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we'll be offering a free 4-week professional development course designed to help instructors, trainers, and instructional designers learn how to better use social media to support learning, whether in an informal networking sense or by embedding social media into more formal learning contexts. The course will be hosted on Blackboard Coursesites and is open to anyone, anywhere in the world, at no charge.

"By outsourcing digital education services -- by partnering with a massive open online course provider, for example -- Hilton and Wheeler argue that universities "shift control and economic power to entities outside of academia that develop and own technologies and services at scale." As a result, "long held faculty and student rights regarding control of intellectual property and privacy might no longer be decided in the academy.""

"the software known as Tor has become the most vouchsafed and developer-friendly method for using the Internet incognito. The free and open source program triple-encrypts your traffic and bounces it through computers around the globe, making tracing it vastly more difficult. Most Tor users know the program as a way to anonymously browse the Web."

"Lack of civility in online forums within learning communities is manageable in small, closed online learning communities where an instructor is in control of a class of up to thirty, or even forty students. However, as classes expand, with MOOCs, and other types of learning communities growing, in combination with platforms that allow anonymity (such as Coursera) it will become an issue for educators [and their institutions] involved in online learning at some time or another. Peers within my network have shared their experiences as students and instructors within MOOCs that involve politically charged or contentious subject matters where discussion forums are fraught with offensive, even toxic comments and vitriol discussion.  It is for this reason that I write this post; to provoke thought and discussion in order for educators to be proactive and develop appropriate strategies."

For many years now, educators and instructional designers alike used the "ADDIE" Instructional Design (ID) method as a guide in designing and effectively tracking a project's progress. "ADDIE" stands for Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate.

"Starting today, teachers and professors can apply for a preview of Classroom. Based on the requests we receive, we'll be inviting a limited number of educators to try Classroom in about a month. By September, Classroom will be available to any school using Google Apps for Education. Since we want to make sure Classroom plays well with others, if you're a developer or partner, sign up to learn more about integrating with Classroom."

On July 10, 2014, EDUCAUSE joined other leading higher education and library associations (listed below) in proposing a set of network neutrality principles for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to use in developing new regulations to preserve the "open Internet." These groups urged the FCC to adopt these principles in light of a recent court decision vacating two of the key network neutrality rules previously in place, which they believe creates an opportunity for Internet providers to block or degrade (e.g., arbitrarily slow) certain Internet traffic, or prioritize certain services, while relegating the online content and services of colleges, universities, and libraries to the "slow lane." The groups argue that new network neutrality rules based on these principles will ensure that the Internet remains a vital, vibrant platform for teaching, learning, research, and community support and engagement.

"Anyone, in theory, can publish on the Web; therefore, it is imperative for users of the Web to develop a critical eye to evaluate the credibility of Internet information. Searching for sources on the WWW involves using a search engine, a directory, or some combination of these two. Because there is so much information on the Web, good and bad, finding what you want is not an exact science and can be time consuming."

"We define digital literacies as the capabilities which fit someone for living, learning and working in a digital society. To help with thinking about this, we have outlined seven elements of digital literacy for consideration, which can be seen in the following diagram."

"The chart below shows the number of deleted posts every day since April among a sample of between 50,000 and 60,000 users in mainland China. On September 28th, the most tumultuous day of the protests, deletions hit a record: 15 of every 1,000 posts, more than five times normal levels. Mentions of "Hong Kong police" and any posts with a #HongKong hashtag fell afoul of the censors. The data were compiled by Weiboscope, a censorship-monitoring programme at the University of Hong Kong. FreeWeibo, a website developed by GreatFire.org, another Chinese censorship watchdog, captured many of the deleted posts. Most were written by ordinary users: people with a few thousand followers whose non-censored messages revealed otherwise unexceptional lives, of dinners with family and frustrations with traffic jams."

"Video games are playing an increasing role in school curricula as teachers seek to deliver core lessons such as math and reading-not to mention new skills such as computer programming-in a format that holds their students' interests. Some herald this gamification of education as the way of the future and a tool that allows students to take a more active role in learning as they develop the technology skills they need to succeed throughout their academic and professional careers."

"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."

"Under Chairman of the Board Martin Lipton and President John Sexton, New York University has been to operate as a real estate development/management business with a predatory higher-education side venture. A group of 400 faculty members at NYU, Faculty Against the Sexton Plan (FASP), have been working for years against what Pam Martens has called "running NYU as a tyrannical slush fund for privileged interests." FASP just published a devastating document, The Art of the Gouge, which describes how NYU engages in a mind-numbing range of tricks and traps to extract as much in fees as possible from students, while at the same time failing to invest in and often degrading the educational "product"."

The intersection of copyright and the scale and delivery of MOOCs highlights the enduring tensions between academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and copyright law in higher education. To gain insight into the copyright concerns of MOOC stakeholders, EDUCAUSE talked with CIOs, university general counsel, provosts, copyright experts, and other higher education associations. The consensus opinion was that intellectual property questions for MOOC content merit wide discussion because they affect multiple stakeholders and potentially carry significant consequences. Each MOOC provider, for example, establishes a proprietary claim on material included in its courses, licenses to the user the terms of access and use of that material, and establishes its ownership claim of user-generated content. This conflicts with the common institutional policy approach that grants rights to faculty who develop a course. Fair-use exceptions to traditional copyright protection face challenges as well, given a MOOC's potential for global reach. Nonetheless, fair use and MOOCs are not mutually exclusive ideas. MOOCs remain an experiment. Initiating discussions with a wide range of campus stakeholders will ensure clarity of purpose and a common understanding of copyright issues in a MOOC environment.

Every institution should develop and  implement a strategy for the support  and on-going improvement of  the quality of teaching and learning,  devoting the necessary level of human  and financial resources to the task, and  integrating this priority in its overall  mission, giving teaching due parity  with research.

"The University of Toronto is committed to exploring new ways of teaching and sharing knowledge in the 21st Century, and its participation in the two platforms Coursera and EdX are an essential part of this. Instructors from the university have already launched very well received "Massive Open Online Courses" on subjects ranging from programming to aboriginal education, statistics to mental health and psychology. To further our understanding of these new course formats, the Office of Online Learning Strategies (OLS), together with the course instructors, have developed an extensive research program around MOOCs and flipped classrooms"

"The rock-star meme implies that teaching is all about performance. What happens on stage is still what matters, even if techno-hip educators supplant traditional sages. Talk of rock-star faculty members reinforces the static lecture model that MOOCs were, ironically, developed in part to destroy. The audience at a rock concert is listening, not interacting. Decades of research and a modicum of common sense confirm that students engage and learn more through active participation in the classroom. For all the talk of personalized analytics and adaptive learning, MOOCs built around faculty rock stars will just transfer the lean-back experience of the lecture hall to a screen."

"Microsoft corporate vice-president for Skype Mark Gillett told BBC News that his division is working on 3D technology for its video calls, although the technology itself is years away from mainstream implementation."

"We contend that the real issue - and the one that largely goes unaddressed - is that the majority of people who teach online are given virtually no assistance in learning how to teach online. Professional development for these instructors is limited to lunch 'n' learns, basic learning platform support, and other technology-related resources, but generally fails to expose instructors to the best techniques for online instruction."

"Within the overall framework of the organization's strategy on OA, the recent launch of OA curricula for Researchers and Library Schools by UNESCO highlights its efforts for enhancing capacities to deal with Open Access issues. The carefully designed and developed sets of OA curricula for researchers and library and information professionals are based on two needs assessment surveys, and several rounds of face-to-face and online consultations with relevant stakeholders."