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"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will require grant recipients to make their research publicly available online -- a multibillion-dollar boost to the open access movement. The sweeping open access policy, which signals the foundation's full-throated approval for the public availability of research, will go into effect Jan. 1, 2015, and cover all new projects made possible with funding from the foundation. The foundation will ease grant recipients into the policy, allowing them to embargo their work for 12 months, but come 2017, "All publications shall be available immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period.""

""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.""

"The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field," says Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who in her former role at the Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding for MIT's project. "We're changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge.""

"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation wants to find out whether the massive open online courses that have proved so popular in advanced and often highly technical fields offer the same promise for remedial and introductory courses."

"With the report, Educause has launched the Next Generation Digital Learning Environments Initiative, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-supported effort to examine why colleges and universities are using "antiquated" technology -- and how to replace it. The average institution's learning management system, according to Educause's data, is eight years old."

"Although not specifically designed to optimise learning, claims have been made that MOOCs are based on sound pedagogical foundations that are at the very least comparable with courses offered by universities in face-to-face mode. To validate this, we examined the literature for empirical evidence substantiating such claims. Although empirical evidence directly related to MOOCs was difficult to find, the evidence suggests that there is no reason to believe that MOOCs are any less effective a learning experience than their face-to-face counterparts. Indeed, in some aspects, they may actually improve learning outcomes."

Just in time for Creative Commons' 10th birthday celebration of its license suite, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) announced a 3.5 million dollar grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a new program - Integrated Digital English Acceleration (I-DEA) - that will help adult English language learners improve their language skills while simultaneously providing career and college readiness training through technology-based tools and resources.

The Case Foundation, created by Steve Case and Jean Case in 1997, invests in people and ideas that can change the world. We create and support initiatives that leverage new technologies and entrepreneurial approaches to drive innovation in the social sector and encourage individuals to get involved with the communities and causes they care about.

Thousands of Idaho students in public, private and charter schools big and small next fall will be able to log into math, physics and history classes provided by the Khan Academy, a growing content provider focused on making free education available to anyone, anywhere. With $1.5 million in startup money from the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation, Khan Academy content will be provided in 47 schools, making Idaho the nation's first proving ground for a statewide implementation of the academy's free educational content and teaching model.

"During her search for videos, Chellani discovered that many of them didn't cover foundational concepts. So she started creating her own using the digital content creation software Adobe Captivate. She also started evaluating the concepts she teaches and decided to move away from teaching "to the textbook." Without this built-in time every week, Chellani said she wouldn't be able to work on these projects. Through end-of-year conferences, Sheninger found out that other teaches had students blog in their English classes and create YouTube videos instead of traditional lab reports. "I don't know if that stuff would have happened if this time wasn't made available," Sheninger said."

As "MOOC mania" completely overshadows the Open Education Resource (OER) initiative of UNESCO and the Hewlett Foundation, a potentially valuable point is being overlooked. The MOOC format, as it exists today, seems especially inappropriate for degree completion by a traditional age student (18-24). It may even be a challenge for the older, post- traditional student as the issue of how learning is to be validated still has most institutions questioning the credit worthiness of such offerings.

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.

"OpenStax College, the year-old Rice University startup that produces free online textbooks, will more than double the number of fields in which it has titles by 2015, the university announced today. A grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation will allow OpenStax College to add to its current offerings in physics and sociology, and its two new biology books and an introductory anatomy text coming out this fall. The new titles will be in precalculus, chemistry, economics, U.S. history, psychology and statistics, Rice said, toward its goal of producing high-quality open-source books in the 25 most-enrolled college courses. OpenStax says its existing two texts have been downloaded more than 70,000 times so far."

"Over 49,000 students registered for the class, over 16,000 attended the first week's lecture, and over 4,900 students earned a certificate at the end of the 10-week course. It would take 32 years of teaching our SI 502 foundations course on networked computing to interact with that many students."

"This Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (Framework) grows out of a belief that information literacy as an educational reform movement will realize its potential only through a richer, more complex set of core ideas. During the fifteen years since the publication of the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education,1 academic librarians and their partners in higher education associations have developed learning outcomes, tools, and resources that some institutions have deployed to infuse information literacy concepts and skills into their curricula. However, the rapidly changing higher education environment, along with the dynamic and often uncertain information ecosystem in which all of us work and live, require new attention to be focused on foundational ideas about that ecosystem. Students have a greater role and responsibility in creating new knowledge, in understanding the contours and the changing dynamics of the world of information, and in using information, data, and scholarship ethically. Teaching faculty have a greater responsibility in designing curricula and assignments that foster enhanced engagement with the core ideas about information and scholarship within their disciplines. Librarians have a greater responsibility in identifying core ideas within their own knowledge domain that can extend learning for students, in creating a new cohesive curriculum for information literacy, and in collaborating more extensively with faculty."

This report is the result of a National Science Foundation-Sponsored Computing Research Association Workshop held at MIT on January 9-11, 2013. This workshop developed a framework for understanding current disruptive change in higher education learning delivery models and outlined steps towards a research agenda for realizing possible benefits while avoiding future pitfalls.

The UCT OpenContent directory is the web portal for accessing open teaching and learning content from the University of Cape Town (UCT). Produced by the Open Educational Resources project in the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT with the support of the Shuttleworth Foundation, the directory aims to showcase the teaching efforts of UCT academics and encourage the publication of open resources.

This OCL4Ed micro Open Online Course (mOOC) will be facilitated by the UNESCO OER Chair network in support of capability development for the UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration (See video from Abel Caine, Programme Specialist for OER at UNESCO.). The OCL4Ed 13.09 course is sponsored by the OER Foundation and the Commonwealth of Learning.

During last month's round of School of Open courses, I helped out with a facilitated version of the Open Science course supported by Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and PLOS. On four Tuesdays in August, Billy Meinke hosted online discussions with a handful of well-known members of the open science community while participants from around the world completed course modules and blogged about their experiences. Here's how things went down.