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"Writing learning outcomes is very difficult for faculty who were never trained to think about their teaching in such terms.  We are great at describing what content our course will cover; we are pretty good at knowing that we expect our students to master a certain amount of content or skill set by the end of the semester.  We are terrible at framing our expectations for student learning in terms of learning outcomes, with all of our learning activities in the course aligned to those learning outcomes.  We are even worse at measuring learning outcomes.  We conflate grades with learning outcomes on the regular."

The reason is that the top universities do not offer the best teaching and learning experiences. Instead, their faculty members are incentivized heavily to focus on research at the expense of teaching. If a professor seeking tenure at one of these institutions receives a teaching award, it is often said that that professor has just received the kiss of death for her tenure hopes. If students learn at these institutions, it's often not because the teaching is so good, but because the students are so talented that they can absorb anything thrown at them (and it's worth noting that just because a professor is entertaining, does not mean it's a good learning experience).

"The National University System, for example, is developing  a variety of initiatives aimed at bringing down the cost of a degree, including through FlexCourse?, a teaching and learning platform that offers faculty-supported, variably-paced online degree programs at an affordable price point of $8,500 annual tuition. The platform is initially being offered in conjunction with John F. Kennedy University, through JFKU Online --  both part of the National University System."

"Just the other day I was observing at a restaurant in Palo Alto that's popular for many business lunch meetings, that most, if not all, of those engaging with other humans were also equally engaged in their digital devices. I watched three different tables and in a time period of 15 minutes, every person at every one of those tables averaged checking their smartphones and responding to something at least three times."

"The relatively low completion rates of learners have been a central critique as MOOCs grow in popularity. This focus on completion rates, however, implies a monolithic view of disengagement that fails to acknowledge alternative forms of participation in MOOCs. Identifying subpopulations of learners based on their longitudinal engagement with the course allows MOOC designers to target interventions and develop adaptive course features. We develop a simple, scalable, and informative classification method that identifies four prototypical engagement trajectories: Completing learners, who complete the majority of the assessments offered in the class; Auditing learners, who do assessments infrequently (if at all) and engage instead by watching video lectures; Disengaging learners, who do assessments at the beginning of the course but then have a marked decrease in engagement, generally in the first third of the class; and Sampling learners, who enter and exit the course quickly, watching a minimal number of videos at some point during the course."

"After about two decades of steady growth in the number of graduates, the country likely peaked at about 3.4 million graduates in 2011 and will see a modest decline over the next few years, according to a report released Thursday by the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education. According to the report, the number of graduates will fall in the immediate term, settle at about 3.3 million graduates a year by 2014 and begin to grow gradually starting in 2020, but at nowhere near the rate seen from 1990 to 2011."

"The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field," says Cathy Casserly, a senior partner at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who in her former role at the Hewlett Foundation provided seed funding for MIT's project. "We're changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge.""

"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"

"Working 24/7 is not the only way to achieve success in academia. There, I've said it. A recent article described the working week of people across academia. This included the science professor who "compensates for the time he spends with his young children in the evening and at weekends by getting up before they do", and the early career researcher who "tries to take at least a half-day off a week". While many colleagues have similar working patterns and are happy (or at least not unhappy) working in this way, I am meeting increasing numbers of promising academics who reject it."

Digital badges are receiving a growing amount of attention and are beginning to disrupt the norms of what it means to earn credit or be credentialed. Badges allow the sharing of evidence of skills and knowledge acquired through a wide range of life activity, at a granular level, and at a pace that keeps up with individuals who are always learning-even outside the classroom. As such, entities not traditionally in the degree-granting realm-such as museums, associations, online communities, and even individual experts-are now issuing "credit" for achievement they can uniquely recognize. At the same time, higher education institutions are rethinking the type and size of activities worthy of official recognition. From massive open online courses (MOOCs), service learning, faculty development, and campus events to new ways of structuring academic programs and courses or acknowledging the granular or discrete skills that these programs explore, there's much for colleges and universities to consider in the wide open frontier called badging.

"By "standards … effectiveness … accountability," what Rhee means, of course, is more emphasis on her reform agenda of assessing schools, teachers and students with high-stakes test scores - not at all an agenda uniformly accepted by top-scoring nations. Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg corrected her on a blog site at the Washington Post, noting that Finland's PISA scores are routinely at or near the top, yet "the Finnish approach to educational policy has stood in direct opposition to the path embraced by the United States.""

"I have argued the futility of continuing to call the connectivist-style online courses by the term MOOC. In popular culture MOOC means Udacity, Coursera or EdX, and Andrew Ng's keynote on Wednesday showed the tone-deafness of the dominant paradigm. At #OpenEd13 debate continued among the group of experts (and this conference was full of experts) regarding how we properly define a MOOC, akin to the debate at Educause where Mathieu Plourde argued that every term in the acronym is negotiable. My argument at #OpenEd13 is that such thinking is counter-productive to the political and cultural conversation about distance, online and open education: those of us in that world are still arguing about the definition, but in the mainstream the ship has sailed, and we need to accept that the term MOOC no longer means what it did in 2008."

" I lecture so that I can model how an expert approaches problems. If my students have read the book (or, for the flippers, watched the video) before class, they have (I hope) obtained some basic facts and also have at least the beginnings of an understanding of how those facts fit together. If I assign them problems or questions to grapple with, they will eventually work toward a deeper understanding of the topic at hand. What the in-class lecture adds is a model of how an expert approaches questions."

"According to data from the Delaware Department of Education, the newly-created ninth grade class at Newark Charter School consists of 15 percent Hispanic and African-American students, with representation of low-income students also at 15 percent. This contrasts starkly with the freshman class at Newark High School which is composed of 64 percent African American and Hispanic students and 70 percent low-income students."

"In 2014, the Centre for Innovation and Excellence in Learning embarked on a research project to investigate elements of effective teaching and learning practice valued at Vancouver Island University (VIU). Our investigation resulted in conversations with faculty and students in defining the elements of teaching practice valued at VIU. Faculty from the existing Community of Scholarly Teaching Practice (CoSTP) and students from the VIU community were invited to contribute their ideas about regarding effective teaching and learning design and practice. These consultations have generated a list of themes which capture practices most valued at VIU. "

"The results are in, and the top landing pages are heavy on content and light on color. At Crayon, we recently analyzed the top 1,000+ landing pages from our web design inspiration site Crayon Inspire. We looked at how they used text, video, and colors, and we even dug into the structure of the most popular landing pages of the last year."

"Big data is everywhere-even in education. Researchers and developers of online learning, intelligent tutoring systems, virtual labs, simulations, and learning management systems are exploring ways to better understand and use learning analytics to improve teaching and learning."

We face a critical need to prepare children and adolescents to thrive in the 21st century-an era of rapidly evolving technology, demanding and collaborative STEM knowledge work, changing workforce needs, economic volatility, and unacceptable achievement gaps. This report takes a close look at a core set of noncognitive factors-grit, tenacity, and perseverance-that are essential to an individual's capacity to strive for and succeed at important goals, and to persist in the face of an array of challenges encountered throughout schooling and life.

"Many institutions have invested substantial resources in diverse initiatives to deliver distance learning and/or enhance campus-based learning with online resources. To these institutional efforts, faculty and students are now adding online tools and resources from beyond the campus. Higher education institutions are confronting the need to connect these various efforts to create more powerful and integrated learning experiences for all of their students. In this interview, Brian Hughes, Director of Social Media at the Teacher's College at Columbia University, discusses the issues surrounding social media integration."

"There are a lot of gadgets out there, right? Shiny new products with fun, useful, or amazing capabilities are being churned out at quite the clip. They're available for use in workplaces, schools, and at home, and the scope of what we can do with all these neat devices is only expanding. So, we know that students are connected - Very Connected. They have computers, smartphones, tablets, and a variety of devices in between. But just how connected are they? And what does this mean for teachers?"

"The Internet affords children endless opportunities to get into serious trouble, downloading what they shouldn't download, looking at what they shouldn't be looking at, and getting ideas about what they shouldn't be getting ideas about. But the good news is that if your kids are like mine, they may be doing some or all of those things... but there's another use for the Internet that's attracting their time and attention. It's called teaching."