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Recordings of the sessions presented during the Learning Futures Festival, held 13-15 April 2011, are now available to view online. Among them are presentations by delegates from ICDE member institutions, Athabasca University, The Open University, Unisa, University of Leicester and the University of Southern Queensland.

"'Massive open online courses: Higher Education's digital moment?' tracks the development of MOOCs from a small selection of specialist courses to major online platforms, offering hundreds of courses with millions of users.  The report explores MOOCs' surge in popularity and discusses whether this signals the beginning of a significant transformation in higher education, similar to those seen in other sectors, such as the newspaper industry. It pulls together the recent trends in online education delivery and looks at how universities can respond to the changing online environment."

"The University of Queensland has committed to the development of a major online open learning environment.  UQ Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Terry said heads of school, deans and other senior academic leaders had embraced a University vision to move toward the development of a major online open learning environment.  "The initiative is an integral component of the new UQ blueprint for technology-enhanced learning, recently released to staff," Professor Terry said. "

"The University of Florida has faced sweeping budget cuts from the State Legislature totaling 25 percent over three years. That is a main reason the university is moving aggressively to offer more online instruction. "We see this as the future of higher education," said Joe Glover, the university provost."

NY Times article about the University of the People, which offers degress for free. Volunteer lecturers - which makes me wonder how sustainable this is... Also only offers degrees in computing and business administration

"The manifesto for teaching online was a key output from the Student Writing project at the University of Edinburgh. It is a series of brief statements that attempt to capture what is generative and productive about online teaching, course design, writing, assessment and community. It is, and may remain, a living document that is reviewed and reworked periodically with colleagues, students and amongst the programme team of the MSc in E-learning programme. Its primary purpose is to spark discussion, and to articulate a position about e-learning that informs the work of the project team, and the MSc in E-learning programme more broadly. This position is best summarised by the first of the manifesto statements: Distance is a positive principle, not a deficit. Online can be the privileged mode."

Universities compared to Domino's pizza in terms of serving up options that are ordered online. A plug for the importance of conversation and how that provides learning - and that online conversation (e.g. twitter) is the new 'game changer'. 

Education, and in particular higher education, has seen rapid change as learning institutions have had to adapt to the opportunities provided by the Internet to move more of their teaching online1 and to become more flexible in how they operate. It might be tempting to think that such a period of change would lead to a time of consolidation and agreement about approaches and models of operation that suit the 21st century. New technologies continue to appear,2 however, and the changes in attitude indicated by the integration of online activities and social approaches within our lives are accelerating rather than slowing down. How should institutions react to these changes? One part of the answer seems to be to embrace some of the philosophy of the Internet3 and reevaluate how to approach the relationship between those providing education and those seeking to learn. Routes to self-improvement that have no financial links between those providing resources and those using them are becoming more common,4 and the motivation for engaging with formal education as a way to gain recognition of learning is starting to seem less clear.5 What is becoming clear across all business sectors is that maintaining a closed approach leads to missing out on ways to connect with people and locks organizations into less innovative approaches.6 Higher education needs to prepare itself to exist in a more open future, either by accepting that current modes of operation will increasingly provide only one version of education or by embracing openness and the implications for change entailed. In this article we look at what happens when a more open approach to learning is adopted at an institutional level. There has been a gradual increase in universities opening up the content that they provide to their learners. Drawing on the model of open-source software, where explicit permission to freely use and modify code has developed a software industry that rivals commercial approaches, a proposed

Opinion piece on the place of online lectures in the future of education.  Get your world class expert via YouTube, MIT, etc and use your time with students to really interact with them and the material.

"Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarship functions which can be affected by new technologies, and the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to technological change comes from those with a vested interest in either wholesale change or maintaining the status quo. Taking the resilience metaphor from ecology, the authors propose a framework for analysing an institution's ability to adapt to digital challenges. This framework is examined at two institutions (the UK Open University and Canada's Athabasca University) using two current digital challenges, namely Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing."

"But I think there are two important things that online universities bring to the table: (1) Broadening access to higher education, and (2) Leveraging technology to explore new approaches to learning."

By this autumn, every university in England will have published a new set of information about every undergraduate course on offer. These Key Information Sets will include data on areas such as contact hours, graduate salaries and student satisfaction. But with little fanfare, one institution has already put itself ahead of the game by displaying information about its graduates in a way that could set a benchmark for the sector. The University of Oxford has created an online tool for comparing data about its graduates' careers and salaries. Tucked away on its main careers website and organised into a set of user-friendly tables, it allows immediate comparisons of the salary and employment status of its alumni from 2008-09 and 2009-10 - undergraduate and postgraduate - sorted by subject area, individual course and even constituent college.

"Far more important to me than all the venture-capitalized consortia of elite university MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) and the hundreds of thousands of students flocking to them is a course taught by an adjunct professor at University of Mary Washington."

"TRADITIONAL textbooks will be put on the endangered list next year as the University of Adelaide's Faculty of Science becomes the first tertiary institution to embrace a new approach to online learning." Ahh you need an iPad to do elearning in science, that's the problem.

University of Southern Queensland: all teaching staff at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) will have access to use virtual classrooms, online study groups and other innovative educational tools from semester two this year. The tools are part of the Wimba suite of educational technologies that USQ

All classes online but students must all participate at the same time and live on campus.

"The infographic below, while simply designed to show students who are taking a MOOC for university level Spanish what the components of their class will be, does an excellent job showing a) just how online language learning can be (even if you're sitting at home alone) and b) how well language learning lends itself to online learning"

Michael Peters reviews MOOCs from an economic, post-modern university type standpoint. Quite long. Most of the comments are garbage!

Why do Intro to Sociology @Waikato & pay for the privillege when you can do it for free from Princeton? http://t.co/Dzhxeruw #waitalk #yam

Another OERu style of initiative?