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The course management system (CMS) reinforces the status quo and hinders substantial teaching and learning innovation in higher education. It does so by imposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process. The open learning network (OLN)-a hybrid of the CMS and the personal learning environment (PLE)-is proposed as an alternative learning technology environment with the potential to leverage the affordances of the Web to dramatically improve learning.

The rationale for seeking open terms of both access and use is as follows. Free access provides the literature to at least five overlapping audiences: researchers who happen upon open-access research articles while browsing the Web rather than a password-protected database; researchers at institutions that cannot afford the subscription prices for the growing literature; researchers in disciplines other than that of a journal's intended audience, who would not otherwise subscribe; patients, their families, students, and other members of the public with an interest in the information but without the means to subscribe; and researchers' computers running text-mining software to analyze the literature. In addition, granting readers full reuse rights unleashes the full range of human creativity for translating, combining, analyzing, adapting, and preserving the scientific record, whereas traditional copyright arrangements in scientific publishing increasingly inhibit scholarly communication.

"After 18 months in the darkness of beta world, Mozilla's Open Badges project stepped out into the light recently with the unveiling of Open Badges 1.0. But will the concept of organizations bestowing their own virtual endorsements for the mastery of skills hold up to critical examination from a world that, even in an information economy, demands most of its skilled workers hold a framed degree?"

All of the issues around creating or using OER, of getting faculty towards supporting open access, of implementing inter-institutional open source software communities - all collapse before the MOOC.

Massive Online Open Course (MOOC): an online course or content aiming at large-scale interactive participation and open access. Open Educational Resources (OER): freely accessible, usually openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research purposes. ($): Requires some financial investment

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.

Find open source software alternatives to well-known commercial software Our mission is to provide easy access to high quality open source alternatives to well-known commercial products. And remember that open source software is also a freeware alternative.

"The Open Textbook Network (OTN) promotes access, affordability, and student success through the use of open textbooks."

A student-driven initiative plans to turn the page on skyrocketing textbook costs by promoting an affordable, online educational resource that's picking up steam across the nation: open-source textbooks. Starting this fall, the University System of Maryland Student Council will pilot a program to allow interested faculty members in high-enrollment, entry-level classes to use open-source textbooks.

Today the Getty becomes an even more engaged digital citizen, one that shares its collections, research, and knowledge more openly than ever before. We've launched the Open Content Program to share, freely and without restriction, as many of the Getty's digital resources as possible. The initial focus of the Open Content Program is to make available all images of public domain artworks in the Getty's collections. Today we've taken a first step toward this goal by making roughly 4,600 high-resolution images of the Museum's collection free to use, modify, and publish for any purpose.

The UCT OpenContent directory is the web portal for accessing open teaching and learning content from the University of Cape Town (UCT). Produced by the Open Educational Resources project in the Centre for Educational Technology at UCT with the support of the Shuttleworth Foundation, the directory aims to showcase the teaching efforts of UCT academics and encourage the publication of open resources.

"Penn is strongly committed to open learning - a vital part of our mission to increase access, around the world, to the educational resources that can change people's lives. Our goals as early adopters of massively open online courses are to create and disseminate knowledge, drive teaching innovation, and expand Penn's global presence.  We invite you to learn more below about our Coursera courses and the outstanding Penn faculty members who teach them."

"Google is teaming up with EdX, an open-source online education nonprofit started by Harvard and MIT, to create a new site that EdX's president compared to a "YouTube for MOOCs." The site is called mooc.org-MOOC being the unfortunate acronym for "massive open online courses." It will use the same EdX platform through which professors at Harvard, MIT, and other EdX-partner universities now offer their online courses. But it will be open to everyone, including businesses, governments, and private individuals as well as professors at non-EdX colleges."

"An all-digital public library is opening today, as officials in Bexar County, Texas, celebrate the opening of the BiblioTech library. The facility offers about 10,000 free e-books for the 1.7 million residents of the county, which includes San Antonio. On its website, the Bexar County BiblioTech library explains how its patrons can access free eBooks and audio books. To read an eBook on their own device, users must have the 3M Cloud Library app, which they can link to their library card. The app includes a countdown of days a reader has to finish a book - starting with 14 days, according to My San Antonio."

Opening up Education: Innovative teaching and learning for all through new Technologies and Open Educational Resources

"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will require grant recipients to make their research publicly available online -- a multibillion-dollar boost to the open access movement. The sweeping open access policy, which signals the foundation's full-throated approval for the public availability of research, will go into effect Jan. 1, 2015, and cover all new projects made possible with funding from the foundation. The foundation will ease grant recipients into the policy, allowing them to embargo their work for 12 months, but come 2017, "All publications shall be available immediately upon their publication, without any embargo period.""

Some authors will always prefer CC BY-NC-SA or CC BY-NC-ND, for a myriad of different reasons, and we support their choice to do so - but CC BY is widely considered to be the gold standard for open access, as it allows for maximum re-use and discovery. It is also preferred by many funders, and we continue to be compliant with all open access funder mandates.

"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."

OER can be looked upon as a process as well as a set of products. This is because educators need to rethink the way in which they create, use and distribute learning and teaching materials. Opening up learning and teaching materials does not equate to providing a free education. Open educational resources are components of a rich educational package which includes staff expertise, institutional facilities, tuition and feedback.

"To, "moocify" k12, the connectivist opportunities need to come out in stages and be student centered with a humanistic focus.  Based on this information, I have suggested a, Continuum of Open Learning and an instructional design model, called the Open Classroom Model, for future consideration.  The next steps are demonstrating how K12 learning environments can be "MOOCified" by connecting, collaborating and creating."