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" The real complexity should come out of the emergent work, not the software. A collaboration platform that is over-engineered would be counterproductive. The key aspect of a collaboration platform is that should make work more transparent and rewards sharing. Does your LMS do this? Does it simplify work and make it more transparent for everyone in the network? Does it enhance serendipitous learning?"

EverFi, Inc. the leading education technology company for critical skills, today announced that it has built Sash, the first open-source badging platform that enables education companies to use badges to encourage and recognize student achievement. EverFi launched t open-source badging technology across its K-12 learning platform in the 2012-2013 academic year. The technology behind Sash allows organizations to integrate badge creation, management, and display into their own products. The badging platform follows the metadata format established by the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure.

"This week, at the Google I/O 2013 conference, Google announced many exciting changes for various parts of it's platform.  The bulk of the upgrades this year centered around the Google+ platform… "

What would happen if you decreed (or maybe strongly suggested - we don't really decree in higher ed), that by 2015 that mobile will be the primary platform that our students will interact with digital curriculum and learning platforms.

"Welcome to Class2Go! We're Stanford Online's internal platform, designed to be an open platform for online learning and research."

"Professors typically don't worry about what price point an online course will sell at, or what amenities might attract a student to pick one course over another. But a new online platform, Professor Direct, lets instructors determine not only how much to charge for such courses, but also how much time they want to devote to services like office hours, online tutorials, and responding to students' e-mails."

"We met with the most obvious first: the textbook managers at the campus bookstore, where only 1% of book sales were in digital form. We received a demonstration of the digital platform and are now doing informal testing. This led to the creation of a Digital Course Materials page, to share the university's materials ordering policy, information about the digital platform, and textbook alternatives."

"Has the online course creation market gone stale already? Launched on Tuesday, newcomer Versal hopes to breathe life and possibilities into what they see as a very limited set of tools that currently exist. Their course-building platform offers a set of pre-made gadgets that allow teachers to build interactive courses on their platform through a what-you-see-is-what-you-get drag and drop interface. To add interactivity beyond basic pictures, texts and embedded quizzes, Versal uses gadgets to create interactive graphs, simulations, and models. With these gadgets, teachers can build models or simulations that the students use to experience and manipulate the content they are learning."

"Technological platforms are creating unprecedented global access to new educational opportunities. But we do not know the extent to which students using these systems are learning. As educators and researchers, we must partner to ensure that these platforms not only deliver information, but also include useful metrics, standards and methods that maximize learning outcomes."

"Privatization of online higher education is on the rise. For-profit online education corporations like Academic Partnerships, Kaplan, Wiley, Pearson, and Blackboard contract with public and private nonprofit institutions to provide digital platforms for educational content, recruit students, manage enrollment, facilitate the development of course materials, and more. While the use of digital platforms and online teaching tools can enrich higher education, elements of contracting with for-profit online education corporations can present problems in areas of interest to faculty, particularly academic freedom and shared governance. Check out our resources, surveys, and social media shareables below and learn how you can get involved in making sure that higher education serves the common good, not private profit."

""We welcome Acrobatiq's team to the VitalSource family," said Pep Carrera, President of VitalSource®. "VitalSource already does more than just deliver learning materials.  We empower students and faculty with the resources necessary to promote greater success. By combining Acrobatiq's cognitive and data science-based platform with VitalSource's valued relationships with publishers and institutions, we have an opportunity to bring high impact learning to the market at an unprecedented scale."  "

"The National University System, for example, is developing  a variety of initiatives aimed at bringing down the cost of a degree, including through FlexCourse?, a teaching and learning platform that offers faculty-supported, variably-paced online degree programs at an affordable price point of $8,500 annual tuition. The platform is initially being offered in conjunction with John F. Kennedy University, through JFKU Online --  both part of the National University System."

"Ambi is reinventing how learning takes place in higher education by putting students at the center of the experience: a Learner Engagement Platform designed for the student first, creating a more engaged, involved, and immersive learning experience for everyone. Ambi is the product of three years of research and more than eighteen months of development to build a Learner Engagement Platform where learning takes place without limits. The interface is as familiar as the social networks students use on a day-to-day basis, but with a tight integration to the course materials and features from Learning Management Systems like Canvas from Instructure, and Blackboard."

"Given our current, collective limitations, what are we to do? Instead of searching out alternative platforms, we might partner with LMSs to reconceptualize the LMS as a platform. In many ways, the LMS is already beginning to evolve in this direction. Canvas has their App Store, which is a more individual faculty-driven model. John Baker of D2L recently utilized the oft-referenced Lego analogy. LMSs in general are moving away from individual building blocks or custom integrations towards open standards like LTI, but the robustness of that interoperability is still inconsistent across what version of LTI their product meets."

"To hold ourselves accountable for building upon this favorable impact, we made the Learner Outcomes Survey a permanent part of our platform experience: every learner, anywhere in the world, who completes a course now receives a survey a few months later. And since a lot has changed on Coursera since 2015 - we've gone from 90 active courses on our platform to 2,000, and more than doubled the size of our learner community - we decided it was time for another deep dive into the data."

"This means anyone can create and organize a class on the platform, which allows educators to set up and manage course, including both in person and online remote education courses. Classroom is available across platforms, since it's web-based, and it's pretty easy to get set up and started with, so this should be a big boon for private educational organizations, independent skills coaches, hobby instructors and many more."

""Canvas Network allows institutions to define the structure of their courses and the approach to teaching that makes the most sense to them. Some institutions have chosen to pursue a massive open online course format (MOOC), and some have chosen to pursue a smaller online course format with more interaction. Often the courses are taught on the same platform the institution uses to teach tuition-based courses, which means students have a seamless experience as they progress through their academic journey.""

"the company opened an "Amazon Education Wait List" earlier in the month. The new platform, "Amazon Inspire," would allow teachers to upload, manage, share, and discover resources in a similar fashion to the reviewing and purchasing systems already in existence through Amazon. Content will be searchable using assigned metadata tags organized by the federal Learning Registry, and will aid in an effort to collect data concerning how digital resources are created and used."

With the panOpen platform, schools of all kinds can make the most of open source course materials.

"Tell your story any way you'd like. Known is a simple platform for publishing words, pictures, podcasts and more to a site that you control. Choose to share it on networks like Twitter and Facebook, or the software you already use."