ID Verified Certificates of Achievement
Press Release, September 25, 2013

EdX is offering certifdicates with courses, tracking user identity in a manner very similar to Coursera (which reportedly made $1 million from the scheme this year). According to their website, "Using a series of photos of you and your ID, we are able to verify that you are the person completing your work in the course. When you complete and pass the course, your verified certificate provides a level of comfort to others who may want assurance about the authenticity of your edX coursework."

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MOOCs Need to Go Back to Their Roots
Michael Burnam-Fink, Slate, September 25, 2013

"They were supposed to be educational communities, not hypertextbooks," writes Michael Burnam-Fink. Needless to say, I am in broad agreement with this post (though I wouldn't characterize connectivism as "flaky"). "A pair of Canadian academics developed the MOOC in 2008 as a proof of concept of their connectivist theory of education. Drawing from neuroscience and computer networking, connectivism postulates that knowledge is distributed across human and nonhuman nodes in a network."

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Research review: “Effectiveness of Cognitive Tutor Algebra I at Scale”
John Watson, Keeping Pace, September 23, 2013

I'm not sure how much I trust a study by RAND Corporation researchers - mind you, I don't necessarily distrust it either. But it has to earn its credibility. And while (as John Watson notes) the result of this large-scale evaluation of a computer-based mathematical tutor reports positive results, "the caveats are non-trivial, and the time and expense required of this study show that it is simply not feasible to conduct this level of effort with all blended learning models, instructional approaches, or specific courseware or providers" (which of course means that, just like in medicine, only 'interventions' (their word) with well-funded backing will be evaluated, and hence, no approaches (my word) that are not well-funded will prove to be successful. So maybe (as in medicine) we should rethink how we approach this.

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JSON for Linking Data
JSON-LD, September 23, 2013

For the last decade standardization efforts have been based around XML. This is beginning to shift to JSON (JavaScroipt Object Notation, and in particular, JSON Linked Data (JSON-LD). "Linked Data empowers people that publish and use information on the Web. It is a way to create a network of standards-based, machine-readable data across Web sites.... JSON-LD is being developed by the W3C JSON-LD Community Group. It is in the final stages of standardization at W3C. Participation is open to the public. There is a JSON-LD Github repository. If you need immediate help, we have a #json-ld IRC support channel on freenode.net. There is also a JSON-LD mailing list."

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StudySoup Launches Online Marketplace for Digital Course Content
Press Releases, PRLog, September 23, 2013

From such small starts can large things grow. As Noozhawk reports, "The Santa Barbara-headquartered StudySoup strives to eliminate the frustrations of bulky course readers by allowing students and professors to annotate and highlight synced content in real-time online while also saving money that would have been spent on textbooks."

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