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To award grants to encourage State educational agencies, local educational agencies, and schools to utilize technology to improve student achievement and college and career readiness, the skills of teachers and school leaders, and the efficiency and productivity of education systems at all levels.

"Instead of being an unstoppable force disrupting the faculty profession, MOOCs can be an opportunity to empower faculty to explore, create, and express themselves in new ways through open and digital education. To do this requires establishing the proper institutional context, one that allows for experimentation and grassroots, faculty-led initiatives to flourish. We have argued in this article that a focus on soft infrastructure - the resources, values, and affirmations that support faculty agency in experimenting with digital learning - has helped us create this context at Stanford. Our research suggests that this approach has given faculty the opportunity and autonomy to manifest their desires to share intellectual work more broadly, experiment and take pedagogical risks, express their unique teaching philosophies in new ways, and thoughtfully engage in the MOOC phenomenon on their own terms. As a result, a great number and variety of open and digital learning approaches have flourished at our institution."

Now ability grouping has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country - a trend that has surprised education experts who believed the outcry had all but ended its use. A new analysis from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a Census-like agency for school statistics, shows that of the fourth-grade teachers surveyed, 71 percent said they had grouped students by reading ability in 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. In math, 61 percent of fourth-grade teachers reported ability grouping in 2011, up from 40 percent in 1996. "These practices were essentially stigmatized,"

Open access as the default sounds ambitious, but is consistent with recent trends, particularly for research funded by taxpayers. A growing number of governments and funding agencies have already embraced mandatory open access requirements, recognizing that if the public funds the research, it is entitled to access the results.

In the past several years, Dartmouth undergraduates have written more than 100 nonpartisan policy briefs for state legislators, agencies, and local municipalities in New Hampshire and Vermont. Small-town traffic congestion, charter schools, broadband Internet access, drug courts, and the privatization of parks, hospitals, and prisons: All have been investigated by students from Dartmouth's Policy Research Shop.

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.

Learning analytics holds increasing potential for student agency and autonomy, highlighting a need for ethical discourse at all levels of higher education institutions. Topics central to this dialogue include student awareness of analytics, the future of algorithms and learning analytics, and the redefinition of failure.

"ReCon is designed to raise and discuss current issues to do with research communication in academia and beyond. These issues range from the use of metrics for evaluating research, access to publications, how to share and store data, government policy to how this affects careers and incentives for researchers. ReCon includes speakers from government agencies, academics, publishers, people working in outreach and founders of startups working in the research space."

This lack of transparency from accrediting commissions is a relic of a bygone era when higher education was relatively stable and accrediting decisions mostly affected the specific institution under review. But given the changes that the higher education industry is facing and going through, these policies are damaging to those institutions who are trying out new models and need to know where the boundaries are drawn. Accrediting commissions play an important role in the governance of our higher education industry, in particular by providing a method for quality assurance. By operating in such an opaque manner, however, the agencies are effectively acting as a barrier to change and stifling innovation.

"The first type of 'Domain' took audience into account, considering the implications of public scholarship, representation, and student agency. The second, in many ways, mirrored the traditional pedagogical structure by assigning papers or short answer assignments to be posted online through blogs. This is not necessarily bad, but also doesn't necessarily empower."

"You need to visit Laura's UnTextbook site to gain a full appreciation for the open content she has compiled for the course (and keeps compiling), and also to understand how it is representative of the future of openness, open content, and open pedagogy. While the UnTextbook certainly saves money for students, its real value is the way it opens the course structure and expands student learning networks."