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Digital badges are receiving a growing amount of attention and are beginning to disrupt the norms of what it means to earn credit or be credentialed. Badges allow the sharing of evidence of skills and knowledge acquired through a wide range of life activity, at a granular level, and at a pace that keeps up with individuals who are always learning-even outside the classroom. As such, entities not traditionally in the degree-granting realm-such as museums, associations, online communities, and even individual experts-are now issuing "credit" for achievement they can uniquely recognize. At the same time, higher education institutions are rethinking the type and size of activities worthy of official recognition. From massive open online courses (MOOCs), service learning, faculty development, and campus events to new ways of structuring academic programs and courses or acknowledging the granular or discrete skills that these programs explore, there's much for colleges and universities to consider in the wide open frontier called badging.

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.

"Pathway tuition, which varies by area, is set by local LDS authorities to make it an "affordable stretch," Griffith said. In Mexico, students pay $35 per credit hour, while students in Ghana pay $20. The cost can be kept so low because Pathway is a branch of online education at BYU-I, which is self-sustaining, says Griffith. It's also because buildings used for Pathway are already owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, professors are already employed by BYU-I, senior mentor couples serve unpaid and no marketing is needed thanks to word-of-mouth and ecclesiastical leader referrals. "Part of the blessing of this program is it's not about the church or BYU-Idaho making money … it's about providing an education," Griffith said."

"the software known as Tor has become the most vouchsafed and developer-friendly method for using the Internet incognito. The free and open source program triple-encrypts your traffic and bounces it through computers around the globe, making tracing it vastly more difficult. Most Tor users know the program as a way to anonymously browse the Web."

"This post is part of a series of 11 posts in which we're sharing the syllabi for all 11 courses in the Instructional Technology and Digital Media Literacy (IT&DML) program. Please keep in mind the materials we're sharing here are the documents and specifics as approved when we initially launched the program. The "real" implementation of these courses is a bit different as we embrace new digital texts and tools."

"I am trying to answer this question that Learning Program Designers ask me, when I propose that we can include blogging as an activity for learners in their program design: 'Why should we invest time in convincing a learner to blog?'."

These are just a glimpse of some of the most recent (within the last two years) updates to distance education policy standards set forth by regional and national accrediting organizations in the U.S. And as many institutions begin implementing online programs, it's never been a more critical time for administrators and leaders to become well-acquainted with the hallmarks of quality required for both new, and currently in-place, distance-ed programs.

"The University of Florida made an unusual offer to more than 3,000 high-school students who would otherwise have been rejected for admission: Pass two semesters of online coursework, and then you can enroll on the campus. But less than 10 percent of them took the offer. Joseph Glover, the provost, defended the new option, called the Pathway to Campus Enrollment, or PACE, saying it hadn't been well explained. "This year, now that the program is in place and there is time to advertise and explain what it is all about, we hope to get a better response," he told The Gainesville Sun. Pathway builds on UF Online, the online-only undergraduate program that state legislators pushed for about two years ago."

"Hapkit is an open-hardware haptic device designed to be very low-cost and easy to assemble. Hapkit allows users to input motions and feel programmed forces in one degree of freedom. This enables interactive simulation of virtual environments that represent realistic physics (such as springs and dampers) and creative new touch sensations (like textures and buttons). The Hapkit can be assembled using household tools, costs less than $50 for all components, including the microcontroller board, and is easily set up and programmed by novices."

"The University of Toronto is committed to exploring new ways of teaching and sharing knowledge in the 21st Century, and its participation in the two platforms Coursera and EdX are an essential part of this. Instructors from the university have already launched very well received "Massive Open Online Courses" on subjects ranging from programming to aboriginal education, statistics to mental health and psychology. To further our understanding of these new course formats, the Office of Online Learning Strategies (OLS), together with the course instructors, have developed an extensive research program around MOOCs and flipped classrooms"

"Drexel University last January earned praise for expanding a transfer program that brings the university's faculty members to local community colleges. But Drexel is phasing out the program less than a year later."

"FlexCourse, a teaching and learning platform offering self-paced online degree programs, comes from a combination of acclaimed technological assets and programs of UniversityNow, which were acquired by NUS, and enhancements and customization by NUS developers; NUS affiliate John F. Kennedy University is the first to integrate FlexCourse, with classes starting in September"

"WGU Academy courses will be delivered in an online, competency-based format similar to the WGU learning model. Students will enroll in customized programs of two or more college-level courses that typically include a writing course and one or more courses in math, general education, or introductory-level classes focused on desired degree paths. In addition to college-level courses, WGU Academy offers the Program for Academic and Career Advancement (PACA). Modeled on a nationally recognized social and emotional learning course used by WGU for several years, the course provides group sessions, peer interaction, and one-to-one coaching to build confidence and college persistence."

"expect to see more colleges turn to these providers, said Michael Feldstein, a consultant and co-publisher of the popular e-Literate blog, who has long followed the OPM market. A survey released last week by The Chronicle of Higher Education and P3-EDU, a conference on public-private partnerships to be hosted by George Mason University, found that 42 percent of provosts, chief financial officers and presidents surveyed said that expanding online programs was the area they most considered turning to a private company to help with."

"The Online program management (OPM) market is growing in terms of the number of institutions using OPM providers and in the number of providers. The market is also showing signs of consolidation as the providers figure out how to position themselves in this competitive landscape. What we don't hear much about is the international trend that is also taking shape. Yes, the US market started earlier and is still larger than all others combined, but the international market is growing and becoming more and more important."

"Quite expectedly, faculty comments included concerns about creating electronic correspondence courses, lowering course quality, and otherwise silencing the faculty voice in the teaching and learning process. Indeed, success with this new mode would depend on acknowledging the legitimacy of that fear and creating a process to encourage, respect, and retain the faculty voice. Our method of achieving this is anchored by five essential elements and will be applied to more than 250 courses, including general education, in nearly 20 academic programs."

"The program kicks off today with two curriculums, Business or Supply Chain Management for associate and bachelor's degrees with additional curriculums to follow at three non-profit universities: University of Florida which is ranked #17 in the nation for its business school by U.S. News and World Report, Brandman University and Bellevue University. The five-year long program will include what Carlson calls "having a personal coach for education" from the application process up through graduation."

"The main situations in which this happens are email programs, instant messages, some mobile applications*, and whenever someone is moving from a secure site ("https://mail.google.com/blahblahblah") to a non-secure site (http://www.theatlantic.com).  This means that this vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL. It shows up variously in programs as "direct" or "typed/bookmarked" traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that's not actually what's happening a lot of the time. "

"Today, computer science is absent in 95 percent of high schools in the U.S. Yep. Why? Because developing curriculum for these subjects requires time and expertise, and finding the qualified candidates to teach these subjects demands significant capital to lure talented programmers away from high-paying jobs in the private sector.  That's where CodeHS comes in. Founded by Stanford students Zach Galant and Jeremy Keeshin and incubated at StartX and Imagine K12, CodeHS is an online program built for high school students (and teachers) with no previous coding experience that intends to provide an easy and fun way to learn computer science."

Code.org, the new non-profit aimed at encouraging computer science education launched last month by entrepreneur and investor brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi, has assembled an all-star group of the world's most well-known and successful folks with programming skills to talk about how learning to code has changed their lives - and isn't quite as hard as people might think.