MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, have taken the elearning world by storm. 

EdX's experts, who in a way are leading the path, analyze some pitfalls they are finding along the way, and give some advice. 

In my view, it is fair price to pay when you are pioneering such a disruptive technology.
 

• Have a rerun plan, revise your lecture recordings after your get feedback from MOOC students. 
   
• Expell from the course antisocial students.
   
• Consider delegating and recruit forum monitors, since forums are critical to the student experience. The cross-cultural, cross-time-zone reach of MOOCs is too time-consuming to keep up.
   
• Test the technology to prevent failures and fix logic bugs.
   
• Avoid creating long MOOCs and split them.   

Read all the conclussions here. 
 

YouTube has launched a pilot program for a small group of partners who will sell paid subscriptions to their videos, with fees ranging from $0.99 to $7.99 per month. 

YouTube's goal is to create a prominent new marketplace for programming on the Internet. 

The early participants include Sesame Workshop –which streams full episodes of the children's show to paying subscribers; Ultimate Fighting Championship –which streams martial arts fights– and The Young Turks –a progressive talk show. 

The plan gives the creators of videos a new way to profit from their popularity, while YouTube gets a new source of revenue. For media start ups, it can be an alternative way to gain audience, instead of cable and television systems. 

Several companies specializing in how-to videos are among the initial partners, including iAmplify, a producer of instructional workout videos. Other areas are children's programming, movies and documentaries, reruns of television shows from outside the United States. 

YouTube said that all the paid channels would have 14-day free trials and many would offer discounted yearly rates for subscribers. Viewers will pay with Google Wallet, the same system Google's app store uses. Subscriber revenue split has not been disclosed yet. YouTube now keeps 45 percent of the revenue from the ads and gives producers the rest.

The inbound movement gains traction every day in the marketing world.

It works for companies of all types when getting more end-results from their marketing dollars. 

The 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Annual Report contains findings gathered from 3,339 marketing professionals from 128 countries. 

The main conclussion: inbound marketing generates many more leads and at a significantly lower cost than outbound methods. 

When you're stuck and need content inspiration to fuel your marketing strategy, do some keyword research –and for that use the Google's AdWords Keyword Tool.

Enter your domain name to identify strategic keywords you want to target. And especially look for long-tail keywords which contain three words or more and indicate problems that people need solving.

Good luck!

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have captured public attention. Beyond that, the elearning industry is moving fast.

How can students learn more effectively? How technology can expand the understanding of teaching and learning?

These videos give a clue. They hightlight some of Stanford University's experimentation. 

This is big.

EdX will be available as an open source learning platform on June 1.

Doing so, the EdX platform –which was created by Harvard and MIT– will become the Linux of learning.

EdX will also receive the support of Stanford University that will integrate features of its existing Class2Go open source online learning plafform. (However much of that code is already synchorized).

Behind this huge announcement for the elearning industry –in where IBL Studios develops content, software and marketing solutions– is the goal of mentioned universities of evaluate how students best learn, and how faculties can best teach, in an online environment.

While they continue to develop MOOCs (Massive open online courses), they explore new ways of packaging online content, flipped classrooms, interactive video, social interaction... They're asking the big questions about where online is going and what it means for education itself.

Open source online learning platform such as edX will allow universities to control branding of their educational material and develop their own delivery method.

The edX source code will include its Learning Management System Studio, a course authoring tool; xBlock, an API for integrating third-party learning objects; and machine grading API's. All will be accessed this June from the edX Platform repository. 

Content curation is used by many marketers to generate a steady stream of high quality and relevant materials.

These sites have all been successful in leveraging third party content, optimizing it, adding value, and building audience:

• Upworthy
• Huffington Post
• BuzzFeed
• Brain Pickings
• TechMeme

Usually these media outlets employ professional journalists and relies on three pilars: community, algorithms and editors.

All these sites will provide you good inspiration for your content curation.

Read: How to curate content like a pro.

The future can be predicted... at least in marketing.

Here is an interesting e-book that will serve as your navigation system into the world of marketing.