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"A growing number of Fortune 500 companies, like Walmart, have grown tired of waiting for colleges and universities to produce the skilled workers they need and have started offering their own classes instead. And as an added bonus for employees: Many of these courses -- from Starbucks' Barista Basics to Jiffy Lube's finance fundamentals -- are eligible for college credit. "What companies like is just-in-time learning that gives somebody a skill they need at the time they need it," says Mark Allen, a Pepperdine University business professor and author of The Next Generation of Corporate Universities. "What traditional universities do to a large extent is just-in-case learning.""

"Even if you routinely teach large courses, a MOOC requires far more time to prepare and execute. To prepare the three lectures offered in a single week, my team spent about 20 hours planning and developing content. I spent an additional eight hours rehearsing my lectures. It took just under four hours to record the video for three formal lectures. I cannot speak to the editing process, because another unit at Georgia Tech does that work, but it usually takes five to 10 days to receive the edited video and get Coursera approval. Even then there is more work to incorporate any quiz links or other "in-class work" that takes place during lecture pauses. Finally there is the "Courserafication" process of uploading and configuring the content for use on our Coursera site. Formatting assignments and other content takes still more time."

Google Glass, like the Segway, is what happens when Silicon Valley spends too much time talking to itself. Maybe that's even overstating the case: The rhetoric around Google Glass is what happens when important tech people spend a little too much time congratulating each other.

While the participants in each conversation deserve the most credit for jumping into play as a pathway for transforming professional practice, the aforementioned facilitators helped scaffold dynamic settings for learning during our time together which felt both entirely awesome and all too short. In response to both on-site and online feedback, I wanted to share some notes on practice before too much time goes by.

"from time to time I have had the luxury of developing learning materials relating to my own specialities in workplace learning. These are the projects I have most enjoyed and which, in my opinion, delivered the best results. So, what works best: designing with your own content expertise, or concentrating on the process, without necessarily having content expertise?"

Time for a coffee? You've got time to get started on Twitter! 24 key tips to start you on your way.

"It is shame when teachers use excuses not to build their own networks. Too many times they say they can't or they don't have the time when they just don't want to. They are afraid to try something new. Until they give it a try, they won't see the value in it. I believe that when I try something new, I have to use it regularly for at least 2 weeks in order to make an honest decision about it. "

"Twitter and Facebook might soon replace traditional professional development for teachers. Instead of enduring hours-long workshops a few times a year, teachers could reach out to peers on the Internet in real time for advice on things like planning a lesson (or salvaging a lesson that's going wrong), overcoming classroom management problems, or helping students with disabilities."

"Below, we collect some "rules" we've derived from these features and from other pieces on the Times site, along with links and related activities we hope writers at any stage will find fun or useful - or both."

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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

"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"

In addition to the benefits of using "clickers" (AKA student response systems) in a classroom to foster a more engaged environment (click here for a quick intro), clickers also offer the opportunity to measure how students are understanding and processing information in real time. "Keeping the poll open" and asking students questions while they are listening/watching is a very useful way to find out how they are able to apply theoretical ideas. Although the examples in this essay focus on music, keeping the poll open could be applied to other time-based arts, or even in other disciplines when a teacher wants to observe how students are processing information as it changes.

"As a parent, I really cannot cover everything I want my kids to learn from me in the four hours I have them at home. I really like my kids teachers and I really appreciate all the work they do during the day, but due to the short amount of time I have my kids at home, I'm going to have to send some work back to school with my kids to complete during the seven hours they spend in the classroom. I apologize for the negative impact this work might have on the teachers and the rest of the class. I know only too well how that feels. However, the lesson plans I have in the evening are better learned if there is some additional follow through done during the day, parent/home connection and all that. None of these assignments should take up much time, thirty minutes tops."

"It's time to call these fake open initiatives out for what they really are. It is time for us to stand up for and protect the idea and name that are so critically important to improving the affordability, quality, and equity of education around the world. If you need a handy, slightly derogatory term to use in describing fake open initiatives, I highly recommend the term "fauxpen": Faux in French means "false" or "fake." So fauxpen means "fake open." Examples of how to use this term appropriately would include "Fauxpen Education Alliance.""

"There's little reason for typesetting to be such an expensive bottleneck in both time and money when we have better solutions in place. Academia will have to adopt new methods of producing text-based content. This was true when scholars moved from typewriters to word processors like Microsoft Word. Word enabled new capabilities like saving documents and editing them over time, rich text formatting, and the like. Unfortunately, Word arrived in a world before the internet and has never been adapted to work with the internet. As a result, it takes months to get an article into a format that can communicate with the web. Keep in mind that once we have the text in a web-communicable form the innovative things we can do with it are endless in terms of presentation, analytics, and more. We can't reverse that scholarship is moving to the web so we might as well learn how to speak with the web, today."

The Blended Schools Network is hosting a massive open online course (MOOC). Starting on Monday, October 21, 2013 this course is designed for educators who wish to Learn the fundamentals of being a quality online teacher using a pre-built online course. Note: This course is designed for educators that have access to online course content via a course management system of their choosing (e.g. Blackboard, Canvas, Edmodo, Moodle etc.). If you do not have access to an online course the Blended Schools Network can provide you with a sample online course for use during the MOOC. This MOOC is an online course consisting of: Weekly online lesson content that can be completed at any time during the assigned week Weekly online collaboration activities that can be completed at any time during the assigned week Weekly online presentation and discussion sessions that can be attended live or viewed as a recording

This looked interesting - very interesting.....

"The problem is that we get interrupted frequently in the modern workplace. Rituals become habits, and that means we run through the transition cycle every time we stop doing what we're doing. One famous 2007 study found that when people responded to email or instant messaging alerts, it took them 10 to 15 minutes beyond time spent on the interruption to really get back into their original tasks. Those 10 to 15 minutes of headline checking add up."

"When we started using Google Apps in our elementary district a few years ago, we figured it was time to test out electronic ways to present a year's worth of work, instead of the traditional binder. Our fourth, fifth and sixth grade students love using Google Sites to create their own portfolio as a web site. They can be creative, show their personality, and present an easy to navigate body of work to their parents . We continue using those portfolios each year and when it's time to update their portfolios, students get excited to see where they started. "

"At the same time, MOOCs called into question our basic assumptions about college. Free access to content from prestigious institutions revealed that content didn't need to be proprietary. Without having to waste time re-creating the same lectures and class materials, particularly for lower-division courses, many professors saw the opportunity to be even more connected and hands-on in order to make existing content come alive for students. Despite the intense trepidation that technology would somehow replace teachers, it became clear that MOOCs didn't preempt interaction; instead, they forced more contact and accountability on both the student and the teacher."

"For example, there's a lot of overlap in the processes of reading and the processes used for understanding speech - processes that assign syntactic roles to words. Do we see any evidence that people are having a harder time understanding spoken language? Or does the problem lie in the mental processes that build understanding of larger blocks of language, as when we're comprehending a story? If so, habitual Web users should have a hard time understanding complex narratives not just when they read, but in television and movies. No one should have watched The Sopranos, with its complicated, interweaving plotlines."