By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Inside the Shadowy, Totally Legal World of High-Priced College Consultants
Dana Goldstein, Jack Healy, New York Times, 2019/03/13
The tagline for this post says it all: "While lawbreaking in the sector is rare, the use of money to oil the gears of the American meritocracy is not." Fallout from the scandal has been considerable, and I won't even try to summarize it. But this article looks a little deeper into the real issue: that people buy their way into an educatioon system that confers status based on which school you went to (via the social network you have thereby managed to join). That's why, for example, Harvard’s well-off outnumber low-income students 23 to 1. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. FutureLearn’s Unlimited: One Price for the Entire Catalog
Dhawal Shah, Class Central, 2019/03/13
As reported in Class Central: "FutureLearn, the UK-based MOOC provider, just launched a new plan that lets learners pay a single price to access most of FutureLearn’s catalog. Unlimited costs $269 and gives users access to the catalog for a single year and does not automatically roll over." That's a bit cheaper than Lynda, but not much, and within the range of other bundled-course plans. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Learning 2019
Geoff Cain, Brainstorm in Progress, 2019/03/13
Geoff Cain notes, "From Open Learning Hub: “Open Learning ’19, a cMOOC about open learning now in its third iteration will begin on March 17th and run for three weeks. Week 1 will be preceded by a “pre-cMOOC” week for anyone who is new to connected learning.” Worth a look. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. OER Mainstreaming in Tonga
Ishan Sudeera Abeywardena, Philip Uys, Seilosehina Fifita, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2019/03/12
There's a lot of good stuff in this article. Though it's focused on Tonga, it contains resources useful for any organization thinking of implementing open educational resources on an institution-wide basis. The "OER for skills development project model" in particular will appeal to administrators looking for a focuse on outcomes or impact. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Should Universities and Colleges be in the Web Hosting Business?
Mark Bradley, Show Me the Data - A Blog About Higher Education Websites, 2019/03/12
If you've been wondering why I'm studying cloud hosting, this is why. The answer this article suggests to the question in its title is "no" as it offers up statistics on which major cloud hosting services are supporting how many institutional websites across six nations. Amazon Web Services is the clear leader with Google and Rackspace coming second and third (I', wondering which Canadian institution has GoDaddy's only contract). Note that this entire article is 'below the fold' on this website; you have to scroll past the self-promotion in order to actually find the article. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Introducing Firefox Send, Providing Free File Transfers while Keeping your Personal Information Private
Nick Nguyen, The Mozilla Blog, 2019/03/12
Firefox Send is a simple file-sharing application that mostly it just works. It uses the Web Cryptography JavaScript API with the AES-GCM algorithm for encryption; this is supported by most browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Edge) but not older and less secure browsers (Internet Explorer 11). Navigate to the Send web page, log in with a Firefox UserID, and upload a file. You'll be given a download link to share. The link expires after a preset number of downloads (up to 100)  or after after a certain time has elapsed (up to one week). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The HyperSpace Blog Is Live on… HyperSpace
HyperSpace, 2019/03/12
I've been keeping an eye on the HyperSpace project with some interest. In a nutshell, HyperSpace is a distributed publishing platform that uses it's own digital currency to promote and reward participation. The longer term roadmap, though, envisions a fully decentralized publishing economy. Today it took a major step in that direction. Here's the HyperSpace Blog on HyperSpace. You can join Hyperspace, create a post, and in addition to publishing on Hyperspace, the post will be published on the Inter-Planetary File System. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Massive Scandal Alleged in College Admissions
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, 2019/03/12
To be clear, this isn't about the rich buying their way into university admissions. As the Chronicle makes clear, this is already well-established and legal: " Applicants could go in through the "front door," applying through the normal process, or the "back door," through large donations to the university." The scheme in question here is called a "side door" scheme, where somewhat less rich (and nouveau-riche) take the more affordable (but less legal) way of buying their way through the admissions process via such means as (for example) "helping non-athletes gain the benefits of being admitted as athletes." The NY Times reports that 50 people were charged. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Global guidelines: Ethics in Learning Analytics
Sharon Slade, Alan Tait, ICDE, 2019/03/12
This document summarizes the considerations of an ICDE working group on learning analytics. For the most part it is a clearly-written and even-handed treatment of a number of difficult subjects, though it would appear to be relentlessly focused on the institutional perspective (not surprising given its intended audience of educational policy makers and regulators as well as middle and senior management in higher education institutions. The presumption throughout is that a global ethic in learning analytics is needed, can be known, and comprehends the issues in this document. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web.Facebook says the future is private messaging, not public posts
Mathew Ingram, Columbia Journalism Review, 2019/03/11
If you want to understand Facebook's pivot to a private messaging system, think of it as being like email, except that it's all on one centralized platform, and where the platform owners can mine the contents of the email more marketing purposes or whatever. Nothing would happen in public, of course, and targeted FaceMail(tm) advertising campaigns would take place completely under the radar. More...