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Social media is now an active reality for marketers. No longer something to consider as an option, marketers are rapidly increasing their budgets in this space and trying to leverage social media to best connect with consumers. Many marketers believe social media is a low risk, high reward channel. However, these 5 pitfalls will increase your risk and lower the reward, leading you down the path to social mediocrity.

"As the online education market has matured, however, there has been a growing pushback against revenue-sharing as the only model available. Thus there is an emerging unbundled fee-for-service OPM model, in which the companies offer the same services, or some subset, for the market price of those services. The institution pays for the services used, mostly independent of the amount of tuition revenue coming into the online program. This category leads to the program, or institution, to take the up-front financial risk but not have to sign contracts sending ~40 - 60% of the tuition revenue to the vendor. Fewer strings attached but more responsibilities and risks for the school."

"For me, risk literacy is central to digital literacy. It is our ability to assess the drawbacks, dangers and limits of control in digital and digitally augmented environments. It is an acknowledgement that by using digital tools, no matter how open, if a learner is unable or not required to modify the code to create a learning experience, as much as we'd like them to stay learners, they occupy the role of an "end user.""

"In other words, while a few already well-paid superprofessors get their egos stroked conducting experiments that are doomed to fail, "second- and third-tier universities and colleges, and community colleges" risk closing because Coursera and its ilk have sent higher education price expectations through the floor and systematically devalued everybody else's work. And they get to do all this while dispensing a produuct that they know is inferior!"

""Error marks the place where education begins," Mike Rose posits as one of the central themes of his book Lives on the Boundary. Error is a signal of stepping outside the confines of our comfortable knowledge base, of taking that risk and transcending what we already know; yet it is precisely error that is punished. If trial repeatedly ends up as punished error, the fear of error may hinder the curiosity proclivity of young children who then develop "error terror.""

"Prices for a "tutor" vary. Boostmygrades.com advertises a $695 rate for graduate classes, $495 for an algebra class, or $95 for an essay. When Inside Higher Ed, posing as a potential customer, asked for a quote for an introductory microeconomics class offered by Penn State World Campus, noneedtostudy.com offered to complete the entire course for $900, with payment upon completion, and onlineclasshelpers.com asked for $775, paid up front. Most sites promise at least a B in the course."

"Designing a course that precludes cheating might require thinking creatively and breaking away from simply uploading lecture videos and administering quizzes, said Kyle Johnson, an independent higher ed consultant. "What kind of experience are we providing for students if someone is able to take an entire class for a student and we never figure it out from the interaction? At a pedagogical level, that's my concern," he said. "Are we really just dumping information at them so someone can come in and take a couple of quizzes and they're done?""

Although institutional leaders are still discussing e-content plans, in reality the debate is over: students are asking for digital now, this semester.

Why expose oneself to Internet trolls and conspiracy theorists? It doesn't "pay." It doesn't explicitly count for tenure or promotion. In fact, it puts one at risk of being labeled a popularizer or even being criticized by one's own colleagues as a less-than-serious scholar. But having opened the door to public engagement, I can't walk away now.

MOOCs are too new for there to be compelling evidence of their value, cost, and risks. The potential benefits and threats to academic quality, student outcomes, institutional integrity, and administrative processes are not yet known. However, the emerging features of MOOCs that have made them distinctive from the other types of OER are the services integrated with the content. The MOOC platforms for organizing and delivering the multimedia content, integrated with the social media tools for engaging individuals, and the assessment and analytic tools for providing feedback on learning and teaching are critical services that manage the content delivery within a design for learning. These services available through the open enrollment of MOOCs are the additional benefits that have been recognized as valuable by some learners, teachers, and institutions.

"The schools most at risk are those without strong name recognition. While that might be unfair, it seems to be a fact of life. While Clayton Christensen has taken some heat from the projection that "in 15 years from now half of US universities may be in bankruptcy", the data from this survey lends some credibility to the concept."

"We urge the US to take the lead and make reforms that ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight."

"Instead of being an unstoppable force disrupting the faculty profession, MOOCs can be an opportunity to empower faculty to explore, create, and express themselves in new ways through open and digital education. To do this requires establishing the proper institutional context, one that allows for experimentation and grassroots, faculty-led initiatives to flourish. We have argued in this article that a focus on soft infrastructure - the resources, values, and affirmations that support faculty agency in experimenting with digital learning - has helped us create this context at Stanford. Our research suggests that this approach has given faculty the opportunity and autonomy to manifest their desires to share intellectual work more broadly, experiment and take pedagogical risks, express their unique teaching philosophies in new ways, and thoughtfully engage in the MOOC phenomenon on their own terms. As a result, a great number and variety of open and digital learning approaches have flourished at our institution."

"Assumptions about young people's familiarity with technologies risk exacerbating inequality. Access to devices and connectivity isn't equal across all young people, and neither is support in developing skills - from peers, parent/carers, or schools, equally distributed. Socioeconomic status remains a key issue in relation to access, with a small but significant number of young people having very limited access."

"Rather than providing information about students at risk, we aimed to develop a system that would broadly inform instructors about all their enrolled students, providing summarized institutional data about the aggregate characteristics of the students enrolled in their respective classes. We call it the Student Profile Report (SPR), a short document that summarizes student records, intended to provide a useful snapshot of information about the population of students taking a course prior to the start of a semester. "

"If online learning is to succeed as not only as a legitimate option for learning but as a respected platform within an institution, leadership has to build that respect through calculated risks and building multi-departmental relationships."

"The new university/company AI partnership model will resemble the current online program management model, in which the AI company de-risks the AI investment with up-front capital and resources, and is paid by a revenue share."

"Career services are a natural evolution of focus for the student success movement. If we abandon low-income or first-generation students at graduation with a poorly designed handoff between college-to-career, we risk failing to deliver on the full promise of higher education," said Dr. Bridget Burns, Executive Director of the University Innovation Alliance. "Strada Education Network understands that innovation starts with listening to, and understanding, the perspective of students. This project is about providing career services professionals with the capacity and time to redesign career readiness in order to better prepare students for an increasingly dynamic future of work.""

"Jakubowski identified some key steps institutions might take to mitigate risk and set themselves on a path for achieving accessibility success"

"Not everyone will successfully navigate the shifting jobs market. Those most at risk of technological disruption are men in blue-collar jobs, many of whom reject taking less "masculine" roles in fast-growing areas such as health care. But to keep the numbers of those left behind to a minimum, all adults must have access to flexible, affordable training. The 19th and 20th centuries saw stunning advances in education. That should be the scale of the ambition today."

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It seems pretty legit.

In this same thread, I just saw the article in Inside Higher Ed called "Paying for an A" and I thought it flowed with this conversation-they actually review the site you mention here. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/21/sites-offering-take-courses-fee-pose-risk-online-ed