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"University officials say the higher tuition rates for online courses are the result of expensive infrastructure and the costs for designing the courses, which often involve partnerships or contracts with outside online education providers.   Nassirian said the infrastructure costs make it difficult to create online classes cheaply on a small scale."

"Open educational resources rate as one popular strategy, with 92 percent of faculty members and 97 percent of administrators saying instructors should assign more of them. Still, past research has suggested many faculty members haven't heard of OER or don't know where to discover open content. David Wiley, chief academic officer of Lumen Learning, said the report builds on previous findings about OER."

"he rate of unemployment still stands stubbornly close to 8 per cent, while millions of unemployed workers have given up looking for jobs, taking them out of the official statistics of the jobless. Yet, the US Labor Department shows 3 million jobs requiring special skills that remain unfilled. "

"While distance-learning programs are not likely to replace the traditional college experience for everyone, the rate of growth in online enrollment is outpacing that for campus enrollment. The market for online programs is crowded and relatively easy to enter, but traditional name-brand universities now claim a larger share of it than in the past. This means smaller institutions with less-established programs will struggle unless they can set themselves apart, according to the report."

"These aren't necessarily a "yellow brick road to student success," - yet - the report noted; completion and retention rates for institutions reporting adoption of guided pathways were lower than those not reporting adoption of this approach."

"We were happy to find no difference in the effectiveness, performance ratings,  or promotions for individuals and teams whose work requires collaboration with colleagues around the world versus Googlers who spend most of their day to day working with colleagues in the same office. Well-being standards were uniform across the board as well; Googlers or teams who work virtually find ways to prioritize a steady work-life balance by prioritizing important rituals like a healthy night's sleep and exercise just as non-distributed team members do. At the same time, we did hear from Googlers that working with colleagues across the globe can make it more difficult to establish connections-in many senses of the word. Coordinating schedules across time zones and booking a conference room for a video chat takes more logistical brain power than dropping by a coworkers desk for a meeting over coffee. The technology itself can also be limiting- glitchy video or faulty sound makes impromptu conversations that help teammates get to know, and trust each other, seem like more trouble than they're worth."

"students using the openly licensed material were able to more efficiently internalize and remember the information conveyed. Students also rated the quality of the print version of the OER higher than the commercial equivalent, although the digital version received a lower ranking. The authors acknowledge that "the open textbook (in its first edition) and the commercial textbook (in its tenth) are written by different authors with differences in the breadth and depth of content coverage, organization, and writing style" and that a text's quality leans on several other factors besides the nature of its copyright."

"we were able to create dashboards on all of our courses through software called Tableau. Every faculty member can see everybody's completion rates, and they're broken down by demographics. Now faculty can go, "I'm struggling with that group of students, you're having success with them - what are you doing?""

"A year-to- year increase of 226,375 distance education students, a 3.9 percent increase, up over rates recorded the previous two years. More than one in four students (29.7 percent) now take at least one distance education course (a total of 6,022,105 students)."

"I'm beginning to think there's a fourth stage, one that I saw a few times at last week's "Multidisciplinary Research for Online Education" (MROE) workshop in Washington, DC. Apparently, when you get together a bunch of people in Stage 3, some of them move to Stage 4: Stage 4 - Maybe all those "dropouts" got just what they wanted out of the course."

I am considering a MOOC on Gamification that starts April 1.

Let the World know how you feel

"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."

Twitter today succumbed to pressure from a New York criminal court to turn over deleted tweets of an Occupy Wall Street protester. This is why you should care.

I guess as social media continues to expand at rapid rates...there will be many law suites...K-12 schools probably more than universities may be hit harder. Not sure...

Striking the right tone can be difficult. Professors aren't always natural performers, at least not on a par with professional actors. They also aren't famous, and Mr. Kimmel's setup works partly because viewers have a "parasocial" relationship to celebrities. That means they often know a great deal about famous people and even feel as if they're friends with them, even though there's a vast distance between them, said Dannagal G. Young, an associate professor of communication at the University of Delaware.