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The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an international alliance of academic and research libraries, applauds Governor Pat Quinn for signing into law the Open Access to Research Articles Act. The bill, which was spearheaded by State Senator Daniel Biss, requires each Illinois public university to create an open access task force with the goal of making its research available to the public online and free of charge.

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.

"Learning management systems have become the primary delivery platform in most higher education systems for course-related activities such as lecture presentations, readings and assignments, discussions, and quizzes. Until a few years ago, access for learners and instructors with disabilities was either poorly supported or not considered at all in many popular tools. Due to lack of, or limited, accessibility in learning management systems, students were not able to fully or independently participate in key course activities."

Thank you!!

""Stanford is committed to being a great research and teaching university.  We believe it is not only possible but vital that we give teaching as much emphasis and support as we give research.  As a Stanford faculty member, academic staff member, or teaching assistant, you are already recognized for your scholarship in your field.  We ask that you be a leader in your teaching as well." "

This OCL4Ed micro Open Online Course (mOOC) will be facilitated by the UNESCO OER Chair network in support of capability development for the UNESCO 2012 Paris OER Declaration (See video from Abel Caine, Programme Specialist for OER at UNESCO.). The OCL4Ed 13.09 course is sponsored by the OER Foundation and the Commonwealth of Learning.

"Helpouts are face-to-face video calls powered by Google+ Hangouts. You can start and join a video call from your computer, Android, iPhone, and iPad devices. The Helpouts platform is different from Hangouts because Helpouts takes care of all of the setup and maintenance associated with delivering your services - from payment, to scheduling, reputation management, and customer acquisition."

"Peak higher ed means we've reached the maximum size that colleges and universities can support.  What we see now, or saw in 2012, is as big as it gets.  After two generations of growth, American higher education has reached its upper bound."

Not surprisingly, nearly half of the dropouts said they left because of fears about privacy and ethical concerns about how their personal data would be used. Many did not want their private information sold to advertisers or were worried about unauthorized disclosures to people they didn't know. (Prior studies have found that older people tend to pay more attention to privacy issues than younger users, a trend that was supported by this data.)

Twenty-first-century learners have expectations that are not met within the current model of higher education. With the introduction of online learning, the anytime/anywhere mantra taken up by many postsecondary institutions was a first step to meeting learner needs for flexibility; however, the choice and determination of delivery mode still resides with the institution and course instructors. Recently, the massive open online course (MOOC) movement has been introduced as an undeniable force in higher education, and the authors argue that it is distracting leadership from focusing on alternative options for supporting the needs of learners who demand both personalization and real access to learning opportunities. The key element to the MOOC movement is its openness that enables student access to education. In this article, the authors present the multi-access learning framework that envelops the MOOC phenomenon and merges course access modes enabling student choice and agency. The authors report results from a pilot study on one type of multi-access course, where students were able to choose their mode of access. In this case, remote students accessed the course via webcam and joined their on-campus classmates and instructor who were together face-to-face. Implications for multi-access learning in relation to the MOOC movement are discussed.

During last month's round of School of Open courses, I helped out with a facilitated version of the Open Science course supported by Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and PLOS. On four Tuesdays in August, Billy Meinke hosted online discussions with a handful of well-known members of the open science community while participants from around the world completed course modules and blogged about their experiences. Here's how things went down.

"I am particularly excited by the plans we have for what we're calling "MOOC-supported learning communities," in which local groups of MOOC participants benefit from and contribute to the overall MOOC experience, as well as our plans to share the materials we develop for the MOOC (videos, assignments, other resources) in an open-source fashion."

"To succeed in today's connected world, you need to build a community around your company, brand, and products. Over the last decade, social media monitoring has become a primary form of business intelligence, used to identify, predict, and respond to consumer behavior. Listening to what your customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about you is key to getting great results from your social media campaigns. There are countless tools out there, offering many ways to analyze, measure, display, and create reports about your engagement efforts."

Bucknell University, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will host its first annual international digital scholarship conference. The theme of the conference is "Collaborating Digitally: Engaging Students in Faculty Research" with the goal of gathering a broad community of scholar-practitioners engaged in collaborative digital scholarship in research and teaching.

To ensure that the Federal investment of these funds has as broad an impact as possible and to encourage innovation in the development of new learning materials, as a condition of the receipt of a Ready to Work grant, the grantee will be required to license to the public all work (except for computer software source code, discussed below) created with the support of the grant under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) license. Work that must be licensed under the CC BY includes both new content created with the grant funds and modifications made to pre-existing, grantee-owned content using grant funds.

"Education is increasingly occurring online or in educational software, resulting in an explosion of data that can be used to improve educational effectiveness and support basic research on learning. In this course, you will learn how and when to use key methods for educational data mining and learning analytics on this data."

we'll be offering a free 4-week professional development course designed to help instructors, trainers, and instructional designers learn how to better use social media to support learning, whether in an informal networking sense or by embedding social media into more formal learning contexts. The course will be hosted on Blackboard Coursesites and is open to anyone, anywhere in the world, at no charge.

"Vi Hart is back at it again. Hart has a knack for demystifying complex concepts with her visually-rich mathematical videos. She has previously tackled Stravinsky and Schoenberg's 12-Tone Compositions and the Space-Time Continuum. This week, she's taking on the concept of Net Neutrality. The FCC will soon consider whether it wants to end the era of net neutrality and the open web - something that could have far-reaching consequences for you. The web keeps getting more and more corporatized (even by companies that claim to support net neutrality). And by killing net neutrality, the FCC can officially ensure that big corporations run the show."

Google+ isn't as big as Facebook, but it's bigger than Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and all the rest. But size is irrelevant at this point. The fact is that it's way too big and active to kill. Google+ provides the best information Google has at its disposal for understanding hundreds of millions of users' social relationships, interests, identity and product and brand affinities. Google+ supports serious initiatives in the company like Android, Chrome, Chromebooks, Search and more.

On July 10, 2014, EDUCAUSE joined other leading higher education and library associations (listed below) in proposing a set of network neutrality principles for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to use in developing new regulations to preserve the "open Internet." These groups urged the FCC to adopt these principles in light of a recent court decision vacating two of the key network neutrality rules previously in place, which they believe creates an opportunity for Internet providers to block or degrade (e.g., arbitrarily slow) certain Internet traffic, or prioritize certain services, while relegating the online content and services of colleges, universities, and libraries to the "slow lane." The groups argue that new network neutrality rules based on these principles will ensure that the Internet remains a vital, vibrant platform for teaching, learning, research, and community support and engagement.

"With the report, Educause has launched the Next Generation Digital Learning Environments Initiative, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-supported effort to examine why colleges and universities are using "antiquated" technology -- and how to replace it. The average institution's learning management system, according to Educause's data, is eight years old."