By Devon Haynie. Beware of accreditation mills, which provide a false sense of legitimacy. Back when Lauren Marrett wanted to be an art major, she didn't care much about whether her school was accredited or by whom. It was the quality of her art portfolio that mattered, she thought, not the reputation of her college. She enrolled in a for-profit online college lacking regional accreditation. But six months into her schooling, she started to get nervous about how employers would view her school. More...

By Geoff Maslen. Australia's first open and free online learning platform has achieved 100,000 enrolments, with 53,000 students since it was launched just seven months ago. An offshoot of Open Universities Australia, Open2Study (https://www.open2study.com/) has lured more students to its courses than any university in the country, drawing them from more than 180 nations.
In April, Open2Study began offering 10 free subjects, each taking four weeks to complete. It now has 32 courses available with 60 per cent of students enrolling from a mix of overseas countries, the top five being the US, India, Britain, Spain and Canada. The Open2Study platform is also Australia's first free online education provider and, like its parent OUA, offers anyone anywhere the chance to undertake online tertiary and professional learning through a range of subjects ''designed for everyday people''.
Principles of project management; food, nutrition & your health; writing for the web; user experience for the web; and strategic management currently attract the most students. Lecturers from several universities and TAFE institutions provide the instruction. More...

By Tracy Sherlock. Imagine studying artificial intelligence for robotics with a Stanford University instructor or discussing the moralities of everyday life with a Yale University professor.  Not only can anyone enrol in classes like these, but they are offered free of cost and on the Internet. They’re called MOOCs: massive online open classes, and they’re shaking up the world of post-secondary education. When the University of British Columbia offered its first MOOC this May, 130,000 people from around the world signed up. While only 8,000 people completed the four-week game theory class, that’s still an impressive number by any university class standard. MOOCs are mostly video-based that teach complex subjects and attract tens of thousands of people who interact during the course, solving problems and discussing issues. Individuals who complete the course don’t typically gain a traditional university credit but they usually receive a certificate of completion. More...

By Robinson Meyer. Even non-profits need to eat. It’s been about a year and a half since massive open online courses (MOOCs) achieved notoriety, and the industry now has three giants: Coursera, Udacity, and EdX. Coursera and Udacity are West Coast-run, Stanford-spawned, for-profit standard-style startups.
EdX is different: It launched as an East Coast, non-profit collaboration between Harvard and MIT.
EdX, then, is more of a mystery. As a non-profit, it’s not concerned with, well, profit. But it is concerned with its own survival, so, this month, it debuted a new way of making money.
Until this fall, EdX had mimicked a tack Udacity and Coursera have taken: A “business-to-consumer” approach, in which students pay the course provider to verify their identity before they take a class on EdX.org, a kind of certification of achievement. More...

Nouvelles façons d’apprendre, nouveaux usages numériques, nouvelle économie pour la formation
Le secteur de la formation est confronté aujourd'hui à de sérieux défis de différentes natures.
Parmi ces défis, les nouveaux usages des technologies qui ont fait émerger de nouvelles façons d'apprendre dans la vie et au travail. Les tutoriels vidéo sont devenus indispensables dans la vie. Quel point de tricot n'a pas son tuto-vidéo ? Au travail aussi, nous voulons utiliser le savoir avec la même facilité, d'un clic. Autour de la formation proprement dite, de multiples propositions et ressources numériques (vidéos, discussions, débats, textes...) viennent l'enrichir jusqu'à la transformer.
Les avancées de la science, notre meilleure connaissance du cerveau et de son fonctionnement interrogent aussi le processus d'apprentissage et les nouveaux environnements numériques.  
Quelles sont ces avancées scientifiques ? Comment les nouvelles technologies s'en imprègnent ou pas ? Comment les formateurs peuvent-ils en tirer parti ?
Autre défi de taille, la nouvelle économie qui balaie tout sur son passage. Economie du flux, économie collaboratif. D'où notre intérêt pour les Mooc et l'engouement mondial qu'ils suscitent. Comment la formation professionnelle en France peut-elle s’approprier ces nouvelles pratiques ? Peut-on mettre gratuitement en ligne nos ressources de formation ? Comment former aujourd'hui ? Comment exprimer nos vigilances et nos exigences de pédagogue ?
Le FFFOD débattra de ces questions à CAEN, à l’Ecole de Management de Normandie, les 6, 7 et 8 novembre 2013, lors de ses 11es Rencontres. La Région Basse-Normandie soutient la manifestation avec Communotic, le centre de ressources de la formation multimodale en Basse-Normandie.
Le programme sera diffusé début septembre avec le lancement des inscriptions.
Voir aussi sur le blog 8e rencontres du FFFOD.

Ces rencontres porteront sur les nouvelles façons d'apprendre, les nouveaux usages et modèles économiques de la formation.
Le programme : du 6 au 8 novembre 2013
Pour en savoir plus.