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discusses some of the politics involved in MOOCS in higher ed.

I reference first the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the bill being proposed in the California legislature to create a "faculty-free" New University of California online (read it and scream). And yet, this should surprise no one. We are living in a plutocracy. MOOCs are becoming popular as potential money savers for universities and money makers for "education" companies. One might think these two phenomena are unrelated. They're not.

"Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty - by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world's biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity."

The challenge: identifying the best approaches, which vary from campus to campus. "Boards are either overreacting, saying we should have added MOOCs yesterday, or they're underreacting," says David W. Strauss, a principal with the Art & Science Group, a higher-education consulting firm based in Baltimore. "We know you can't be frozen right now."

"It's been interesting watching this unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup."

"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."

"Amid the various influences that massive open online courses have had on higher education in their short life so far -- the topic of a daylong conference here Monday -- this may be among the more unexpected: The courses may be prompting some faculty to pay more attention to their teaching styles than they ever have before."

"The boring university lecture is going to be the first major casualty of the rise in online learning in higher education, says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The custodian of the world's biggest online encyclopaedia says that unless universities respond to the rising tide of online courses new major players will emerge to displace them, in the way that Microsoft arrived from nowhere alongside the personal computer. "I think that the impact is going to be massive and transformative," says Mr Wales, describing the importance of the MOOCs (massive open online courses) that have signed up millions of students."

Is a "personal brand" in social media much different from a old fashion portfolio, i.e art, model, teacher, etc. except it is digital, more creative and fluid?

"Having started a half dozen MOOC's in the recent months, I have found most of them tend to share a common trait. Many MOOC's currently represent a sort of parody of higher education's worst practices, its most spectacular delusions about itself."

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.

"The profile quoted Mr. Thrun as saying the Udacity MOOCs were "a lousy product" and "not a good fit" for disadvantaged students, unleashing a torrent of commentary in the higher-education blogosphere."

Reclaim Open Learning is an innovation contest, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, the Digital Media and Learning Hub, and the MIT Media Lab, with a humble mission. We want to find the five best examples of innovation happening right now in higher ed. The best of truly open, online and networked learning + The knowledge and expertise represented by institutions of higher education = Reclaim Open Learning.

"An open online course, Current/Future State of Higher Education, offering in fall 2012 will evaluate the change pressures that face universities and help universities prepare for the future state of higher education."

#udsnf12 article from Chronicle on MOOCS - available through the library if you can't view the whole article.

Discusses the MOOC at Stanford which we discussed in class, some of its pitfalls.

From a business perspective, this is a supply and demand problem in that the demand for quality education is not being met by an adequate supply of learning opportunities. From a technology perspective, this is a problem that can now be solved with software. From a societal perspective, there should be alarm bells going off for everyone that this is an issue that requires our boldest ideas and brightest minds.

"There are 8 possible monetization strategies that MOOC providers like Coursera, or Learning Management System providers could adopt:"

"His online course drew 28,000 students when it opened last summer, but Sedgewick was not daunted. He had spent hundreds of hours readying the material, devoting as much as two weeks each to recording and fine-tuning videotaped lectures. The preparation itself, he said, was "a full-time job.""

"this apparent lack of a need for a definition is exactly why we need to slow things down and figure out what the heck we're talking about."