Ray Schroeder opened SCUP's North Central Region's 2012 conference two months ago with a keynote by this title.  Schroeder did not provide a set of his slides for the conference proceedings, however, because he wants his content as widely distributed as possible. But, he has shared his presentation for everyone on his own website. It's more than a slide show!

View the full presentation here.

Building Virtual Bridges: Collaborations in an Era of MOOCs and Mashups (PL002) 

Ray Schroeder, Director, Office of Tech-Enhanced Learning, University of Illinois at Springfield

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have captured the attention and imagination of universities across the US. These classes are collectively enrolling literally millions of students from around the world.  Offerings are coming from elite universities and mid-tier colleges alike. Though, in most cases, they bear no academic credit, many higher education leaders and associations are working to develop degree pathways that include MOOCs. Concurrent with the advent of MOOCs over the past months, we have seen the move to integrate "big data" and the use of analytics to create mashup dashboards that enable "smart" decision making. In both MOOCs and big data mashups, the digital online nature of the initiatives invites building bridges between and among institutions to leverage data, knowledge, and resources. We will examine these emerging phenomena and how they will build collaborations and sharing among institutions.