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MOOCs, took heart from this.

What exactly can the administration do to hasten technological innovation besides hosting datapaloozas? The fact sheet points to two proposals: one that requires money, and one that doesn’t. A “First in the World” fund of $260 million, presumably requiring congressional approval, would “test and evaluate innovative approaches to higher education that yield dramatically better outcomes.” Education officials liken this to a $650 million “Investing in Innovation” fund created under the 2009 stimulus law that has been used as seed money for experiments in K-12 education.

And the Education Department could cut regulatory barriers to innovation, whatever those might be. Education officials said Friday that they plan to solicit ideas from colleges on what government rules are hindering innovation. Many educators might say that red tape gets in the way of experiments in distance learning and degree programs not organized around the traditional credit hour.

The fact sheet asserts: “The Department will use its authority to issue regulatory waivers for ‘experimental sites’ that promote high-quality, low-cost innovations in higher education, such as making it possible for students to get financial aid based on how much they learn, rather than the amount of time they spend in class.”

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Massively Online And Offline Too: How MOOCs Will Evolve In The Physical World
Giovanni Rodriguez – Forbes

I was at the airport about this time last Sunday, when I overheard a conversation that’s becoming quite commonplace. One person was explaining to another what a MOOC was, but he couldn’t remember what the letters stood for. As someone who regards himself as an amateur, ad-hoc, in-the-moment teacher, I felt compelled to help him out: “Massive. Open. Online. Course.” He thanked me. He had been struggling to remember the “open” part of the MOOC message. And, even more interesting, he had been struggling to remember the word “course.”

Over the past few months, more and more clients and partners have been coming to me to deconstruct not just the acronym but also the attributes of MOOCs. So often in fact that I have decided to write a short series on the subject. There are many things to say about both the true impact and hype about MOOCs in the larger narrative that’s emerging about disruption in education. But from where I sit, what’s most important to note about MOOCs in 2013 is something that the acronym does not yet capture: the massive disruption we’re seeing in education will be online and offline, too.

Experience

There are at least three reasons for this. And each of these reasons deserves at least one post, but I’ll be super brief here. The first is that the online experience of MOOCs will almost certainly evolve in a way that teachers, students, and staff will look to find ways to meet with one another. This will either happen by design (by intent and with care) or it will happen organically. Almost certainly, the producers of MOOCs will look to do this with some sense of design, while leveraging the organic power of networks to grow by themselves. And if you have been following the evolution of MOOCs, you already know that the online experience is still a work in progress. My business colleague, Chris Bennett — a behavior designer and gamification expert — and I recently spoke about this: many are stuck in the old paradigm of delivering education to the consumer, rather than leveraging the greatest assets of the new medium (co-creation, crowdsourcing, collaboration). By redesigning the online experience to become more interactive, innovators in the MOOC world will see the possibilities for offline experience.

Inventory

Another reason for thinking about physical space: while the world ponders the impact that the costs of higher education will have on schools that are struggling to compete, the inventory of quality physical space that becomes available will appeal to organizations that need it. A couple of years ago, I had the privilege of serving as an advisor to a White House initiative that traveled the country meeting with leaders in large spaces in a network of state and community colleges. As a former theater producer, I was impressed with the availability and quality of these spaces. In theater — and other kinds of shared, quasi-spiritual, transformative experience — physical space is everything. Innovators in the MOOC world will get wise — if they haven’t already — to the existence of networks of spaces (there are many different networks, as I will show in a later

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