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Cost and completion issues have turned the state of Texas into a proving ground for unconventional ideas such as outsourced online competency-based learning and the $10,000 bachelor's degree. Now the University of Texas will enter MOOCs into the equation with the hope that it will make a Texas degree less expensive for some students.

The Amarillo Area Center for Advanced Learning in Texas is replacing textbooks with digital open educational resources (OER) for its math and science classes using iPads. The specialty high school in Texas recently implemented a 1:1 iPad initiative, and the OER pilot program is intended to help cut costs while providing students with access to high-quality, easily updatable learning resources on their iPads. The district selected a free, Web-based solution, Net Texts, to provide teachers with access to a library of more than 21,000 free OER learning resources from Curriki, Khan Academy, and several universities and colleges.

"An all-digital public library is opening today, as officials in Bexar County, Texas, celebrate the opening of the BiblioTech library. The facility offers about 10,000 free e-books for the 1.7 million residents of the county, which includes San Antonio. On its website, the Bexar County BiblioTech library explains how its patrons can access free eBooks and audio books. To read an eBook on their own device, users must have the 3M Cloud Library app, which they can link to their library card. The app includes a countdown of days a reader has to finish a book - starting with 14 days, according to My San Antonio."

"In "whoa buddy, I'm not so sure about that" news, one Texas school district is in the process of implementing a new way to ensure student safety and make sure that kids are where they need to be while on campus. At least, that's what they say. Others may call it a giant mandatory student tracking program."

"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"

"As part of this work, we are organizing a conference at University of Texas Arlington December 5-6, 2013: MOOCs and Emerging Educational Models: Policy, Practice, and Learning. Registration is now open. We have a great group of keynote speakers and an outstanding list of successful grantees who will also be presenting."

"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."

The UL system has teamed up with the SAS software company of Cary, N.C. and MyEdu, of Austin, Texas, to create a massive data trove that should help make students more marketable to prospective employers and help those companies find the desired types of students. "This partnership allows us to use data to connect the dots," Woodley said. "It allows us to use data to target-market opportunities to our students they may not have known about."

"A POLITICO investigation has found that Pearson stands to make tens of millions in taxpayer dollars and cuts in student tuition from deals arranged without competitive bids in states from Florida to Texas. The review also found Pearson's contracts set forth specific performance targets - but don't penalize the company when it fails to meet those standards. And in the higher ed realm, the contracts give Pearson extensive access to personal student data, with few constraints on how it is used."

"The Copyright Crash Course was created by Georgia Harper and is currently maintained by UT Libraries. The Course is arranged into several sections that allow users to explore certain areas of copyright law individually or as a group. The Course was originally created with faculty in mind, but can be used by anyone who is interested in understanding and managing their copyrights."

Dr. Rankin, professor of History at UT Dallas, wanted to know how to reach more students and involve more people in class discussions both in and out of the classroom. She had heard of Twitter... She collaborated with the UT Dallas, Arts and Technology - Emerging Media and Communications (EMAC) http://www.emac.utdallas.edu faculty and as a Graduate student in EMAC I assisted her in her experiment.

The adjustments to the district's policy are coming on the heels of numerous requests from staff, students, and administrators for more access to education based web technologies, according to Donald Williams, executive director of community services and communications for the district.

"teaching a course using someone else's instructional media is out of alignment with the occupational model. Taken to its extreme, it  reduces the academic to the status of a "mere teacher"; no longer an "expert", and nothing grander than a K12 teacher. This is not a status or identity to which most traditional academics aspire."

"The Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge (LINK) Lab at UT Arlington has been chosen to lead a $1.6 million initiative to connect and support researchers across the country as they examine digital learning's effect on higher education today and in the future."