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The massive open online course (MOOC) provider edX took a step toward boosting the credibility of its "graduates" on Thursday, announcing a partnership with Pearson's testing centers that would allow students in edX's free, online courses to take proctored exams.

Pig farmers, electricians, plumbers, bridge painters, jam makers, blacksmiths, brewers, coal miners, carpenters, crab fisherman, oil drillers…they all tell me the same thing over and over, again and again - our country has become emotionally disconnected from an essential part of our workforce. We are no longer impressed with cheap electricity, paved roads, and indoor plumbing. We take our infrastructure for granted, and the people who build it.

"To help consumers understand the data being collected about them, Acxiom just launched a new website called AboutTheData.com. The site allows you to enter some personal information (name, birthdate, etc.) and discover what marketers think about you. Granted, the site is likely also a way for Axciom to build up its reservoir of data, but it's kind of fun to see what the marketing data says about us."

As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally-our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don't know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time.

Digital badges are receiving a growing amount of attention and are beginning to disrupt the norms of what it means to earn credit or be credentialed. Badges allow the sharing of evidence of skills and knowledge acquired through a wide range of life activity, at a granular level, and at a pace that keeps up with individuals who are always learning-even outside the classroom. As such, entities not traditionally in the degree-granting realm-such as museums, associations, online communities, and even individual experts-are now issuing "credit" for achievement they can uniquely recognize. At the same time, higher education institutions are rethinking the type and size of activities worthy of official recognition. From massive open online courses (MOOCs), service learning, faculty development, and campus events to new ways of structuring academic programs and courses or acknowledging the granular or discrete skills that these programs explore, there's much for colleges and universities to consider in the wide open frontier called badging.

Brandon, like many blue-collar millennials, is stuck on a journey to adulthood with no end in sight. His own parents, who had just high-school degrees, were married, steadily employed at the college, and homeowners well before they reached his age. But working-class kids today are growing up in a world where taken-for-granted pathways to adulthood are quickly eroding. Since the 1970s, stable blue-collar jobs have rapidly disappeared, taking family wages, pensions, and employer-subsidized health insurance along with them. Unlike their parents and grandparents, who followed a well-worn path from school to the assembly line-and from courtship to marriage to childbearing-men and women today live at home longer, spend more time in school, change jobs more frequently, and start families later.

A new bill introduced in the U.S. Senate seeks to tackle the rising cost of textbooks by giving states an incentive to experiment with open educational resources. The Affordable College Textbook Act, introduced by U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Al Franken, Democrats of Illinois and Minnesota, respectively, would create a grant program that would fund the creation of new textbooks -- as long as they are made available for free online.

"Mass higher education, conceptually, is practical, low cost, skills oriented, and mainly concerned with teaching. It caught on because state legislatures and businesses saw it as a means of economic development and a supplier of personnel, and because families saw it as a way of ensuring a place in the middle class for their children. Research universities, on the other hand, grant extraordinary freedom and empowerment to a small, elaborately trained and selected group of people whose mission is to pursue knowledge and understanding without the constraints of immediate practical applicability under which most of the rest of the world has to operate."

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.

"The Federal Government currently invests billions of taxpayer dollars each year in programs that include the creation of educational, training, and instructional materials through grants, contracts, and other cooperative agreements. This investment produces educational resources ranging from innovative curricular resources to workforce training materials to English language learning tools. While these materials are created for the public good, they are generally not open to the members of the public who paid for them. At a time when educational opportunity, workforce development and access to knowledge are critical to America's future, these valuable publicly-funded resources should be openly available to students, teachers, businesses, workers and the public to use in new and innovative ways."

"Dealing with all the complaints takes time and, as a PhD student, I had my own research to do. Evaluations, ironically, were not really my concern. Student evaluations are not that important in economics (unless you aspire to teach at a liberal arts college), or not nearly as important as publishing papers in a top journal. And despite pleas from the thwarted Goldman candidate, the future job prospects of students and the money they might some day donate to the university was furthest from my mind. I'd sooner worry about winning a research grant."

This report, funded by a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation with additional support from Pearson, examines the attitudes, opinions, and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) among teaching faculty in U.S. higher education.

"The company announced that, for the first time, it generated more revenue from digital products than print. This seemed to go relatively unnoticed by most, likely because we all took the evolution for granted, but it is a key milestone in the ongoing reinvention of learning content for Higher Education."

"Private colleges raise their tuition 65 cents for every dollar increase in federal subsidized loans and 55 cents for Pell grants given to low-income students, according to the report. College tuition has outstripped U.S. inflation for decades."

"Sometimes the post-secondary instructors who create the content are given grants through the project's funding and sometimes they do it "off the side of their desk," she said. "Instead of getting a royalty fee every time someone buys their commercial book, we give you money up front to do this work," Coolidge said. According to BCcampus, 26 per cent of students in the province have at some point chosen to not register for a course because the cost of the required textbooks were too high."

"Among the software slated to be released under an open-source license is the university's pioneering adaptive-learning project, the Open Learning Initiative, as well as a learning analytics platform LearnSphere. Officials estimate that developing the software has cost more than $100 million in foundation grants and university dollars. The goal of the software giveaway is to jump-start "learning engineering," the practice of applying findings from learning science to college classrooms."

"The first part of this opinion piece finished by reporting there are over one hundred different models and frameworks claiming to describe the nature of digital literacies. Given the messy topography of the field this follow up blog post briefly describes some of the higher profile or more widely known frameworks from the United States, United Kingdom and Europe. The discussion identifies an inherent tension between universal and contextual definitions of digital literacies, and finishes with an example of a current Irish initiative. This local example (for me), and the other major models critically reviewed below, illustrate why we need to challenge some of our taken-for-granted assumptions, and metaphorically 'get off the tracks' in order to develop more transformative frameworks for digital literacies."

"On Tuesday, the publishing powerhouse announced a partnership with Alchemie, an educational app startup that gamifies learning, to develop augmented reality apps for college-level chemistry courses through a National Science Foundation research grant."

"Zapps are apps that you can use within the Zoom platform to help improve productivity and create more engaging experiences. No more switching between multiple applications on your desktop. Now you can quickly navigate to apps within the Zoom interface to streamline permissions, grant document accessibility, and collaborate on screen."

The Academy offers a wide variety of STEMx topics offered as online workshops, mini-courses, or "massively open online courses" (MOOC's) that are fun, practical, and engaging. Topics include "Helping students solve community challenges through app design" (offered by AppsforGood.org), "Game Design for Learning" (offered by LearningGamesNetwork.org), "Using Remote Science Labs" (offered by Northwestern University) and more. Educators earn recognition from the host institution and from the HP Catalyst Academy by collecting electronic badges.