Here is a draft abstract for an upcoming keynote – comments welcome.

Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) providers like edX and Coursera have revealed an almost unlimited desire for education for people of all ages and all walks of life. While these pioneering efforts have achieved much, these learning opportunities are still in relatively short supply. Each course is costly to produce, deploy, and support. These costs are a rate limiting factor in scaling online education to the point where we begin meeting the much larger demand for high quality, plentiful and relevant education worldwide. We need to build a Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE) that makes it so any teacher can build and efficiently deploy their own open courses to a worldwide audience. In this presentation, we will look at how we can build an open source infrastructure that is based on open standards and open content that will make creating an open education experience within the reach of any teacher, anywhere in the world. We will look at how educational technology will need to change to reduce the cost to produce, share, and even remix online educational content.

We are reaching the end of the first session of the Python Specialization capstone. We have two things planned to celebrate the time and commitment of the students who have made it through five classes, 25 weeks of work and completed the capstone.

First, the University of Michigan School of Information will be sending signed paper certificates, a temporary tattoo, and a waiver of the application fee to the University of Michigan School of Information Masters Program to everyone who completed the Capstone. We will be sending the packet to every student that has completed the first capstone regardless of geography.

Second, we will be the first MOOC to have an online, live, graduation ceremony and we want to invite anyone to watch our celebration. The graduation ceremony will be held:

Wednesday June 8, at 9:00AM Eastern time

Location: http://live.dr-chuck.com/

The URL will be ready Tuesday night. The ceremony will be streamed live on YouTube using Google Hangouts and then later a recording will be uploaded to Coursera for those without access to YouTube.

The agenda for the graduation ceremony will be to (1) thank those who have worked behind the scenes to make the course successful, (2) hear a short commencement speech from my colleague Colleen van Lent (who also teaches the Web Design for Everybody) specialization, and then (3) read the student’s names as we show each student’s picture.

There are 1165 students who have completed the capstone – but it is optional to participate in the ceremony.

If you have completed the capstone session 1 and want to participate in the graduation ceremony, go back to the course site and read the instructions for joining the ceremony that we sent you in email.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible and congratulations to the graduates on finishing the specialization.

I hope to see you at graduation.