Paul Lowe is one of a handful of people pioneering the use of webinars in education in the UK. As a course director at the London College of Communication, he placed webinars right at the heart of his online MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, and has seen them spread around the rest of the college.

"We realised that webinars were the perfect solution for people who wanted to study photography at a higher level but stay where they were living and working, and for whom the traditional to-and-fro emails of a typical distance-learning course lacked the immediacy they wanted."

Lectures, seminars and tutorials for the students on the course now all occur online in real time, while the students stay at homes or their office.

"It takes students and guest tutors a few minutes to get their heads round the idea before they are hooked," Lowe says. "Their shared interest in photography very quickly helps them develop a real sense that that they are part of a group exploring issues together, and the power of the collective experience of overcoming technical hitches just reinforces the bonds between them."

There may be worries as to how employers see such virtual courses; however, Paul Lowe believes that webinars also have a future at undergraduate level. "What's the point in getting everyone into campus for just one tutorial, when they can stay at home and attend online?"

It looks as though students will soon have another reason not to get out of bed.

Not a great deal to note here other than it is probably indicative of the long lead time on technology impact (assuming one equates webinars with video conferencing, at least at some level).

Well... they got this one pretty much right? It's just a VLE for the ears (or hard-wired to the brain?) rather than for the eyes? :-) And if they had imagined a way of wiring random people up outside the classroom, they'd have got OER as well!

Another barrier to open access and contestability is the automatic link between degree awarding powers and teaching. Over the past 50 years, we have created a regulatory system which says that teaching students and awarding degrees must be done by the same institution. And that is certainly one way of doing it, as represented by the institutions in this room. But it is not the only way. Quality standards have to focus on quality alone. They must not protect one way of delivering higher education at the expense of others.

Indeed the growth of higher education in England between 1850 and 1950 was based on a very different model. Degrees were awarded by the University of London for the South, and the original proposal was for Manchester to do the same for the North. New entities were able to set up as colleges teaching students for the external degrees of these institutions. That system had great merits. It meant that students at new institutions could obtain degrees or other qualifications from prestigious and well understood institutions. They did not have to set up a new degree to get public respect. It also provided a benchmark against which the quality of education could be measured.

We have reached the position where the regulatory system makes such a model pretty much impossible today. The external degrees of the University of London are now largely for foreign students. They should, once again, be widely available across Britain. I already have colleges coming to my office keen to educate their students locally to that standard and trying to navigate today’s elaborate financial and regulatory system to make that possible. It should be possible and we are engaged in the tricky and challenging work of making it easier for them without compromising our spending controls. So we will permit organisations to offer external degrees without necessarily teaching themselves – BTEC degrees are on their way, for example. And we will make it easier for new providers to come in as teaching institutions with their students getting loans without that institution having its own degree awarding powers. This is a crucial new freedom which will put the quality of teaching where it should be – at the heart of the system.

I have been approached, in recent weeks, by various existing education providers who are deeply-rooted in their local communities and have argued passionately for the right to offer externally-validated degrees to local people with limited existing access to higher education. The combination of a local FE college, regional employers and an awarding body could be an important embodiment of the Big Society. So these challenges have to be addressed to open up the system.

Lots of stuff about fees, access and so on, as you'd expect. But this section, under 'long-term ambitions' also caught my eye.

I’m terribly sorry I had to do this through my blog, this is not easy for me at all, honestly. This post may be the last memory we ever share on this blog, but I have to come clean: I’m done with you because I decided to be with your best friend #ds106. I know this is cold, and I’m really sorry. Don’t let it get you all upset inside, we had a good run, and we seemed to respect each others space. I didn’t exploit you, never took your name in vain to make money, never even did a presentation about you—that said you were quite the icebreaker—and you certainly garnered me more attention than I deserved. For a while there I though we really had a future together, but your history of flirting and seducing the neo-liberals who want to dismantle public institutions has been a real turn off.

If EduPunk has died, does that mean it's time for...

EduNewRomantic

?? I'm breaking out my pixie boots and leg warmers.

PS: I must admit I thought EduPunk had died yonks ago!

Speaking at a conference on widening participation in London last week, Sir Martin said: "The Treasury made assumptions, and one of the reasons for the delay in the letter of guidance to me...is that they thought that Offa was going to be in a position to have legal powers to impose certain fee levels.

"How they came to that view I cannot say because it was obvious to me from Day One that (Offa) didn't (have such authority). Now the government is in some difficulty in limiting expenditure to the levels that the Treasury has assumed.

"It would be fair to say that as of today, there isn't a solution - but there will be a solution because, in the end, the Treasury always wins."

Sigh :-(

A group of universities plans to draw together existing free online learning materials from around the world and develop new OERs to create whole degree programmes that can be studied via the internet for free.

The project will focus on how to offer students using OERs the opportunity to earn academic credit and have their work assessed at a significantly reduced cost.

It is hoped that these degrees could cost up to 90 per cent less than a traditional qualification gained through on-campus study.

In an interview with Times Higher Education, Wayne Mackintosh, director of the Open Education Resource Foundation, said an OER university would help widen access to higher education in the developing world as well as helping students in the developed world faced with rising tuition fees.

"Throughout most Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, the costs of education have been increasing in excess of the inflation index," he said. "What we're aiming to do is provide alternatives...the opportunity to get the same quality of education for significantly lower cost."

The "same quality of education for significantly lower cost". Really? I mean, really? Come on.

You're talking to someone (in the UK) who is now facing a bill of over £60,000 to get his remaining two kids thru university and you're telling me that they could get the "same quality of education" for significantly lower cost. Either things don't add up or it says something pretty bloody terrible about the current quality of education?

Although our research is about reuse, nonetheless we should keep the notion of sharing at the back of our minds, as there seems to be a close link between the former and the latter in several aspects (for more about this, see our mindmap).

Reading this, I'm minded to ask whether our tendency to say 'reuse' in the context of initiatives like UK OER is semantically significant - or do we just mean 'use'? Often we actually say 'use/reuse' (as in the diagram attached to this blog post - but I know that I do this myself as well) so it seems like we mean something different. But I'm not sure.

Is reuse just a use that isn't what the original creator of the resource intended? Or is there, in fact, no difference between 'use' and 'reuse'?

Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education and creative expression over the next one to five years. The areas of emerging technology cited for 2011 are:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

• Electronic Books
• Mobiles

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

• Augmented Reality
• Game-based Learning

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-based Computing
• Learning Analytics

No surprises here, with the possible exception of 'learning analytics' (which was new to me):

Learning analytics loosely joins a variety of data-gathering tools and analytic techniques to study student engagement, performance, and progress in practice, with the goal of using what is learned to revise curricula, teaching, and assessment in real time. Building on the kinds of information generated by Google Analytics and other similar tools, learning analytics aims to mobilize the power of data-mining tools in the service of learning, and embracing the complexity, diversity, and abundance of information that dynamic learning environments can generate.

Sounds horrible! On the other hand, it's on the 4 to 5 year time frame and the world will have totally changed by then anyway, so best not to worry :-)