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"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.""

Open education is about sharing, reducing barriers and increasing access in education. It includes free and open access to platforms, tools and resources in education (such as learning materials, course materials, videos of lectures, assessment tools, research, study groups, textbooks, etc.). Open education seeks to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.

"I often find it difficult to convince those in "real" colleges that they are in dialogue with for-profit higher education. After all, they're not "our kind of students". This juxtaposition of MOOCs and for-profits is the first time I think this has worked particularly well. As I said at the lecture, we get to MOOCs by way of the lessons venture capitalists have learned from for-profits' uneven success in penetrating the real currency of higher education: prestige. As the founder of 2tor has been rumored to have said, they can't build prestige so they'll just borrow it from existing institutions."

This semester (spring, 2013), I integrated my on-campus Duke University class (which I've taught twice before using a "traditional" lecture format) with my online class (which I'd taught once before via Coursera MOOC), both bearing the title "Introduction to Genetics and Evolution." My on-campus class had 453 students, while the online one peaked at 27,000 enrolled (though MOOC enrollment figures are misleading). Needless to say, I was more than slightly nervous about this experiment messing up, given the number of students who would be affected! My initial reaction is that the integration (via "flipped classroom") was a success and thoroughly enjoyable by me (I'll have to wait to see the formal course evaluations before I know how much most of the students liked it), but I learned some lessons for future iterations.

Mr. Kellen said he would not rule out using the Coursera partnership to streamline certain parts of the curriculum in the future. "I am fairly confident that MOOC-like techniques could be a viable option for certain high-volume operations," he said. "And I would say large lectures are one of those."

"Regardless of the goal of MOOCs - be it for profit or idealism - there are genuine educational concerns that need to be closely monitored. A course with 10,000 (or even 1,000) students enrolled cannot foster any significant discussion. Yes, teaching assistants (TAs) can be employed to groups of 100-200 students for online questions etc, but that may not be so simple. About 100 TAs would be needed for a modest-sized MOOC of 10,000 students. Even for the lecturer to organise 100 TAs would be a Herculean task. Another serious concern is evaluation. How can one evaluate 20,000 students taking a course? Yes, electronic quizzes and multiple-choice tests can be given to monitor progress - if the material is suitable for such types of questions. But what about material in the social sciences and humanities that might be harder to evaluate (than science) without essay-style answers? I've already seen that companies are attempting to write computer programs that will grade essays. But as one educator put it, how can a programmer include wit and style for evaluation in such a program?"

IN LITTLE MORE THAN A YEAR, discussion of the role of online learning in higher education has undergone a qualitative shift. With the launch of for-profit educational start-ups such as Coursera, Udacity, and the MIT and Harvard-founded nonprofit platform edX, Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have moved from obscure experiment to major initiative. MOOCs are online classes, generally composed of short lectures, that allow for open, often free enrollments (thousands can easily enroll in a single course), assessing students through periodic quizzes and discussion forums.

"The relatively low completion rates of learners have been a central critique as MOOCs grow in popularity. This focus on completion rates, however, implies a monolithic view of disengagement that fails to acknowledge alternative forms of participation in MOOCs. Identifying subpopulations of learners based on their longitudinal engagement with the course allows MOOC designers to target interventions and develop adaptive course features. We develop a simple, scalable, and informative classification method that identifies four prototypical engagement trajectories: Completing learners, who complete the majority of the assessments offered in the class; Auditing learners, who do assessments infrequently (if at all) and engage instead by watching video lectures; Disengaging learners, who do assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement, generally in the first third of the class; and Sampling learners, who enter and exit the course quickly, watching a minimal number of videos at some point during the course."

Please join Ivy League LMS experts, Wendy Drexler and Catherine Zabrieske of Brown University for this informative webinar during which they will discuss five lessons they learned in their search for an open access LMS, how they formed their selection committee, involved faculty and students, and why they ultimately selected Canvas as their LMS. Drexler and Zabrieske will also discuss the latest on MOOCs in general as well as specifically how using Canvas Network as a platform for their MOOC "Exploring Engineering" has allowed them to create a more interactive course that engages students and keeps participation high rather than merely providing lectures and quizzes.

"Fluidity, flexibility and responsiveness seem like important skills for students to develop as part of their learning. Apart from anything else, it's a great way to bring some additional life into lectures and encourage students to think about their online presence; something they inevitably will have, but which is usually separate from their learning."

"For open participants in ds106, we can dispense of the entire "I dropped out of another &$*#ing MOOC" because there is nothing to drop out from. No one-pace-for-all ramming speed schedule, no weekly lectures, no multiple guess quizzes. We have a very easy to understand Getting Started Guide, itself with not one way to do this course but TWO, the Fast And Easy Way and the Blogging Way."

"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."

"Put another way, in ten or fifteen years' time, students may expect to find educational nuggets on demand whenever they need them. Some will have had many years' experience of creating and sharing content, perhaps quite complex, perhaps to do with education. Will they be happy to accept timetabled classes and sit through lectures?"

"In her new institution, which is yet to be named, students will design their own learning path, and use flipped curriculum to meet goals. "We see research as the most advanced form of project-based learning," Ortiz said. "This platform will enable us to evolve those pathways rapidly as things evolve." "

Shortly after the invention of the quantum computer chip, and the laying of fibre optic broadband to almost every house in the UK, it had been clear that the days of teaching as a profession were numbered. Teaching had been relegated to a minority profession in a matter of years. It had been simply a question of scale. A teacher, working for 45 years, could teach maybe 1,500 children. Some lessons would be better than others, some children would get more attention and do better than others, they'd occasionally need time off and so on. Simply put, human teachers were inconsistent, and not always great. So when the new educational bodies started recording the best lectures for every subject from around in the world, annotating them in 3D, and enhancing them with CG, what could the schools do to fight back?

There's nothing particularly new about MOOCs. Most universities have offered online courses for many years and the basic technologies involved - video lectures, discussion forums, tests, and the like - are the same we have used with on-campus and distance students. The only difference is the scale.

"Google has launched its own Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to teach the general public how to understand surveys, research, and data. Called "Making Sense of Data" and running from March 18 to April 4, the course will be open to the public and, like most MOOCs, will be taught through a series of video lectures, interactive projects, and the support of community TAs."

"The advantage of the flipped classroom is that the content, often the theoretical/lecture-based component of the lesson, becomes more easily accessed and controlled by the learner. "

"Learning management systems have become the primary delivery platform in most higher education systems for course-related activities such as lecture presentations, readings and assignments, discussions, and quizzes. Until a few years ago, access for learners and instructors with disabilities was either poorly supported or not considered at all in many popular tools. Due to lack of, or limited, accessibility in learning management systems, students were not able to fully or independently participate in key course activities."

Thank you!!

" instead of professors and students, there's facilitators and participants, instead of one-directional lectures, you have discussions, and instead of tests and quizzes you create projects and artifacts. If it all sounds too squishy and feel-good, make no mistake, this is serious learning, tackling the amazingly heady topic of feminism and technology and created by bona fide, longtime professors in their fields. It's rigorous, complex and in San Antonio, you don't need to be a college student (past or present) or even own a computer to access it. That's the new international network FemTechNet in a nutshell, one of those ideas that seems to have suddenly arrived fully formed, like Athena springing out of Zeus' head. Obviously a lot more work went into it than that, but the actual creation timeline for the Network took a little more than a year-and-a-half according to co-creators Anne Balsamo and Alexandra Juhasz, Dean of the New School's Media Studies program and professor of media studies at Pitzer College, respectively."