In 2012-2013, the massive open online course (MOOC) approach has been accepted by universities around the world, and outsourcing companies have been launched to provide the infrastructure for it. Current press and blog coverage of the MOOC trend is examined and the range of reactions to it, most of them enthusiastic. MOOCs vary in their…

Education is intimately connected with ethics, because holistically speaking education is more than simply passing examinations and acquiring degrees. Education is character building and life long learning. Savants and philosophers throughout the history of humankind have borne testimony to this aspect of education. Today, there is a great deal of…

In conjunction with the relaunch of the Digital Learning Transition (DLT) Massive Open Online Course for Educatos (MOOC-Ed) in September 2013, the Alliance and the Friday Institute released "The Digital Learning Transition MOOC for Educators: Exploring a Scalable Approach to Professional Development", a new paper that describes the…

The authors present this interview with Joshua Kim, Director of Digital Learning Initiatives at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL). Dr. Kim leads Dartmouth College's efforts around online learning and digital innovation for teaching and learning. He is a well-known conference speaker and consultant in the area of…

General education is at the forefront of the challenges facing faculty and administrators as they develop initiatives to address the nationwide trend focused on college completion programs. Attempts to trim core requirements and shift courses to online environments could be one answer for providing greater course access, for improving enrollments,…

Besides the shift in community college funding from the state to the student, a number of other innovations and trends have emerged with respect to community college finances. This chapter explores some of these developments, including performance-based funding, changes in student and institutional eligibility for financial aid, changes in local…

This paper is concerned with how research ethics is evolving along with emerging online research methods and settings. In particular, it focuses on ethics issues implied in a hypothetical virtual ethnography study aiming to gain insights on participants' experience in an emergent context of networked learning, namely a MOOC--Massive Online Open…

Despite societal imperatives for equity--whether espoused by nation states or transnational agencies like UNESCO--current models of higher education are unequivocally failing to provide universal access. This paper seeks to explore the (cyber)spaces (un)occupied by higher education, specifically in the area of curriculum studies, arguing that the…

Assessment is an integral part of the learning process. The traditional practice of assessment has changed to meet the need of the contemporary society. In this paper assessment strategies used in Open and Distance Education are discussed and constructive suggestions are given to meet the challenges of assessment. Recently we experience a paradigm…

Over a period of three years a number of International and African based institutions collaborated to design and create a set of Open Educational Resources (OERs) to support school based teacher education as part of the TESSA project. Writing of the materials drew on case studies, experiences and existing resources from across the region using a…

Cathy Sandeen is Vice President for Education Attainment and Innovation at American Council on Education, the nation's largest organization providing leadership and advocacy for all sectors of higher education. Within this role she develops and articulates ACE's attainment agenda and currently oversees a large research project on Massive Open…

The mission of Thompson Rivers University Open Learning (TRU-OL) can be understood in terms of three entities: the student, the faculty member and the curriculum content. Their conjuncture--when a TRU-OL student works with TRU-OL courseware and is supported by a TRU-OL faculty member--is where learning, assessment and, ultimately, credentialing…

Forget basketball and March Madness. Aside from always pressing financial issues, it is "MOOC madness" that has emerged as the topic "du jour" at a growing number of American colleges and universities. Indeed, in boardrooms all across the country, people are grappling with what the advent of MOOCs--massive open online courses--means to their…

Because MOOCs bring big data to the forefront, they confront learning science with technology challenges. We describe an agenda for developing technology that enables MOOC analytics. Such an agenda needs to efficiently address the detailed, low level, high volume nature of MOOC data. It also needs to help exploit the data's capacity to reveal, in…

A number of visual models have been proposed to help explain the interplay and interactions between specified components of higher education systems at different levels and to take account of emerging trends towards open education systems. At sector and institutional levels the notion of an iron triangle has been posited, linking firstly access,…