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MOOCs have a 10% completion rate. The root cause has not yet been studied extensively, but it's thought to be a combination of crap structure, crap material, lack of learner motivation and lack of instructor support. While grad students arguably should be able to deal with these conditions, I can't imagine the best way to screen candidates is to put them through the torturous experience of a MOOC.

This third round of action in âOperation in Our Sitesâ(TM) took control of the domains of Rojadirecta, one of Spainâ(TM)s most popular sites.

The people who operate Firstrow donâ(TM)t live in the US, and neither are their servers located there. In fact, Firstrow says that their site is perfectly legal where they are based

November when ICE seized Rojadirecta.org, a sports site held to be a legal website by Spanish courts on two occasions. The agency may have a desire to protect consumers from foreign websites. Steve Tepp, ICE senior director for Internet counterfeiting and piracy, explains that âoetheir jurisdiction is limited to the United Statesâ¦â However, Tepp argues that âoe[w]e need legislation to provide enhanced remedies to cut off foreign rogue sites from the U.S. market

U.S. Claims Global Jurisdiction of .net and .com Web Sites: Is .edu Next?

It appears to be the US asserting jurisdiction over any website in any country.

ICE seized the TVShack.net in June 2010

you can expect the price to be tailored to your individual institution, or in other words, likely several hundred dollars at least, probably in the thousands.

I think you missed "Per student" and "annually" at the end of that.

The typical customer licensing the works will pay $160,000 - per year. Even small victims are being bled for upwards of $50,000 every year just for the joy of being permitted to use Blackboard.

Blackboard doesn't sell to teachers or even individual schools, they target entire districts and school boards, aiming high enough up in the organization to be sure that nobody they meet will ever have to use their product, or have any idea of what Moodle is.

For universities it's easy: as most of them benefit from public funds, they shouldn't be able to patent anything and release it all under the public domain for the public's benefit.

Well, you have to repeal/amend the Bayh-Dole Act that essentially gave universities the right to patent their findings. I think before that the patents went to the United States government if they funded the research. I know that our friends at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) have courted the government to keep funding them by offering Institutional Patent Agreements. Does WARF sound familiar to you? It should.

There's a lengthy blog post about this that has good quotes and points from both sides including:

Georgia Tech professor Mark Allen said "In a number of circumstances, the competitive advantage afforded through exclusivity [that is, patent monopoly] may be absolutely critical to justify the risk undertaken by a company in developing a product from a promising early-stage university technology, as it was in the case of Cardiomems." Professor Allen, also Chief Technology Officer at Cariomems, did not reveal his compensation from privately-held Cardiomems using the patented technology from his Georgia Tech research.

Susan B. Butts, Dow Chemical Company, had a different perspective: "Although the Bayh-Dole Act has enabled the transfer of technology developed with federal funds from US universities to industry it has also contributed to a contentious climate around the issue of intellectual property (IP) rights which discourages research collaborations between industry and US universities. Second, most foreign universities, which do not have the IP expectations created by Bayh-Dole, allow industry research sponsors to own or control inventions resulting from the research that they fund. This much more favorable treatment of IP is causing companies to do more of their sponsored research abroad [emphasis added]."

And, you know, with how much value we place on intellectual property elsewhere it would seem that the amount of funding and rewards universities are getting for this research is down right laughable. So the Bayh-Dole Act was a very simple solution: let both parties involved benefit from the research and allow the university to reap the benefits of licensing and royalties.

What's a better alternative method for appropriate rewards?

Public funding can be used to obtain private patents in this nation. Until such fundamental rules change there will be heavy pressure from administrators to impede open publication as much as possible.

I agree with you that current publication methods are a bit ludicrous; however, it will be at least half a generation before those in charge have any grasp of how to publish.

Right now, there already are a whole slew of online publications some of which are open access. The issue is one of prestige and acceptance. If I were to do major research, do I go to a newer publication whose reputation for peer review is still not well established or do I go with a big name. Having something in the New England Journal of Medicine is a big deal. It can establish a career for someone. At that point the fact that its not open access becomes a secondary concern - the journal is widely available to whom it would matter. This brings me to another point - elitism. It would have to be overcome before people will be fully willing to hand over access to these sources.

My experience has been that the resistance to open access runs deep. People question whether an open access journal could maintain the quality of the traditional sources.

Blackboard to patent software that is none functional when run on a new OS.

It's great to have a patent system that rewards innovation.

there is less chance the Census Bureau will be purchases by NewsCorp, and you find yourself being targetted for ads due to papers you have written, or of having your sophomoric essays on the wonders of Marx being turned over to your next employer for a reasonable fee.

Say for instance Turnitin is purchased, along with their database? They could develop quite detailed personality profiles on the users in their system, and sell them to the highest bidder.

Sure these things are currently prevented by their licensing agreements with schools, however large corporations routinely ignore the agreements they've made with educational institutions (see the example Blackboard, Inc. & Pearson Publication ignoring the agreements they made with the IMS Global Consortium, etc.) and there does not seem to be much in the way of federal oversight (nothing that a few million to the right CongressCritter couldn't stop).

I have a friend that started working for the USPTO a few months ago. I showed that person the link and got a little bit of information about how things happen there:

Me: http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/permalink/b lackboard_patents_the_lms
your people are being dumb there

Them: yeah well some people screw up
examiners do it just as much as anyone else

Me: doesn't anyone double-check these things though? ;)

Them: infact i think we do it less, but it's just more public
well, we have a production goal
and the yare trying to make "quality" but however when you're under the pressure of being fired if you don't get your count, you might mess up
but then again, they might just be stupid :P

Me: so after someone researches it and decides it's ok to grant does someone else review that or after 1 pass it gets accepted?

Them: not if you're a primary examiner, then you sign your own cases

Me: that's scary

Them: yeah, as a primary sometimes you have to do a case a day
which makes it rough

Me: how many do u have to do now?

Them: 3-4 every 2 weeks
but i'm only doing 2-ish
b/c i've only been examining for 2 months

Me: and if u don't get them done then your boss gets on your case?

Them: well, we are on a one year probationary period...if i don't make it with in a year then we might get fired

----
Sounds like a high-pressure job, especially the longer you've been there. There are probably some burn-out examiners that just let things slip through now and again (which is pretty evident by what's been coming out of there).

I recently blogged a short review of this book from the perspective of somebody in the online learning business. What's interesting to me is that Koster believes "fun" is an evolutionary adaptation to reward learning. Fun comes with mastery of skills, he suggests. So when you hear somebody say that a game is "better than sex," it's possible that there's more to it than a game geek whose memory of sex is somewhat...hazy.

Also interesting is Koster's comparison of what games can teach versus what stories can teach. He believes that games teach abstract pattern recognition. You beat the game by grokking the pattern. The fact that the obstacles you have to eliminate happen to be human beings...well, games aren't so good at getting you to empathize. Stories do that much better (he claims).

For a contrasting view, you might want to check out "Is Instructional Video Game an Oxymoron?" in this week's New York Times (registration required).