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"If administrators really wanted to improve the quality of any particular online course, they would cut the professor a check and walk away.  No, I'm not talking free money here.  There'd be a call for proposals, and reports at the end to demonstrate that the professors who got the money did what they said they'd do.  All the usual accountability measures.  If the professor needs help making this happen, then they can call the instructional designers rather than the other way around.  If administrators wanted to find a place to fund these checks, they could just cut out all the money going to for-profit Silicon Valley startups rather than the actual educational experience and give it to faculty instead."

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.

"Canvas has always believed in education and innovation. Now we're putting our money where our mouth is and offering $100k in grants to help spur innovation in education. The most innovative ideas in specific categories for both Higher Ed and K-12, as judged by a panel of experts, will receive grant money to help get their difference-making ideas off the ground. Submissions may include (but are not limited to) content, applications, classroom techniques, tools, and who knows what other amazing thing you brilliant people might come up with. "

"Wherever the money is coming from, and however it is being spent, the root of the crisis in higher education (and the evidence that investment in universities may amount to a bubble) comes down to the fact that additional value has not been created to match this extra spending. Indeed, evidence from declines in the quality of students and graduates suggests that a degree may now mean less than it once did."

I really think I thought people just died if they didn't finish college. That kind of crazy superstition is how bubbles are made. For a time, we collectively seemed to believe that people might die if they didn't own their own houses. So we plowed money and faith into that conceit, and look what happened.

"Who created the Internet and why should we care? These questions, so often raised during the Bush-Gore election in 2000, have found their way back into the political debate this season - starting with one of the most cited texts of the preconvention campaign, Obama's so-called "you didn't build that" speech. "The Internet didn't get invented on its own," Obama argued, in the lines that followed his supposed gaffe. "Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet." In other words: business uses the Internet, but government made it happen."

"First of all, blogging is writing, 21st-century style, plain and simple. Blogging constitutes a massive genre.  It comes in many forms, addresses myriad topics, and can certainly range in quality. For my money (which usually means free), blogging provides the best venue for teaching student writing. As bloggers, young people develop crucial skills with language, tone their critical thinking muscles, and come to understand their relationship to the world."

""It will be harder to get into Minerva than any other university," says Nelson. "You'll have the same criteria for your grades, essay, and application. But you'll get no brownie points for how good an athlete you are, for how much money your parents can donate, or for what state you were born in.""

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.

The prices of traditional textbooks continue to increase, further driving up the cost of Higher Education. CTE's goal is to help save OU students money while delivering highly engaging and pedagogically sound course materials. There are a number of options to supplement or replace high cost textbooks such as free online resources, lower-cost digital books and course packets and downloadable open-access textbooks.

Colleges are raising tuition and fees every year, at a rate of increase that far outpaces any reasonable expectation. One might think this is the kind of thing that couldn't continue forever, but that's precisely what has been happening over the past several decades. Prices have gone up, and buyers have poured in anyway, buoyed by a flood of seemingly cheap government money in the form of student loans. As with any bubble, there are doomsayers who are mostly ignored and cheerleaders who say that this time it's different. But-as with any bubble-reality is starting to intrude.

A true educational Commons would be a force for reducing academic hierarchy and income inequality. I'm all in favor of that. You say you are too. But is that what you are telling your partners in finance and university administration? Or are you telling them that they can accumulate even more of what they already have-money and prestige-while appearing to be giving it away? I will know my course has been successful when my students understand Coursera's business model behind offering free higher education globally (along with the promise of greater social equality) as an exciting venture capital investment opportunity through which to increase privately-held wealth and lock in existing educational hierarchies.

"As much as I don't want to say this, I don't think there's a chance in hell that MOOCs will die on their own. I can't think of any trend which saved large institutitions money and trouble, then died a natural death. And faculty can't defend against them - we have been made powerless very slowly, over a long period of administrative takeover and public apathy (or even antipathy in our new era of anti-intellectualism). What happened at SJSU and Amherst is the exception  - an exception I applaud, but an exception. The public perceives faculty objections to MOOCs as an issue of job security rather than quality."

"His positive view about online education was strongly supported in a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll. Among the registered voters who participated in the survey, 59% said they agreed with the idea that increasing the number of online classes at California's public universities will make education more affordable and accessible. However, 34% expressed fears that expanding online classes will reduce access to professors, diminish the value of college degrees and not save money."

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.

"My parents are stockbrokers, where the phrase "market correction" is used to describe what's happening to the LMS market right now. Schools are realizing that we have been paying too much for a big, integrated system with many features we don't use, and we're exploring smaller, cheaper systems. Canvas is attempting to offer all of the services that Blackboard does for less money by using free and open source components. "

A course driven by 20 practical questions about wireless, web, and the Internet, about how products from companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Ericsson, HP, Skype and AT&T work.

"The definition of "a state education" may also change. Far more money should be spent on pre-schooling, since the cognitive abilities and social skills that children learn in their first few years define much of their future potential. And adults will need continuous education. State education may well involve a year of study to be taken later in life, perhaps in stages."

""Feminism and Technology" is trying to take a few MOOC elements, but then to change them in ways consistent with feminist pedagogy to create a distributed open collaborative course or DOCC (pronounced "dock"). The DOCC aims to challenge MOOC thinking about the role of the instructor, about the role of money, about hierarchy, about the value of "massive," and many other things. The first DOCC will be offered for credit at 17 colleges this coming semester, as well in a more MOOC-style approach in which videos and materials are available online for anyone."

"THE BOOKSTORE as we know it is doomed, because many of these establishments are going to go from making a little bit of money every day to losing a little bit. And it's hard to sustain daily losses for long, particularly when you're poorly capitalized, can't use the store as a loss leader and see no hope down the road. The death of the bookstore is being caused by the migration to ebooks (it won't take all books to become 'e', just enough to tip the scale) as well as the superior alternative of purchase and selection of books online. If the function of a bookstore is to stock every book and sell it to you quickly and cheaply, the store has failed."