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"GPAs don't predict anything about who is going to be a successful employee. "One of the things we've seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.'s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless - no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there's a slight correlation,"" "After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different," he said. "You're also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently. Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they're conditioned to succeed in that environment. 

The course management system (CMS) reinforces the status quo and hinders substantial teaching and learning innovation in higher education. It does so by imposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process. The open learning network (OLN)-a hybrid of the CMS and the personal learning environment (PLE)-is proposed as an alternative learning technology environment with the potential to leverage the affordances of the Web to dramatically improve learning.

"Our flipped school model is quite simple. Teachers record their lectures using screen-capture software (we use Camtasia) and post these lecture videos to a variety of outlets, including our school website, and YouTube. Students watch these videos outside of class on their smartphone, in the school computer lab (which now has extended hours), at home or even in my office if they need to. Now, when students come to class, they've already learned about the material and can spend class time working on math problems, writing about the Civil War or working on a science project, with the help of their teacher whenever they need it. This model allows students to seek one-on-one help from their teacher when they have a question, and learn material in an environment that is conducive to their education. To change the learning environment even further, we've used Google Groups to enable students to easily communicate outside of class, participate in large discussions related to their schoolwork and learn from each other."

"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."

"When you combine IdeaPaint's ability turn any wall or surface into a canvas and Evernote's ability to capture, archive and make that surface searchable, the possibilities for turning any room into an interactive environment are endless. These two products come together in a particularly exciting way in a classroom environment, which can become a more creative and engaging place to learn."

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 time a student interacts with their university - be that going to the library, logging into their virtual learning environment or submitting assessments online - they leave behind a digital footprint. Learning analytics is the process of using this data to improve learning and teaching. Learning analytics refers to the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about the progress of learners and the contexts in which learning takes place. Using the increased availability of big datasets around learner activity and digital footprints left by student activity in learning environments, learning analytics take us further than data currently available can."

"To enable learning environments of greater quality, scale, and power, with continuous and instantaneous digital connections to information, services, and communities, the learning management system of today must be reimagined. New systems are needed that capitalize on the transformative possibilities of technology to personalize instruction and integrate the diverse resources that support learners."

"To, "moocify" k12, the connectivist opportunities need to come out in stages and be student centered with a humanistic focus.  Based on this information, I have suggested a, Continuum of Open Learning and an instructional design model, called the Open Classroom Model, for future consideration.  The next steps are demonstrating how K12 learning environments can be "MOOCified" by connecting, collaborating and creating."

Jonathan is also the director of the BadgeStack Project, the first system designed for badge-empowered learning and community-building, and the first to issue Mozilla Open Badges. We'll talk about the changing nature of professional development (PD) in particular and learning in general with the rise of online meeting technology, and how informal and non-traditional learning environments are impacting how we think about education.

"If we want to see our digital learning environments evolve quickly and in a particular direction, we need to understand what evolution means. What are the generational changes that have happened so far, and what were the drivers for those changes?"

"An exciting path forward in achieving the NGDLE vision is a next generation learning system designed to create great learning experiences that improve learning outcomes. This learning system will understand learning outcomes, learner assessment, the learner record, and how to launch the right learning moments for each student."

Stanford On-Line course

"As a former K-12 teacher and a current educator in higher education, I grappled with the idea of creating a Facebook account to communicate and become "friends" with my students. I was less concerned with using Twitter because of the difference between "following" and "friending." In my youth I was told by parents and teachers, "I'm not your friend." They said this to distinguish between the roles of friends and adults in the rearing of a child. An assumed level of respect was maintained between teacher-student and parent-teacher when such boundaries were made clear. Today's shift in learning environments to learner-centered classrooms thus raises these questions: Do educators now want to be friends with their students? Do students actually prefer not to be friends with their teachers?"

"Instructors of online courses must create a learning environment that differentiates student discussion. But specifically, teachers must incorporate use of student blogging in an online course structure."

In order to understand Circles, Communities, and Sharing, it was important to grasp how each worked and then discuss what is best for the learning environment. Tools Each teacher received the following: markers, tape, yarn, and two package of photos of their peers On the think tank wall, each teacher was provided with the following drawings: three circles, share options, and a house community. Process Teachers started by categorizing the photos and labeling the circles with each category Teachers placed the photos into the proper labeled circle Anticipated Question: Can I place the same person in multiple circles? Teachers label their house community with an interest: CrossFit, Bulldogs, Blackhawks, etc. Each teacher takes his or her picture and does a gallery walk of the community houses. Once a community of interest is found, each teacher places his or her photo into the house community. The creator of the house community returns and determines whether to "accept" those people into the house With circles and a community created, teachers are ready to share ideas. They choose one of the options, draw/write/place links on the wall, and decide whether they are sharing to a circle, house community, public, or more. Using yarn, they connect their idea to whomever they are sharing to see visually how ideas spread

Using Edmodo, I delivered online instruction to my students into an actual active and engaging learning environment. As my students engaged in learning the fundamentals of Edmodo, both in the classroom and at home, I was simultaneously able to test each student in Reading Workshop, so that I may assess their independent reading levels.

For teens, the phone is the social device. One teen shared, "I use my phone for all of my social networking. I don't use a computer or an iPad for that." Since the go-to spot for mobile social is the phone, not the tablet, this might be encouraging news for schools incorporating tablets into the learning environment.

"A group of students at the Royal College of Art in London have created two masks that can give you superhuman sight and hearing. The first prototype covers the wearer's ears, mouth and nose and uses a directional microphone to give him the ability to hear an isolated sound in a noisy environment. For example, you could target a person in a crowd and clearly hear his words without the surrounding noise."

"gRSShopper is a personal web environment that combines resource aggregation, a personal dataspace, and personal publishing. It allows you to organize your online content any way you want to, to import content - your own or others' - from remote sites, to remix and repurpose it, and to distribute it as RSS, web pages, JSON data, or RSS feeds."