Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Michael Feldstein. This is another follow-up to the comments thread on my recent LMS rant. As usual, Kate Bowles has insightful and empathetic comments:
…From my experience inside two RFPs, I think faculty can often seem like pretty raucous bus passengers (especially at vendor demo time) but in reality the bus is driven by whoever’s managing the RFP, to a managed timetable, and it’s pretty tightly regulated. These constraints are really poorly understood and lead to exactly the predictable and conservative outcomes you observe. Nothing about the process favours rethinking what we do. More...

By Michael Feldstein. As I was perusing David Kernohan’s notes on Larry Lessig’s keynote at the OpenEd conference, one statement leapt out at me:
Could the department of labour require that new education content commissioned ($100m) be CC-BY? There was a clause (124) that suggested that the government should check that no commercial content should exist in these spaces. Was argued down. But we were “Not important” enough to be defeated. More...

By Phil Hill. Yesterday at the WCET14 conference in Portland I had the opportunity along with Pat James to moderate a student panel.[1] I have been trying to encourage conference organizers to include more opportunities to let students speak for themselves – becoming real people with real stories rather than nameless aggregations of assumptions. More...

By Audrey Watters. The non-profit ECMC Group is buying 56 Corinthian College campuses and will reportedly keep the WyoTech and Everest campuses (and brands) intact. The organization, which services student loans – do not let that “non-profit” label fool you that its some sort of noble organization here – will pay $24 million for the campuses. Great insight and great questions from “Dean Dad.”
Pluralsight has paid $75 million for Smarterer, a company that offers multiple choice quizzes to assess employees’ skills. But there is no ed-tech bubble. More...

By Audrey Watters. Here are the transcript and slides from the talk I gave this morning at OpenCon 2014. I was a little nervous as to how well this would be received -- nothing like challenging the meaning of a word that makes up the title of the conference. More...

By Audrey Watters. Here are the notes and the slides from what is (I hope) my last talk of 2014. I gave this this evening to University of Mary Washington, and then turned around and presented it again (online) to Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt's class EC&I 831.
This is (I think) the last public talk I will give this year. It has been the most difficult one to prepare. More...