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In this article, I highlight current theories of learning and critically analyze connectivism within the context of its predecessors, to establish if it has anything new to offer as a learning theory or as an approach to teaching for the 21st Century

"The relatively low completion rates of learners have been a central critique as MOOCs grow in popularity. This focus on completion rates, however, implies a monolithic view of disengagement that fails to acknowledge alternative forms of participation in MOOCs. Identifying subpopulations of learners based on their longitudinal engagement with the course allows MOOC designers to target interventions and develop adaptive course features. We develop a simple, scalable, and informative classification method that identifies four prototypical engagement trajectories: Completing learners, who complete the majority of the assessments offered in the class; Auditing learners, who do assessments infrequently (if at all) and engage instead by watching video lectures; Disengaging learners, who do assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement, generally in the first third of the class; and Sampling learners, who enter and exit the course quickly, watching a minimal number of videos at some point during the course."

" The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that's not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was. "

"One of the key components of the IT&DML program is that we're big believers in "open" and to that end as much of the content of our program is open, and available online for your use. The rationale for this is two-fold. I believe this helps us adapt and react to changes in the industry and classroom. I also believe that if our materials are open and online, then anyone can use them…but also they can be critiqued and reviewed by anyone. To that end, I have been, and will continue to reflect on the texts and tools, and the components of the program here on this blog."

""My entire critique of higher education started with curricular reform at Penn," he says. "General education is nonexistent. It's effectively a buffet, and when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don't get educated. You get a random collection of information. Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.""

"What I'm arguing in the book is that it's not the presence of a laptop in a class that needs to be looked at and needs to be perhaps critiqued, but really the kind of digital culture that we're creating where we're not valuing conversation enough and not valuing relationships enough, and we tend to look at each other as apps in a more transactional way."