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"I have argued the futility of continuing to call the connectivist-style online courses by the term MOOC. In popular culture MOOC means Udacity, Coursera or EdX, and Andrew Ng's keynote on Wednesday showed the tone-deafness of the dominant paradigm. At #OpenEd13 debate continued among the group of experts (and this conference was full of experts) regarding how we properly define a MOOC, akin to the debate at Educause where Mathieu Plourde argued that every term in the acronym is negotiable. My argument at #OpenEd13 is that such thinking is counter-productive to the political and cultural conversation about distance, online and open education: those of us in that world are still arguing about the definition, but in the mainstream the ship has sailed, and we need to accept that the term MOOC no longer means what it did in 2008."

The Blended Schools Network is hosting a massive open online course (MOOC). Starting on Monday, October 21, 2013 this course is designed for educators who wish to Learn the fundamentals of being a quality online teacher using a pre-built online course. Note: This course is designed for educators that have access to online course content via a course management system of their choosing (e.g. Blackboard, Canvas, Edmodo, Moodle etc.). If you do not have access to an online course the Blended Schools Network can provide you with a sample online course for use during the MOOC. This MOOC is an online course consisting of: Weekly online lesson content that can be completed at any time during the assigned week Weekly online collaboration activities that can be completed at any time during the assigned week Weekly online presentation and discussion sessions that can be attended live or viewed as a recording

This looked interesting - very interesting.....

There's nothing particularly new about MOOCs. Most universities have offered online courses for many years and the basic technologies involved - video lectures, discussion forums, tests, and the like - are the same we have used with on-campus and distance students. The only difference is the scale.

"er book has a lot of practical advice for teachers, obviously. We want to talk to her about that. But I thought it would be interesting also, given the focus of our site at MOOC News and Reviews to ask her advice for students, and, of course, to get her observations about the addition of MOOCs into the online learning landscape. So we're going to cover all of those as much as we have time for."

"Quality in online learning can be defined in many ways: quality of content, quality of design, quality of instructional delivery, and, ultimately, quality of outcomes. On the face of it, the organizing principles of MOOCs are at odds with widely observed best practices in online education, including those advocated by my organization, the Quality Matters Program. "

"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."

A coalition of faculty groups has declared war against online learning, particularly massive open online courses (MOOCs), because it said it believes that the fast expansion of this form of education is being promulgated by corporations - specifically for-profit colleges and universities and education technology companies - at the expense of student education and public interest.

Lani Gunawardena is the co-author of a forthcoming book on global culture and online education. She said some global distance education evangelists tend to assume everybody speaks English and has the same priorities as they do.

"More than six million students are currently enrolled in online courses. There are now massive open online courses (MOOCs), in which universities and technology companies partner to design courses for thousands of students. Selingo also discusses how two colleges, the traditional Southern New Hampshire University and the newly developed Western Governors University (see John Gravois, "The College For-profits Should Fear," Washington Monthly, September/October 2011), are experimenting with competency-based online associate's degree programs, in which students are credited as soon as they show mastery of a subject rather than having to spend a set number of hours in class."

the rush for institutions to join Coursera isn't just a matter of their recognizing potential for these kinds of classes to reshape higher education. In the midst of all the hype and the hoopla, it's FOMO. The fear of missing out. Indeed as Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng tells Inside Higher Ed, the startup will "probably double its university partnerships at least one more time before it stops recruiting new institutions." So hurry, folks. You don't want to miss out…

"As part of a university system that has delivered online courses, programs and degrees for a very long time, I am troubled by what appears to be the inseparable link between online education and massive online education-that is, that "massive" is THE way to deliver online programs.  Most online degree programs are not MOOP(rograms)s. "

""The emergence of 'advocacy philanthropy' has resulted in the unabashed use of foundation strategies to influence government action, policy, and legislation," the Claremont researchers concluded. That's a departure, they wrote, "from the established norms in higher education philanthropy, norms that generally created a distance between foundation activity and politics.""

""It will be harder to get into Minerva than any other university," says Nelson. "You'll have the same criteria for your grades, essay, and application. But you'll get no brownie points for how good an athlete you are, for how much money your parents can donate, or for what state you were born in.""

TCC Hawaii invites faculty, support staff, librarians, counselors, student affairs professionals, students, administrators, and educational consultants to submit proposals for papers and general sessions.

Sound like a super on-line conference. I won't be submitting a proposal but would love to join-in. I would not, in this case, having a on-ground session.

As someone who has taught large courses at a University of California, I can assure readers that my job could have easily been automated. Most of college-the expansive campuses and large lecture halls-will crumble into ghost towns as budget-strapped schools herd students online.

This is an online course to help you understand better how to use technology to enhance your teaching practice. The course is aimed primarily at people teaching at Higher Education level, whether in Higher Education Institutions or Further Education Colleges.

"Welcome to Class2Go! We're Stanford Online's internal platform, designed to be an open platform for online learning and research."

"Stanford faculty members are playing a leading role in exploring online education - and a number of them are now sharing experiences about their activities and what they are learning in a new series of videos available on the Stanford Online website."

""There are good reasons to be anxious about universities...selling their name in exchange for something, and (suggesting) that the learning is somehow separate, different or less valuable," he said. "If what we've got is not worth anything - is worth giving away free - doesn't that feed into the general suspicion of experts that everyone's voice is equal, especially on the internet?""