MAIN THEMES: New technology offers unparalleled opportunities, changing learning and enabling us to inspire others to learn: creativity and engagement, global learning, modern problems: smart solutions, redefining formal learning, learning analytics, work and "life-wide" learning.
DEADLINES: There is a wide range of possibilities for submissions, please follow this link for more information.
ATTENDED BY: A broad range of learning professionals; those with an academic interest (working in schools), with a business interest focused on improving performance and building skills in private, public and not for profit organisations, with an interest in informal learning, those working to ensure access to learning for the marginalised and potentially excluded.
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New learning management system enhances functionality, user experience and ease-of-use; integration of WeComply courses to provide enhanced North American and Corporate content.
Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today announced further steps to deliver enhanced governance, risk and compliance solutions to organizations globally. The delivery of a new Learning Management System (LMS), Accelus Learning Manager and integration of WeComply, a leading provider of compliance e-learning, into its offerings will bring increased scalability, performance, capacity and language support to Thomson Reuters online educational courses. These enhancements build on a structured 18 months of execution by Thomson Reuters Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) business to continue to provide enhanced e-learning solutions to its customers. More...

By Garry Kranz. MOOCs haven’t yet hit the mainstream, but they could herald a shift in how employees acquire new skills. Recruiting company Aquent is using a new twist on online learning to help its clients hire next-generation Web developers. Faced with job requests from companies that it could not fill, the Boston-based specialized recruiter for ad agencies in 2012 launched a massive open online course, or MOOC, on skills related to HTML5, the latest version of the markup language that defines how Internet content gets structured. Ad agencies need Web developers well-versed in mobile technologies such as HTML5, yet many code writers seem to lack the necessary skills to compete for available jobs, said Alison Farmer, Aquent’s vice president of learning and development. 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 Tony Bates. Carey, T., & Trick, D. (2013). How Online Learning Affects Productivity, Cost and Quality in Higher Education: An Environmental Scan and Review of the Literature. Toronto: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario
Why this paper is important
In July, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario published the above report. This is a very important development for online learning in post-secondary education as it takes a very hard look at quality, cost and productivity and comes forward with recommendations to government. This is a paper that is likely to be read (and should be read) by legislators, state and government policy makers, university and college boards and senior university and college administrators.
I am also exploring through a series of blogs the issue of productivity and online learning, partly because of dissatisfaction with the current state of thinking about this issue, which became apparent working with this project.
For this reason, I am setting aside my hat as an Advisory Board member who commented on the penultimate draft, and and am here providing a full analytic review of the paper. To do this, I have had to reproduce key parts of the document, but I strongly recommend that the HEQCO document is read in full. Quotes from the actual paper are in italics, although I have edited and abbreviated in part. More...

C'est un projet qu'il est possible de qualifier de démesuré : une université américaine, qui se veut d'excellence, devrait voire le jour… Rien d'exceptionnel, sauf que cet établissement sera complètement dématérialisé. Et il compte bien entrer en compétition avec les universités de la prestigieuse Ivy League, parmi lesquelles figure Harvard, Princeton, et Yale !
Minerva, du nom de la déesse romaine de la fureur guerrière, mais également de la sagesse et de l'intelligence : tel est le nom évocateur de la toute nouvelle université américaine, qui devrait ouvrir ses portes à l'horizon 2015… Ou plutôt ses fenêtres ! Complètement dématérialisée, Minerva devrait en effet être la toute première université en ligne, sans campus, révèle le quotidien The Times. Le journal anglais va même plus loin en estimant que cette création "promet de révolutionner le système éducatif à l'échelle mondiale". Il précise également que Minerva devrait accueillir les 200 ou 300 meilleurs éléments dans un premier temps. Suite...

By Tamar Lewin. Next January, the Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a master’s degree in computer science through massive open online courses for a fraction of the on-campus cost, a first for an elite institution. If it even approaches its goal of drawing thousands of students, it could signal a change to the landscape of higher education. From their start two years ago, when a free artificial intelligence course from Stanford enrolled 170,000 students, free massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have drawn millions and yielded results like the perfect scores of Battushig, a 15-year-old Mongolian boy, in a tough electronics course offered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Read more...