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"Last fall, Alberta Education sent two 2013 diploma-exam questions along with nearly 1,900 student essay answers that had been graded by teachers to LightSide, a Pennsylvania company that develops computer software to score student essays. LightSide's automated algorithms outperformed human reliability in the Alberta study by about 20 per cent, said the company's January 2014 report to the government."

"Regardless of the goal of MOOCs - be it for profit or idealism - there are genuine educational concerns that need to be closely monitored. A course with 10,000 (or even 1,000) students enrolled cannot foster any significant discussion. Yes, teaching assistants (TAs) can be employed to groups of 100-200 students for online questions etc, but that may not be so simple. About 100 TAs would be needed for a modest-sized MOOC of 10,000 students. Even for the lecturer to organise 100 TAs would be a Herculean task. Another serious concern is evaluation. How can one evaluate 20,000 students taking a course? Yes, electronic quizzes and multiple-choice tests can be given to monitor progress - if the material is suitable for such types of questions. But what about material in the social sciences and humanities that might be harder to evaluate (than science) without essay-style answers? I've already seen that companies are attempting to write computer programs that will grade essays. But as one educator put it, how can a programmer include wit and style for evaluation in such a program?"

"Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Essays on meaning and learning networks May 19, 2012. Connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. The bulk of this work is devoted to tracing the implications of this thesis in learning. Yes, this could have been a shorter book - and perhaps one day I'll author a volume without the redundancies, false starts, detours and asides, and other miscellany. Such a volume would be sterile, however, and it feels more true to the actual enquiry to stay true to the original blog posts, essays and presentations that constitute this work."

In addition to the benefits of using "clickers" (AKA student response systems) in a classroom to foster a more engaged environment (click here for a quick intro), clickers also offer the opportunity to measure how students are understanding and processing information in real time. "Keeping the poll open" and asking students questions while they are listening/watching is a very useful way to find out how they are able to apply theoretical ideas. Although the examples in this essay focus on music, keeping the poll open could be applied to other time-based arts, or even in other disciplines when a teacher wants to observe how students are processing information as it changes.

After completing the eight-week course, however, I am optimistic that this kind of MOOC will not eat my job because it and I are not really in the same business. At Ursinus College, where I teach, the faculty and administration work individually and collectively to help our students cultivate judgment, the capacity to decide what to think or how to act in areas, like health policy, where no formula can generate the right answer. While we cannot help our students without demanding that they take an active role in their education, we also assume that they do not come in with their judgments already cultivated. College should be a transformative experience for them, and they will need guidance.

""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.""

"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. "

"America is shifting from a national, analog, industrial economy to a global, digital, information economy. Our social institutions, colleges and universities included, were created for the former. Today they all seem to be broken. They work less well than they once did. Through either repair or replacement - more likely a combination - they need to be refitted for a new age."

" Instructors will offer a "special 'flipped' version of an electrical engineering course ... where students watch online lectures from Harvard and MIT at home." So the good is the flipped part because it's more interactive and dynamic and there's less lecture-based didacticism in the classroom due to watching videos at home? Really? The 1970s just called: they want their Open University courses back. This model perhaps moves the Cal State system forward as it offers more accessibility to content for working adults in a hybrid format. I wish they would just step away from the MOOC terminology, which is, let's be honest, copying and lending out a videotape in another name."

"Along the way, we should encourage learners who have been raised on a diet of compliance and social control to take a critical mind-set. But that doesn't mean that we should teach them that all arguments are equally valid and that the truth is whatever you decide it is at that moment. Just as we learn to raise our standards when analyzing the claims of others, we also need to apply high standards to our own thinking. That's why critical thinking can be an important part of self-improvement. It can help you get what you want, but it can also help you decide what you want to want."

""Learning science" is becoming a buzzword, but it means experimenting with new approaches and learning from what doesn't work as well as what does, writes Michael Feldstein. And everyone who teaches for a living must do it."

"Prices for a "tutor" vary. Boostmygrades.com advertises a $695 rate for graduate classes, $495 for an algebra class, or $95 for an essay. When Inside Higher Ed, posing as a potential customer, asked for a quote for an introductory microeconomics class offered by Penn State World Campus, noneedtostudy.com offered to complete the entire course for $900, with payment upon completion, and onlineclasshelpers.com asked for $775, paid up front. Most sites promise at least a B in the course."

"Designing a course that precludes cheating might require thinking creatively and breaking away from simply uploading lecture videos and administering quizzes, said Kyle Johnson, an independent higher ed consultant. "What kind of experience are we providing for students if someone is able to take an entire class for a student and we never figure it out from the interaction? At a pedagogical level, that's my concern," he said. "Are we really just dumping information at them so someone can come in and take a couple of quizzes and they're done?""

With the scrambled classroom model, we are challenged to learn new possibilities, but also to design instruction based on principles we have known about for some time. In the scrambled classroom model, the innovation is not so much "online learning," but "human learning" supported by all that the 21st century brings to the table.

Two teachers and a few students at Monday's school board meeting questioned the decision, noting the other services provided by Google - such as Google Docs - in some classrooms. One student involved with the National Honor Society said his club uses Google's Gmail to communicate with one another. One teacher said her students use Google Docs to prepare essays. The program, she said, offers students a chance to review each other's papers and she can view students' projects from her computer as they are working on them. "My kids love this," said Laurie Davidson, a seventh-grade language arts teacher.

"As is so often the case in Washington, though, the devil is in the details. Our organizations, along with 19 other higher education groups representing nearly every American college and university, have serious concerns about what the TEACH Act would mean for higher education's ability to use technology to advance learning. In short, the legislation would actually prevent us from using new technology to better serve our students, including students with disabilities."

"Smart machines are an emerging "super class" of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, both the physical and the intellectual kind, said Sondergaard. Machines, for instance, have been grading multiple choice for years, but now they are grading essays and unstructured text. This cognitive capability in software will extend to other areas, including financial analysis, medical diagnostics and data analytic jobs of all sorts, says Gartner."

"At a recent talk at the University of Colorado Boulder I discussed various definitions of digital scholarship and how we might categorize digital scholarship. My forthcoming essay in the second edition of Blackwell's Companion to Digital Humanities deals with these questions in depth. This chart offers one way to consider a typology for digital scholarship in the humanities. These characteristics are offered as a beginning point. They are not meant to exclude or restrict the definition of digital scholarship. Indeed, I hope these definitions might provoke some further discussion about how to undertake reviews of digital scholarship. "

"For all these reasons, I've concluded that it would be sound pedagogy for me to give my students notice about some of the challenging material we'll be covering in class - material relating to racial and sexual oppression, for instance, and to ethnic and religious conflict - as well as some information about their rights and responsibilities in responding to it. Starting with the summer semester, as a result, I'll be discussing these issues during the first class meeting and including a notice about them in the syllabus."

This year, Yik Yak is the app du jour; racist, sexist, and homophobic comments posted on Yik Yak have led to student protests on some campuses, and attempts by administrators to block access to the site on others. But Yik Yak is not the problem; in fact, I am confident that the hype over this particular app will soon die down, and it will be replaced by some new, more exciting tool. The problem lies in a culture that accepts - indeed embraces - the act of broadcasting, behind a protective mask of anonymity, statements that most would find offensive.

"the automated text-analysis tool will be tested in a statistics course this fall. For three semesters, students in that class have responded to the same writing prompts, producing hundreds of essays on the same topics. The M-Write team has pored over those papers, identifying the features of papers that met the assignment criteria and those that missed the mark. The findings will be used to design an algorithm that makes the text-analysis tool look for those features."