Coursera and edX Hire New Executives: What about online experience?
Phil Hill, e-Literate, March 25, 2014

As Phil Hill writes, there have been some leadership changes at the top of some online course providers. " First, Coursera announced they had hired Richard Levin, former president of Yale University, to be the company’s new CEO.... On the same day, coincidentally, edX announced they had hired Wendy Cebula as the company’s new president and chief operating officer." Hill comments that none of the eexecutives as any real experience in online learning. "Stanford, MIT, and Yale are all excellent schools, but just 3.6%, 0.2% and 0.1% of their students take any courses online, according to 2012 IPEDS data." But that is not, in my view, why these people were hired. They were hired for their connections, for their networks. They were hired to help pry loose more VC funding, more foundation funding, more government funding. The product is incidental.

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The MOOC of One
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, March 25, 2014

This is a first lightly edited vrsion of the transcript of my talk in Valencia a few days ago. It describes the development of the MOOC and  want to leads into a discussion of what will follow, what the next generation technology will be to follow after the MOOC. But more, it challenges readers to rethink some of their perceptions about what it is to teach, what it is that an education is supposed to provide. We have this intuitive idea that we think we understand when we begin to educate someone, we're going to make somebody a doctor, but what does that mean? I'm not sure we even know, and a major part of the reason we developed the MOOC is to challenge our thinking around some of these ideas.

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LAK14 Tuesday am (3): Machine learning workshop
Doug Clow, Doug Clow's Imaginatively-Titled Blog, March 25, 2014

Session from the 2014 offering of Learning and Analytic Knowledge (LAK), which kicks off with George Siemens offering and overview and current state of the research. Doug Clow summarizes: "as a research community we’re young. How do we increase the sophistication of the analysis we’re doing? The prevalence of techniques like SNA, discourse analysis, recommenders. Very healthy for a new community. To mature, make a distinct mark and impact, need to begin to advance discipline-specific approaches." We also hear from Dragan Gasevic on learning analytics literature analysis, Carolyn Rosé on machine learning, Annika Wolff and Zdenek Zdrahal on predictive modeling. Good long detailed summaries.

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Episode 59: It’s a Traaaaaaaappppp!
Tim Owens, Andy Rush, DTLT, March 25, 2014

In you want a fun listen, the headline says it all: "Pearson announced a grab for the LMS market today by publicizing an 'open free LMS' integrated in Google Apps for Education as a loss-leader to their content products that they sell. It’s an interesting announcement because it targets not just Blackboard but also Moodle in that they’re offering it as hosted, managed, and supported."

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