By Ry Rivard. While some observers say academe is already moving to a post-MOOC era or one dominated by MOOC-like offerings that aren't really massive open online courses, the MOOC itself has a new symbol of recognition. Oxford Dictionaries, published by Oxford University Press, has now added MOOC as an official word.
Definition: "a course of study made available over the Internet without charge to a very large number of people." Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Two University of Texas at Austin psychology professors will Thursday night take the stage for the fall semester’s first session of Introduction to Psychology. Their audience will consist of a production crew and their equipment. In their years of working together, the professors’ research has shown their students benefit from computer-based learning to the point where they don’t even need to be physically present in the classroom.
Just don’t call it a MOOC. The university styles the class as the world’s first synchronous massive online course, or SMOC (pronounced “smock”), where the professors broadcast their lectures live to the about 1,500 students enrolled. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Two months after San Jose State University announced it would put its partnership with the online course provider Udacity on "pause," university officials on Wednesday touted results from the summer cohort as “significantly better” and said the project will not be disrupted by a hiatus lasting through the fall semester. The partnership, known as SJSU Plus, was unveiled with great fanfare in January, with many politicians -- including California Governor Jerry Brown -- saying it showed the way for providing inexpensive college education for a mass audience. The project then skidded to a halt in July as the first three for-credit courses -- college algebra, elementary statistics and entry-level math -- posted pass rates between 23.8 and 50.5 percent. The university announced it would spend the fall semester evaluating the project and its results, then reopen enrollment for the 2014 spring semester. Read more...