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By Len Sherman. In 512 BC or thereabouts, the venerable Chinese general, Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War in which he proffered the following advice on military strategy:
The highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy’s plans…the next best is to attack the enemy’s army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.
Sun Tzu’s advice applies equally well in business, as disruptive new ventures are well advised not to initiate an all out war aimed at taking over incumbent market leaders’ core markets– their “walled cities.” Sebastian Thrun, the self-declared father of the modern movement to disrupt higher education with Massive Open Online Courses — aka MOOCs — has learned this lesson well.  And therein lies an instructive tale. More...

Seminar presentation delivered to United Nations Committee on Trade and Development, Geneva, Switzerland, by Google Hangout.
In this presentation for UNCTAD's Advisory Group on "Developing skills, knowledge and capacities through innovation: E-Learning, M-Learning, cloud-Learning" I outline major forms of open online learning, contrasting between formal and informal learning mechanisms, publishing and community-based production models, and forms of recognition and certification. The audio has a lot of echo (feedback from the other venue) - The transcript of the presntation is available here.

[Slides] [Audio]

Seminar presentation delivered to , Tecnologías de la Información y Modelos Alternativos, Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, Ajusco, México, vis Skype. 

In this presentation to  I outline major forms of open online learning, contrasting between formal and informal learning mechanisms, publishing and community-based production models, and forms of recognition and certification. English, with translation into Spanish. The audio quality is quite good, just skip past the first 2 minutes of Skype misbehaving.

[Slides] [Audio]

By Susan Adams. That’s what The New York Times suggested today, drawing on new research from the University of Pennsylvania. 
But as the Times also acknowledged, in some ways MOOCs (short for massive open online courses) show great promise. According to the research, conducted by Penn’s Graduate School of Education, only about half of the people who register for MOOCs even look at a single lecture, and an average of just 4% of enrollees complete the courses. 
In some classes, just 2% of students finish. The Penn research tracked 1 million students of 16 MOOCs offered by Penn professors through a for-profit company called Coursera. More...

By Andrea Courey. Break out of the stuffy classroom and forget those exorbitant tuition fees that make education the domain of the privileged. Can't quite decide if I should take the Sapienza University of Rome's Early Renaissance Architecture or a class with renowned quantum physicist Valerio Scarani of the National University of Singapore called Randomness, Chance and Free Will. Then there's Dr. Wendell Porter's class at the University of Florida about Sustainable Energy . . . so much choice, so little time. As a lifelong learner, I'm truly a kid in a candy store as I peruse the course offerings at coursera.org. More...

By Bonnie Stewart. My #mri13 keynote panel talk last week was on “the post-MOOC-hype landscape.” It was supposed to be about what I think we can do in the current “we have a lousy product” hype gulch before it all gears up again to bend the ear of NYT readers all over academia. And Silicon Valley.
The short version (see slide 4) is this: there are currently two solitudes in the MOOC conversation, and it’s not a cMOOC/xMOOC divide. One solitude – the mainstream media discourse – is essentially a unicorn, in the sense that its promises are fantasies of salvation and solutionism that have very little to do with the actual practice of higher education. The other – the practitioners’ discourse(s), broadly represented by the various interests around the table at #mri13 – is a Tower of Babel. Still, this solitude, loosely and cacophonously affiliated as it is, nonetheless leans towards discussing MOOCs in terms of learning. And in the wake of twenty-odd months of hype in which the dominant public narratives about higher ed have been all glorious revolution or ghastly spectre, I think it’s time to seize this (likely momentary) lull in unicorn sales and try to talk about MOOCs as learning. We need to make ourselves familiar with what the post-hype landscape of higher ed looks like, and address the issues and opportunities it’s left us with. In learning terms. On as many public platforms as we can. In stereo. More...