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"Note that Virtual Worlds is chugging out of the Trough of Disillusionment, with only 5-10 years to arrive at the Plateau of Productivity. Big Data and Gamification have a bit more hype to hype before their demise. In-Memory Analytics and Text Analytics are just now descending into the Trough! On, no! While Predictive Analytics is cruising!"

"The MOOC providers didn't bring about the end of higher education as we knew it, but they did stumble upon a highly-effective marketing funnel with the potential to change the way universities put programs online. This niche is known in higher education as online program management (OPM), and providers who work in this space offer solutions to help universities put their programs online. Now, the MOOC providers are poised to make a dent in the highly-lucrative OPM market."

"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.""

" The local cohort and the "massive" cohort don't interact at all.  In other words, as the hype about classroom use of MOOCs is beginning to hit the inflection point, we find that MOOCs in face-to-face classrooms are essentially being used as OER and OCW. For various practical and pedagogical reasons, classes using MOOCs are not in sync with the online cohorts, and frankly the instructors of these classes don't see that as an issue."

"While MOOC's have attracted huge attention, and hype, for supporting massive enrollments and for being free its the pedagogical aspects of MOOC's that interest me the most. The challenge is this - How can you effectively teach thousands of students simultaneously? I'm fascinated by the contrast between post-secondary faculty and K-12 teacher contract agreements that limit class size and the current emergent MOOC aim of having as many enrollments as possible. What a dichotomy."

"Georgia Tech's Tucker Balch, an associate professor at the School of Interactive Computing, released the following information based on the survey of students who took part in his recent Coursera class, "Computational Investing." Of the 2,535 students who completed the course (or 4.8 percent of those enrolled), 34 percent were from the United States and 27 percent came from non-OECD countries. The average age of participants was 35 (ranging from 17 to 74). Seventy percent were white. Ninety-two percent were male. And more than 50 percent of the students already had a master's degree or a PhD. Clearly, this is hardly the "typical" undergraduate population (although it's worth noting that "Computational Investing" isn't really a "typical" or introductory class). Nonetheless, these figures do raise questions about who exactly is being served by today's MOOCs: Is it "learners" from around the world? Or, for lack of a better word, is it "knowers" from the U.S.?"

Apparently, no one really wants to talk about MOOCs anymore, the panel included. In one of my last posts for Edcetera, I wrote about how MOOCs changed higher ed in 2012, and I think we all agree to the fact that MOOCs have been hyped a lot over the past months. The panelists agreed that MOOCs are nothing really that new or exciting. There have been online courses available for quite a while, so why all that buzz all of a sudden?

the rush for institutions to join Coursera isn't just a matter of their recognizing potential for these kinds of classes to reshape higher education. In the midst of all the hype and the hoopla, it's FOMO. The fear of missing out. Indeed as Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng tells Inside Higher Ed, the startup will "probably double its university partnerships at least one more time before it stops recruiting new institutions." So hurry, folks. You don't want to miss out…

"The hype for MOOC and Open educational resources cannot be ignored today. Although there is still much to be explored, the progress of open education at present era attracts a great deal of attention. It often throws a question if Corporate MOOC is for profit-making platform rather than it could reach many more learners, leading to a networked social and economic benefit, and could give great instructors an authoritative position."

"A curious disconnect has been emerging in my thinking, one that has been made clear with the hype-oriented buzzwords of today's ed tech companies. I no longer want to be affiliated with the tool-fetish of edtech. It's time to say adios to technosolutionism that recreates people as agents within a programmed infrastructure."

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.

"But is this viewpoint, from Shift, too simplistic and too in love with the idea of digital disruption? Are schools not changing as much as Silicon Valley types would like to think they are? Is this hype or reality?"

"However, there are some myths, which need to be uncovered and which are blurring the current picture of MOOC style learning:"

"But it turns out that -- when asked privately -- most presidents don't seem sure at all that MOOCs are going to transform student learning, or reduce costs to students -- two of the claims made by MOOC enthusiasts and an increasing number of politicians and pundits."

"We are using the data from our initial offering of MOOCs to investigate the nuances of course persistence and completion, experiment with ways to measure learning outcomes such as peer-to-peer assessment, and discover and design new low-cost delivery models."