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"Australian company's investment of roughly $165 million in Coursera and FutureLearn suggests open course providers have found a viable business model. Not everyone is sold."

"some users will be asked to pay a support fee, "from $9 up to some portion of the certification cost," said Medros. The price of the support fee "will be aligned to the value and experience" that a course gives to a learner, said Medros, suggesting that the best courses will also be the most expensive."

"The MOOC providers didn't bring about the end of higher education as we knew it, but they did stumble upon a highly-effective marketing funnel with the potential to change the way universities put programs online. This niche is known in higher education as online program management (OPM), and providers who work in this space offer solutions to help universities put their programs online. Now, the MOOC providers are poised to make a dent in the highly-lucrative OPM market."

"the automated text-analysis tool will be tested in a statistics course this fall. For three semesters, students in that class have responded to the same writing prompts, producing hundreds of essays on the same topics. The M-Write team has pored over those papers, identifying the features of papers that met the assignment criteria and those that missed the mark. The findings will be used to design an algorithm that makes the text-analysis tool look for those features."

"early MOOCs failed to incorporate active learning approaches or any of the other innovations in teaching and learning common in other online courses. The three principal MOOC providers-Coursera, Udacity, and edX-wandered into a territory they thought was uninhabited. Yet it was a place that was already well occupied by accomplished practitioners who had thought deeply and productively over the last couple of decades about how students learn online. Like poor, baffled Columbus, MOOC makers believed they had "discovered" a new world. It's telling that in their latest offerings, these vendors have introduced a number of active-learning innovations."

"Mr Nelson said that a key priority was to improve the online user experience, warning that "the state of most learning management systems is verging on embarrassing in the face of the smartphone generation" and that "grainy footage of an hour-long lecture, filmed from the back of the lecture hall, just won't cut it"."

Great article - thanks. The thought: "no room for complacency" is powerfully pertinent.

" Course providers like Udemy and Lynda.com, along with coding boot camps and massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as edX and Coursera, promise to refresh workers' skills or help them acquire expertise they didn't get in college. But those new credentials don't carry much weight in hiring yet, recruiters say, because managers don't trust or recognize many of the companies and organizations behind the badges and courses."

"MIT is taking perhaps its biggest step yet to combine free online classes with its traditional on-campus instruction. The university announced Wednesday at its Solve conference that it will allow students to obtain one of its master's degrees by doing half of the coursework online-from anywhere, for free, without any admissions tests-and then doing the other half in a single semester on campus."

"These findings support some of the early hopes that MOOCs would provide a life-changing opportunity for those who are less advantaged and have limited access to education. Of course, MOOCs are still available only to people who have access to the internet, and completion rates remain low. "

"if you aren't the best lecturer in the world, why shouldn't your boss replace you with whoever is? And if you aren't the one providing the content, why did you spend all those years in graduate school anyway? Teaching, you say? Well, administrators can pay graduate students or adjuncts a lot less to do your job. Pretty soon, there might even be a computer program that can do it."

"they've shifted to what's becoming a more familiar Silicon Valley narrative about the future of employability: a cheap and precarious labor force. That's the unfortunate reality of "Uber for Education.""

"This free online course will explain how you can study online without putting the rest of your life on hold."

"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."

" wellspring of fresh faith has surged up around so-called SPOCs. Small and Private, not Massive and Open, SPOCs are boasting better completion rates and better vibes than their highly scalable predecessors."

"To start college, the typical student must meet admission requirements (if any), enroll and pay tuition. But what if anyone anywhere could try out a prominent university's classes for a small fee and wait until the end to decide whether to pay tuition for credit toward a diploma? That is one of the groundbreaking ideas behind an Arizona State University plan, announced Wednesday, to offer a freshman curriculum online through the nonprofit Web site called edX."

"Online learning has been hailed as a faster, cheaper way to provide education -- but it doesn't do half of what administrators think it will.      With the help of a few experts, we've compiled a list of major myths that administrators believe, how they match up against reality and why administrators believe them. "