By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Open Research Agenda
OERhub, 2016/09/26
Passing this along: "The Commonwealth of Learning (CoL) is conducting a global survey of OER ahead of the 2nd World OER Congress....You can find out more and take the survey at http://rcoer.col.org/surveys.html. If you’re feeling in a mood to contribute to a survey, please also consider sharing some thoughts on our open research consultation at http://tinyurl.com/2016ora.". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. What Do Forbes, NYT, And Sotheby’s Have In Common? They Make Online Courses
Anuar Lequerica, Class Central, 2016/09/26
There's virtually no content in this article (would it be too much to do an interview or get a point of view?) but the author points to an important trend. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Education in the Age of the MOOC
Noam Ebner, Social Science Research Network, 2016/09/26

Good paper (47 page PDF) on the development and delivery of a MOOC on negotiation and conflict resolution. It's focused around four major issues:

1. Can we provide the same quality of negotiation education in a MOOC format
2. Can the signature pedagogy of the negotiation field, the experiential learning model, be implemented in a MOOC?
3. Can we provide students in a MOOC the same experience that has made negotiation courses successful?
4. What implications might this have for negotiation and dispute resolution education. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Zero Correlation Between Evaluations and Learning
Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, 2016/09/22

There are several things to say about this report. First, the headline is wildly overstated. 'Not finding' a correlation is very different from 'finding no correlation'. Second, it's a metastudy. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Q&A with CNI’s Clifford Lynch: Time to re-think the institutional repository?
Richard Poynder, Open, Shut?, 2016/09/22

In this long (25 page PDF) article and interview with Clifford Lynch, Riochard Poynder looks at the state of affairs of open journal repositories (for example, the Open Archives Initiative Protocols for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)) and does not appear hopeful. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. MOOCs at Five
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2016/09/22
One of the biggest disappointments I had with the commercialization of the MOOC through the Stanford and MIT products was the idea that the MOOC would have to be "sustainable" through some user pay mechanism. In 2009 the average tuition was around $4500; this accounted for between 30-50% of the total cost of an education. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Doctoral dissertation successfully defended
Hans Põldoja, hanspoldoja.net, 2016/09/27
Worth a look (212 page PDF). "The underlying concept of the study is the open education ecosystem....Firstly, to clarify the design challenges related to the open education ecosystem, this study summarizes a set of design challenges presented in design case studies. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lights out for shomi symptomatic of streaming video’s larger profitability problem
Terry Dawes, CanTech Letter, 2016/09/27
Shomi foundered on the same shoal that afflicted Netflix - the demands for unsustainable revenues from content producers. There's no incentive for providers to offer Shomi a good rate when they'll ultimately roll out their own service and try to grab all the profits. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Timeline
Stephen Downes, Sept 27, 2016, Internal Presentation, Ottawa

This is a very brisk autobiography from my early childhood through to today. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. All ITT Campuses Will Close
Inside Higfher Ed, 2016/09/13

The collapse of ITT Technical Institutes' chain of schools in the United States should counsel as warning about the perils of privatizing education. "U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, at the time of the Education Department action, compared ITT to the Corinthian chain, which collapsed amid federal and state scrutiny. 'For too long, ITT Tech and its executives have gotten rich off taxpayers while misleading and taking advantage of their students with Corinthian-style deceptive and abusive practices.'" Business as usual. The closure involves 130 campuses, 40,000 students and 8,000 employees. More...