By Azer Bestavros
Badges for military skills
It can be difficult for veterans to explain the skills and training they received in the military to potential employers. A new website, BadgesforVets.org, attempts to bridge that gap by giving veterans digital “badges” that recognize their skills.
MOOCs for Liberal Arts Education
Inside Higher Education published an article that shows the open, exploratory way that liberal arts colleges and faculty are approaching MOOCs.
Online Learning Studies Review
The Department of Education published a "Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies", entitled Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning.
Sociology’s perspective on MOOCs
Here is the first in a series of articles that the NYTimes is publishing on MOOCs. It features a Sociology professor at Princeton, who provides the professor’s sense of the experience and his assessment of where this experiment is.
Noteworthy
This forum is to post tidbits about noteworthy news, articles, events, studies, etc. You can do so by adding comments to the forum.
Chat Room
This is a forum to provide feedback, post questions, or engage in discussions that do not readily fit in any of the other forums. You can do so by adding comments to the forum.
Consortium to offer online course credit
A consortium of "top-tier universities" are banding together to offer credit-bearing fully online courses through the "Semester On Line" platform by 2U. The initial set of universities (expected to be expanded by a handful more before the consortium is up and running by Fall 2013) include: Duke, Emory, Washington U, Brandeis U, Northwestern U, U North Carolina at Chapel Hill, U Notre Dame, U Rochester, Vanderbilt U, and Wake Forest U. Additional details are provided in this article posted on Inside Higher Ed web site, an article in the Chronical of Higher Education, and an article in the NYT.
Gates Foundation promotes MOOCs
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 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 EdX. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding that effort as part of $3 million in new, wide-reaching MOOC-related grants.
MOOCs evaluated for college credit
CHE published an article entitled: American Council on Education May Recommend Some Coursera Offerings for College Credit
On aggregating content
The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article about yet another Dot-Com aiming to "drive education costs to zero". The approach relies on custom aggregation of content from multiple sources towards a particular concentration.
