14-year-old Scholar Writes (and Rights) History

This! The Teen Who Exposed a Professor's Myth is a fascinating read and brings up all sorts of uncomfortable issues for traditional academics. But for new millennial academics, it's exhilarating! (Big thanks to Stephen Downes, who finds the best stuff out there and delivers it through the OLDaily!)

Now, Rebecca says she might continue along this same path, “exploring other areas where digitized newspaper evidence might supply new historical insights.” She thinks there “might still be some low-hanging fruit for researchers.”

NOOCs are here!

Ever gotten excited and registered for a MOOC only to lose interest or get distracted and never complete it? Happens to me ... from time to time. But I don't feel badly about it, I just have very focused needs for some of the MOOCs that I find interesting. I don't NEED to complete every MOOC I start, but it would be great if the content I'm after were available in less comprehensive, exhaustive contexts. NOOCs to the rescue (opens in new window)!

Nano Open Online Courses are going to special relevance in training/performance support but have plenty of applications in higher education too. I'm thinking "Learning Objects" for more comprehensive, academic course work.

I'll keep you posted on any that I find especially helpful!

"Explore the Beyond" (MOOC! Register now!)

From the email I received from Dr. Myk Garn:

This online collaboration is open to anyone who attends, works in or works with higher education in the United States. The “Explore the Beyond” online collaboration will use crowd-sourcing and future scenarios developed in the “Invent the Beyond” course (delivered Sept-Nov 2014) to explore and describe the factors critical to the success of student, faculty and postsecondary institutions in 2030. Through successive interactive and discursive sessions participants will identify and quantify the critical success factors and potential new business models in play for higher education stakeholders.
The “Explore the Beyond” sessions will see participants establishing and exploring how three stakeholder groups – students, faculty and institutions – would fare, what factors would be critical to the success of those communities, in the previously identified scenarios. The final session will recap and consolidate the learnings and implications of the complete process to Invent the Beyond resulting in a set of critical success factors and a framework for informing institutions and individuals as they build their future plans.

PLEASE DISTRIBUTE this invitation widely to students, faculty, administrators and other higher education stakeholders! 

The BIGGER the Crowd—the SMARTER the Future!

Are you going to help engineer our future? REGISTER HERE! It starts January 26th!

Competency Based Hiring

From Stephen Downes at the OLDaily:

Get ready for this. The days of the transcript (if it was used at all) as a basis for hiring is about to change. Competencies, rather than transcripts or credentials, will become the hiring standard of the future (or - I should add - something like competencies (for a variety of reasons)). Stacey Clawson, writing for the Gates Foundation, writes, "Competency-based programs offer the potential to go beyond a limited view of higher education, giving students the opportunity to develop and practice the skills needed for a meaningful career, life, and citizenship." We can see the writing on the wall: "An easy-to-adopt, integrated infrastructure designed for institutions that serve the new student majority - older, part-time, lower income, and distance learners - is needed to help scale competency-based programs." She is thinking of the institutions, but my focus is on learners and employers. How will they access their competency definitions? How will these be presented in hiring decisions? An institutional infrastructure served or hosted by providers will be insufficient. I'm not sure the Gates Foundation understands this, though.

HERE's the scoop. No one said it was going to happen overnight. But it is the wave of the future nonetheless. Let's wave back!