By Janet Wagner. This is the first post of a three-part series covering recent trends and developments in education technology.
At the time of this writing, there are 197 APIs listed in the Education Category of the ProgrammableWeb API Directory. A few of the leading APIs in this category include Khan Academy, Edmodo and Schoology.
There have been a lot of exciting and ground-breaking developments in education technology in recent years. Some of these recent and growing trends include:

• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• Learning Management and Learning Content Management Systems (LMS and LCMS)
• Education Marketplaces
• Adaptive Learning
• Integration with Legacy Systems

This first post of the three-part series includes information about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). More...

By Leslie Bary, Department of Modern Languages, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I teach Latin American literature and culture in a public research university that, having lost half its state funding over the past five years, has moved at near warp speed to an entrepreneurial model. So as to become more current on pedogogical and policy issues affecting us and other institutions in similar situations, this summer I joined a Coursera MOOC and a Facebook group where faculty from around the country discuss online teaching. 
In 2008, the year the markets crashed, the Gates Foundation announced a new focus on recasting postsecondary education as a credentialing process. Gates and other private foundations dedicated to the educational “reform” movement donated generously to news organizations covering higher education. The opinion pages of newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal advanced the foundation agenda, touting the advantages of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. More...

By Li Yuan and Stephen Powell. This report sets out to help decision makers in higher education institutions gain a better understanding of the phenomenon of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and trends towards greater openness in higher education and to think about the implications for their institutions. The phenomena of MOOCs are described, placing them in the wider context of open education, online learning and the changes that are currently taking place in higher education at a time of globalisation of education and constrained budgets. The report is written from a UK higher education perspective, but is largely informed by the developments in MOOCs from the USA and Canada. A literature review was undertaken focussing on the extensive reporting of MOOCs through blogs, press releases as well as openly available reports. This identified current debates about new course provision, the impact of changes in funding and the implications for greater openness in higher education. The theory of disruptive innovation is used to help form the questions of policy and strategy that higher education institutions need to address.
Link: MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education (pdf)
Link: MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education (MS Word docx)

By Robert Talbert. In the last post, I said I might be taking a couple of weeks off, and I ended up taking three. Well, the week before classes start is basically a blackout period during which nothing gets done except course preps, so that’s why. Yes, it all starts back up again here this week. This semester is going to be fuller than usual for a lot of reasons, three primary: First, I’m up for contract renewal in January, meaning that I am approaching the “midterm exam” at the halfway point toward tenure, which requires the usual aggregation of evidence demonstrating that I’m making satisfactory progress. Second, I’m teaching my first upper-level course since arriving at GVSU, one section of our Modern Algebra course, which I have not taught in a few years and I am anxious to get into it. I’m also trying out a new platform for classroom response systems in that course and I will tell you all about it later. Third, and biggest by far, I’m rolling out an inverted classroom version of Calculus 1. More...

By Adeline Koh. In my efforts to brush up on my coding knowledge this summer, I’ve been exploring a number of online courses, including CodeAcademy, Udacity and the Programming Historian. My latest foray into code has been with a new company called Codagogy, an offshoot of Web Start Women. Web Start Women is an organization that aims to encourage more women to become web developers and programmers. Codagogy is the company’s attempt to bring their classes to a virtual audience. More...

By Lincoln Mullen. About a month ago, I came to the sad realization that my six-year-old white plastic MacBook was not going to see me to the end of my dissertation. Among the more serious of its ailments, its hard disk was about to fail, and doing any task took at least thirty seconds of waiting. (Going through the metal detector at an archives last summer, one of the security guards said, “I remember you; you’re the guy with the old laptop.”) Fortunately the funds for a replacement were at hand, and I needed to decide which computer to buy. There were two considerations. First, Macs of all varieties are expensive. If my budget were unlimited I’d buy one of the new Mac Pros with three Cinema displays, and compute in style. More...

By Brian Croxall. I’ll be honest: there’s not much I like more than a good software update. When I get a pop-up telling me that there’s a new version available, I tend to click “Install and restart” faster than our new puppy hops onto the table when my back is turned. My general feeling is that new versions of things I like will be even more likely to be likable. And for the most part, I tend to be right. But there’s an exception. I’ve been a huge fan of the screenshot tool Skitch ever since Jason reviewed it in September of 2009. More...

By Amy Cavender. With smartphone ownership becoming increasingly common (according to a study released earlier this summer, 56% of all adults in the U.S. own a smartphone; among mobile phone owners, that figure climbs to 61%), it’s no great surprise that many of us are now regularly using a smartphone as part of our workflow. Each smartphone platform has a dizzying array of applications available, but has stock applications for the functions most people use most frequently (email, calendar, camera). If the stock applications fit the way you work, great. More...

By Heather M. Whitney. As unideal as eating lunch at your keyboard is, it happens. Course and meeting schedules can be unforgiving. Before the semester starts, it can be a good idea to stock your office with food that makes in-office lunch take less thought. This semester, I’ll be lucky to have fifteen minutes for lunch most days, so I have been investigating what to get. With the help of the always spot-on Alissa Wilkinson (whose work you should check out, including her new project The Glass List) I have compiled some options from Amazon — ideal since they can be delivered straight to my office. More...

By Anastasia Salter. Many of us at ProfHacker rely on WordPress. I use it for everything from managing my academic web presence to hosting online course materials and communities. This means I have a lot of out-of-date sites that serve their purpose for one semester and live on only as archives. Ever since WordPress 3.6 came out (ok, and for a year before that) I’ve been planning on taking a day to update all these installations and manage my server. Last week, I opened my email to find a message from my hosting provider entitled “WordPress Attack.” I checked my website and realized the scripts had been shut down entirely. Thankfully, it was before the semester started. More...