A bit off the usual tack of this blog, but this is a good story. Both my parents are retired college professors and growing up I’d occasionally hear similar stories. While this blog focuses on eLearning and few direct classroom interactions, it’s anecdotes like this – caring for students and helping provide a way for people to better themselves – that makes me personally appreciate being involved in the learning community overall.
Just hours before class was scheduled to begin, a student from our Nashville campus lost her babysitter for the evening. She contacted Peter Powell, Nashville campus director, indicating that she would either need to skip class or bring her two-year-old son to class with her. While kids normally are not permitted during classroom instruction, Keller Professor Joel Bunkowske (pictured) and Peter decided to allow the student to bring her son to class so that she, in turn, could attend class that evening. At one point, the boy wanted to be held by Professor Bunkowske, who proceeded to pick him up and continue with his lesson.
‘NPAPI’ is the ‘Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface’ architecture used for a majority of web browser plugins – such as Quicktime, Flash, etc. It was initiated by the fine folks at Abobe in order to help integrate their PDF technology (Acrobat) with the web experience. You can read more about the history of 
Of the various strategies embodied by the latest ‘gamification’ trends, Badging may be one that holds significant, longer-term promise. That’s not to say other gamification strategies are not also worthwhile; leaderboards, game mechanics, incentives and rewards, and even virtual environments can all be effective when implemented properly.
So after a couple of years since MOOCs become a recognized eLearning strategy (and for the sake of our readers, I’ll suppose you know what generally 