuances of course persistence and completion, experiment with ways to measure learning outcomes such as peer-to-peer assessment, and discover and design new low-cost delivery models."

"This kind of learning can't be scaffolded or too-carefully architectured but must be discovered in the act. In A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown write, "Our understanding comes not through a linear progression, in which each step confirms that you are on the right path. Rather, it arises through approaching the problem from many angles and ultimately seeing its logic only at the end" (98)."

For these reasons, the SUNYCoW opposes the prospect that MOOCs--or any other form of massive-scale instruction--might be accepted for credit in writing, especially in satisfaction of SUNY's Basic Communication requirement. Completion of the Writing requirement should always involve close work with a faculty member who can provide students mentorship, careful assessment and a genuine sense of a human audience.

Imagine how transformative it would be if we could combine self-paced, self-directed postsecondary learning (which has been around in one form or another for millennia) with online delivery of content that has embedded in it both the sophisticated assessment of learning and the ability to diagnose learning problems, sometimes even before the learner is aware of them, and provide just-in-time interventions that keep the learner on track. Add to that the opportunity for the learner to connect to and participate in groups of other learners, and, to link directly to the faculty member and receive individualized attention and mentoring. What you would have is the 21st-century version of do-it-yourself college, grounded in but well beyond the experienced reality of the thousands of previous DIYers such as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Edison.

MOOCs are too new for there to be compelling evidence of their value, cost, and risks. The potential benefits and threats to academic quality, student outcomes, institutional integrity, and administrative processes are not yet known. However, the emerging features of MOOCs that have made them distinctive from the other types of OER are the services integrated with the content. The MOOC platforms for organizing and delivering the multimedia content, integrated with the social media tools for engaging individuals, and the assessment and analytic tools for providing feedback on learning and teaching are critical services that manage the content delivery within a design for learning. These services available through the open enrollment of MOOCs are the additional benefits that have been recognized as valuable by some learners, teachers, and institutions.

"In this framework, teaching was an intimate experience shared between teacher and student, the relationship was central. I knew who my student was and I knew, to some degree, if they learned what I intended to teach in the moment it was taught. I am now faced with a new kind of teaching; this mode of teaching provides a dimension to learning that challenges the core of who I am as an educator. This type of teaching is less about the act of teaching and more about the act of learning. In the past, I was an effective educator because I was good at being responsive in the moment, I could guide a conversation to deeper levels on the spot and I could redo and reteach based on in-the-moment assessments. But I am now facing a kind of teaching that doesn't make use of the teaching skills I have developed and refined over the years."

In 1997 Ernest Boyer identified the concept of the Scholarship of Teaching. This was the first time that TEACHING had been identified as legitimate scholarship. Over time this idea has evolved into the movement called "SoTL" or the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Many of us are scholarly teachers; we read the literature, plan, assess, reflect, and revise. But what makes our teaching scholarship is very different. Lee Shulman (1999) clearly delineated the difference. To be scholarship, teaching must become public, be an object of critical review and evaluation by members of one's community, and it must be built upon and developed. This can seem time consuming and overwhelming. Below are some ideas to help you get started on the process.