Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday was a travel day.  I am attending the 18th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning in Orlando, Florida.  This year’s theme is:  At A Crossroads: Online Education in a Complex World.  Among the speakers will be:

Sebastian Trun, former research professor at Standford, he founded Udacity, a new online university, which offers university-level courses free of charge.  He is well-known for being a major catalyst for the MOOC movement when he took his Stanford graduate level class online in 2011, and 160,000 students signed up.

José L. Cruz, Vice President for Higher Education Policy and Practice at The Education Trust. José is the former vice president for student affairs of the University of Puerto Rico System (UPR), where he oversaw admissions, financial aid, and student-life programs.  He was one of the primary authors of the study, Subprime Opportunity:  The Unfulfilled Promise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities.

Arfon Smith, Director of Citizen Science at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and Technical Lead of the web-based citizen zcience platform Zooniverse.  The Zooniverse and the suite of projects it contains is produced, maintained and developed by the Citizen Science Alliance. The member institutions of the CSA work with many academic and other partners around the world to produce projects that use the efforts and ability of volunteers to help scientists and researchers deal with the flood of data that confronts them.

It should be a lot of fun.

Tony