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"Two professors at the University of Texas at Austin have given birth to a new term, SMOC, which stands for "synchronous massive online class." How's it different? The Wall Street Journal describes it as "somewhere between a MOOC...a late night television show and a real-time research experiment," where "students, professors and teaching assistants [are required] to be online at the same time." Running what appears to be a live MOOC doesn't come cheap: the two professors admitted they needed 125 school employees to run the show. And that may be why they're hoping to charge non-UT students for their intro to psychology SMOC"

"Contrary to a progressive lens of technology where asynchronous patterns replace older asynchronous patterns, I like to think that the big picture here is that the gathering collection of asynchronous technology over time - with all of its varieties of communication frequency and durability - gives humans more choice and autonomy over how we interact and what we interact about. Radio has not been replaced by television or even podcasts, but only declined in popularity and taken its place among what is now available. An abundance of asynchronous options is not really a shift that we have been experiencing, but liberation from a narrow range of vastly different options."

"There's a whole galaxy of terminology that you should know about when it comes to education technology. From PLNs to Blended Learning to Synchronous Online Learning… it can get overwhelming. Dubbed the EdTech Cheat Sheet, I think it's one of the most useful infographics out there today. You should consider printing this out and keeping it handy should you ever come across some crazy term that doesn't make sense to you."

Amherst's Chair of Neuroscience Stephen A. George led the faculty rejection of edX. It wasn't a rejection of online learning or open resources or the idea of making entire courses available for free online that they rejected, he said. "It was just the massive, synchronous MOOC that didn't seem to fit" with the school's mission and identity.

"A five week course using asynchronous forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, social bookmarks, synchronous audio, video, chat, and Twitter Limited to 30 learners"

Current & Archived Synchronous Sessions

"as I set up the WordPress blog (which was there for the syllabus, widgets, static material), I realized that there was no need for two systems. After consulting with my colleagues Jim (our blog meister), Laura (our commenter and organizer), and Todd (our captain of synchronicity), I shifted the whole thing to a Google Site. There was no need for the Community, since I had some old gadget that could do discussion."

"Despite the rapid advances in telepresence and distributed working tools, people still brave traffic and go to the office. Business travel is on the rise as people congregate for meetings and conferences. Attendees pay $7,500 for tickets to TED talks when the content is all posted free of charge on their website. And 250 leaders [including John Hagel] will attend Techonomy 2012 in Tucson starting Sunday. Are we just stubborn creatures of habit who are slow to adopt a better solution? Or, is there a fundamental value to the brick-and-mortar, flesh-and-bone world that cannot be replaced?"

"Nelson says the new version of the system lets professors quickly divide a large class into groups of up to 12 students. Those break-out groups of students can then participate in a small-group discussion while each student fills out a "structured worksheet" that can be graded later by a TA following a rubric to make sure each student was following along and participating. During the live class, the professor can peek into any of the breakout sessions, either by appearing as one of the participants, or lurking in the background so that he or she can see and hear the students but they don't know the professor is there. The requirement of filling out the worksheet, or doing some other activity like a poll or quiz, makes sure students in breakout groups stay on task, Nelson says."