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By : Farhad (Fred) Saba, Founder and Editor, Distance-Educator.com This year started with increased attention to massive open online courses (MOOCs), an idea that materialized by MIT and Stanford University when, several years ago, they decided to open their courses to the public for free, but without credit or formal admittance. The idea of MOOCs […]
The free and open publication of course materials (OpenCourseWare or OCW) was initially undertaken by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other universities primarily to share educational resources among educators (Abelson, 2007). OCW, however, and more in general open educational resources (OER), have also provided well-documented opportunities for all learners, including the so-called “informal learners” […]
The last 10 years have seen a massive increase in the amount of Open Access publications in journals and institutional repositories. The open availability of large volumes of state-of-the-art knowledge online has the potential to provide huge savings and benefits in many fields. However, in order to fully leverage this knowledge, it is necessary to […]
The clearest path to college credit for massive open online courses may soon be through credit recommendations from the American Council of Education (ACE), which announced Tuesday that it will work with Coursera to determine whether as many as 8-10 MOOCs should be worth credit. The council is also working on a similar arrangement with […]
The EDUCAUSE annual publication of top IT issues has long resonated as a yearly snapshot of the most pressing issues for IT leaders in higher education. In 2000, EDUCAUSE changed the method by which the issues were selected and ranked, instituting a member survey. For twelve years, members were asked to select the five most-important […]
A group of 10 highly selective colleges has formed a consortium to offer online courses that students enrolled at any of the campuses can take for credit. Wired Campus Full Article
Clayton R. Wright has done his 28th version of his amazing list of conferences again this year. You can contact him at: crwr77 [@] gmail.com. This year, he has cut down the list slightly to cover “selected events.” But its still a massive list. eLearning Technology Full List
Michael J. Saylor was early to the free online-education market. In 2000, Mr. Saylor, then a dot-com billionaire as chief executive of a business-intelligence company called MicroStrategy, promised to give $100-million to open a new Web portalthat would provide quality education for the masses at no charge. The Chronicle of Higher Education Full Article
In the 21st century, some argue that we have a new breed of students (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005; Prensky, 2001). Technologies such as Web 2.0 have been held responsible for these changes as students are now becoming active, critical consumers of information (Klamma, Cao, & Spaniol, 2007). Two components of this Web 2.0 revolution are […]
Second Life (SL) is an ideal platform for language learning. It is called a Multi-User Virtual Environment, where users can have varieties of learning experiences in life-like environments. Numerous attempts have been made to use SL as a platform for language teaching and the possibility of SL as a means to promote conversational interactions has […]