Five Coursera courses get approved by the American Council on Education

Online learning goes official as five Coursera courses get approved by the American Council on Education - The Next Web: "In other words, students who complete select courses on Coursera’s online platform will be able to potentially apply their credit toward a college degree. The word “potentially” is in there because the company can’t guarantee that each college will approve the credit. That being said, more than 2,000 colleges and universities consider ACE CREDIT recommendations in determining the applicability to their course and degree programs, according to Coursera."

For the Internet-Deprived, McDonald's Is Study Hall - WSJ.com: " The Federal Communications Commission assesses a fee averaging $2.50 per household a month on phone bills to pay $4.5 billion a year for building broadband in rural areas and more than $2 billion a year to pay for better connectivity in schools and libraries. The commission says it can make broadband available to all Americans by spending $45 billion over 10 years. Some are wary of deeper government intervention, arguing that many telecommunications companies are already fast expanding broadband access on their own. "Subsidies should really be targeted narrowly to those that need them," said Randolph May, president of the Free State Foundation, a think tank that advocates for lighter telecom regulation. "That's historically not the way we've done it in communications.""

Competence, Excellence, and Innovation in Higher Education | Rightly Understood | Big Think: " . . . So I’ve gotten several emails this morning asking me what I think about this article by Paul J. LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University. It’s a plea for accrediting agencies to take seriously competency-based, as opposed to credit-based, higher education. Southern New Hampshire and its offshoot—the College for America—claim to be riding on “the new wave of innovation” that allows college degrees to be offered at very low prices. This “new innovation” will often be delivered by for-profit institutions, which will have the right incentive to get you the product you want most efficiently. The president claims that historians “will likely point to online learning as the disruptive technology platform that radically changed higher education, which had remained largely unchanged since the cathedral schools of medieval Europe -- football, beer pong and food courts notwithstanding.” Anyone who could take that claim seriously knows nearly nothing about what historians have said about higher education so far. . . . "

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