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"The learning experience that you offer your students may still be unknown, unintentional, or misunderstood; nevertheless, you are offering an experience. An e-learning course with 77 content tabs, for example, may evoke a feeling among your students of being overwhelmed, just as presenting the plagiarism policy as the homepage of your course (you know who you are) may elicit a rigid first impression. This is where we can learn from the curators of the theme park experience-by meticulously curating a course to include enough "thrill" for our accelerated student and enough "support" for our remedial student, while still leaving enough room for every student's self-expression."

"Chester Ludlow, a pug dog from Vermont, has been awarded an online MBA degree (Masters in Business Administration) by Rochville University-an online college that offers life experience online degrees. Chester is believed to be the first dog to be awarded an online masters degree based on work and life experience credentials. But did he earn it-or did he buy it?"

"The prototype Tracker is based on a concise set of questions which have been intensively tested with HE and FE students for readability and ease of response. It builds on resources such as the Jisc/NUS Digital Student Experience benchmarking tool, and the Jisc guide to Enhancing the Digital Student Experience: a strategic approach. The questions cover issues that are important to learners and/or to staff with a focus on the learning experience."

"Drawing on her experience as a consultant for VoiceThread in which she hosts monthly Google+ Hangouts, she created the very first "Teach & Share" Google+ Hangout, an online gathering of educators who, for this installment, shared their experiences using the learning management system Canvas. "I started thinking about how much faculty learn from simply talking to one another. These are always the most powerful professional development experiences," Pacansky-Brock said of her decision to host the event. "Faculty need to connect with each other to keep innovation moving forward. [...] That's the premise of the Teach & Shares.""

"The frustrations teenagers experience with school are more a case of statistics and lack of experience than that of work ethic or "attitude" problems. These statistics are not tied to socioeconomic status, weight or time spent in a seat; they're genetic and experiential. We have a bell curve of abstraction and experience, and we're only beginning to think about how to honor that."

"MOOC success, in other words, is not individual success. We each have our own motivations for participating in a MOOC, and our own rewards, which may be more or less satisfied. But MOOC success emerges as a consequence of individual experiences. It is not a combination or a sum of those experiences - taking a poll won't tell us about them - but rather a result of how those experiences combined or meshed together."

"Ivory Tower takes a look at universities and their transformation from providers of education to business ventures that strive to be the biggest and the best providers of the "college experience". The competition among these institutions of higher learning has had an adverse effect on those they are suppose to serve. From less rigorous curriculums to higher tuition prices, the universities have changed the way Americans think of educations. Students are now consumers and university presidents are CEOs overseeing multiplexes of the college experience. In order to pay for that experience, students are taking out an average of about $30,000 in student loans. The overall student debt in the US has now surpassed $1tn."

"Self-determined learning or heutagogy is fast gaining interest from educators around the world interested in an evidence-based approach to learning. Grounded as it is on brain research and extensive research into how people learn self-determined learning is particularly popular among those interested in innovative approaches to learning. This edited book is the perfect primer on self-determined learning or heutagogy. It consists of an introductory chapter explaining the main concepts and principles of this exciting approach to educational practice. This is followed by 16 chapters describing the experience of practitioners in using the approach. These experiences come from a wide variety of interests including school education, higher education, workplace learning, consulting, lifelong learning, training, and community education. Full of links to resources, curated sites,and discussion forums, this is a valuable 'how to' book for the interested practitioner and theoretician alike."

"Marketers are proficient in using a content engagement cycle, a practice for deciding when to engage whom with what kind of content during the customer journey. They plan months, quarters and even years in advance to create a content strategy that aligns with business goals and engages their audience pre- and post-sale. L&D professionals on the other hand, often think about each training session or learning program singularly instead of looking at the overall learner experience. Mapping out the learner lifecycle and assigning content that engages them along the way not only helps create unforgettable learning experiences but also aids in the transfer of knowledge after a training session ends. "

"Synapse®, the cloud-based Learning Experience Design System, brings all the pieces and people you need together to design and prototype learning experiences quickly, easily and effectively."

"CourseTalk is what you might expect - an early stage Yelp for MOOCs - a place for students to share their experiences with these courses and a way to discover new courses they'd enjoy. Given that it's still nascent, the platform's design is simple and its user experience is straightforward: Visitors can use the general search bar which is front and center, or peruse through "Top Rated," "Popular" and "Upcoming" verticals, or search by category, like Business, Computer Science, etc."

"I graduated from the University of Toronto in Industrial Engineering back in 1988 and I remember how confused I was about where my career would take me when I was in the latter stages of getting my degree.  I thought providing my perspective and experience to someone who is looking for some guidance would be a nice way to give back my time. The experience has been so memorable."

The recently announced partnership with the University of Edinburgh presented the team with an opportunity to engage and experiment with the much-publicised MOOC format, and foreground issues related to the theory and practice of online education itself. What follows are some of our perspectives on the planning and development of a large scale open course, what challenges the MOOC presents for delivering a worthwhile educational experience, and what questions this type of course format provokes for a team already teaching and researching in the field of e-learning and technology in higher education.

Empire State College submitted a proposal for Open SUNY after Chancellor Nancy Zimpher announced her "strategic plan." Open SUNY includes SUNY Complete, designed help SUNY students who have left the system without finishing their degree to complete their education, and SUNY REAL (Recognition of Experiential and Academic Learning). Empire State College has been awarded a $500,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation to develop SUNY REAL, which will assess nontraditional learning experiences. In a press release, Zimpher called it "a unique opportunity for military veterans, workers, and others to translate their life experiences into college credit," saying it will decrease time to a degree and save students money.

"During the webinar, one of the participants shared a link for a report from Duke University on their first MOOC, Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach, delivered through Coursera in fall 2012. And what a find that was - this is the most thorough description I have yet seen from a university about their experience selecting, development, delivering and analyzing a MOOC. Kudos to Yvonne Belanger and Jessica Thornton, the authors."

That's where my TEDx experience becomes a tale of two TEDs. There is TEDx and there is TED. TEDxStanford, and similar grassroots-organized TEDx events, are community-based events, made strong by the lived experience of those in the community. We were together in that space, part of a group that largely felt connected, welcoming, and accessible. We laughed together, we cried together, we ate meals together, we held our breaths together when a presenter seemed to stumble on a word, and at the end, we hugged complete strangers like we were leaving summer camp…together. Then there is TED, the expensive, "unassailable" events. While I am sure that some TED attendees feel some of the things TEDx folks feel, TED looks from the outside more like an exclusive social club than summer camp.

the inverted classroom places a lot of intentional structure on the out-of-class experience. We don't just hand students a book or a PDF or a bunch of videos and say, Read/Watch these and then we'll discuss them in class. The out-of-class experience for students in a flipped classroom is structured.

"remember that your right to academic freedom does not extend into a right to create a poor learning experience."

"It got me thinking about what types of experiences are best suited for real physical conference events.  Unless we get a chance to interact, ask questions, contribute to conversations, get hands on experience, and do things that require your actual physical presence, then perhaps those other things don't belong in a real physical conference.  I feel a bit cheated when I go to an event (and pay good money to do so) only to feel as though what I experienced could have been just as well communicated virtually through video or some other means.  I feel a bit the same when I go to a real physical conference and find that one of the "keynotes" is being beaming in via satellite on a big screen that we all just sit and watch.  I expect better than that."

ECAR has surveyed undergraduate students annually since 2004 about technology in higher education. In 2013, ECAR collaborated with more than 250 higher education institutions to collect responses from more than 112,000 undergraduate students about their technology experiences and expectations. The findings are distilled into four broad themes to help educators and higher education institutions better understand how students experience technology on their respective campuses and the ways in which new, better, or more technology can impact students' relationship with information technology.