Dear Commons Colleagues,

I had quite a busy day yesterday at the Sloan-C Conference on Online Learning.  It started with a plenary session by Cable Green, Director of Global Learning for the Creative Commons.  Cable is responsible for setting Creative Commons’ strategic direction and priorities to build on the global Open Educational Resources (OER) movement that will enable robust and vibrant practices and policies for free and open sharing of learning assets.  His talk centered on affordable computing, open licensing, open access journals and open educational resources and specifically the need to educate policy makers about the obviousness of open policy.

I was a member of two panels.  The first was Students at Risk: The Shifting Roles of Public Higher Education and For-Profit Colleges and Universities.  The theme of this panel centered on the debate about the success of American colleges and universities in meeting the needs of minority, low-income and “non-traditional” students seeking higher education opportunities. This panel specifically examined the role of public higher education vis-à-vis for-profit colleges and universities in serving these students

The second, Because We Can: The Era of Big Data examined that because of recent advancements in computing power, federation techniques and analytics tools, institutional research is being transformed from a hypothesis based to a data mining paradigm. This panel specifically focused on some of the emerging trends in analytics and how they are impacting education at numerous levels. The aim was to provide participants with perspectives on how contemporary and emerging trends can be used to inform practice, including multi-institutional research initiatives.

All was very enjoyable!

Tony