By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The University and Student Learning: A System in Conflict?
Janet Adkins, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, 2017/02/01
According to this article, the globalization of the education system "creates tepid universities all doing the same thing and producing similar results." This results from the primacy of the market-driven economic model at the core of globalization, which eliminates specialization and favours standardization and commodification. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Inspirational teaching in higher education: What does it look, sound and feel like?
James G. Derounian, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching, Learning, 2017/02/01
In a paper tht could have used a good edit James G. Derounian identifies factors associated with inspirational teaching in the literature and then validates the findings through a study of actual practice. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top Fears Shutting the Door on Open Education
A.J. O'Connell, Campus Technology, 2017/02/01

Some people say fear is the reason professors don't want to open up classrooms. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Loving It
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2017/02/01
Just a day or so after authoring a good article Alex Usher comes out with this piece defending the agreement made between McDonald's and Colleges Ontario to recognize part of the corporation's training program as equivalent to college credit. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. European MOOC Platform Expands to 5 U.S. Universities
Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology, 2017/02/15

I can think of all sorts of policical questions that might be asked in the U.S. following this announcement (especially if the British import succeeds where the US-based alternatives failed). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. How Google Chromebooks conquered schools
Anick Jesdanum, Associated Press, 2017/02/15
This is an interesting statistic: "Chromebook's share of the U.S. education market was 49 percent last year, up from 40 percent in 2015 and 9 percent in 2013, according to IDC figures released this week." Who would have thought it. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ellucian Stops Support for Brainstorm, its CBE platform
Phil Hill, e-Literate, 2017/02/15

"Winter is here," writes Phil Hill as Ellucian ends support for Brainstorm, the competency-based education platform it acquired two years ago. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. We Are Not Agreed
noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Downes), Half an Hour, 2017/02/15

A few days ago University Ventures authored a piece in response to a post from the New America Foundation comparing Republicans who defend for-profit colleges to climate change deniers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. A Growing (But Controversial) Idea in Open-Access Textbooks: Let Students Help Write Them
Ellen Wexler, EdSurge, 2017/02/09
I've promoted the idea of having students author learning resources since forever, but not surprisingly the idea hasn't caught on. It won't catch on after this article either but each voice in support is a tiny step forward. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. If content is king, why are OER still uncrowned? A developing world perspective’
Asha Kanwar, Balasubramanian Kodhandaraman, Abdurrahman Umar, Pan-Commonwealth Forum, 2017/02/09
This is a conference presentation from 2010 which was listed in the OER Knowledge Cloud today (10 page PDF). So it's a bit dated but it's well written and I felt it was a pretty good description of some fundamental trends and issues in open educational resources. More...