Is online education, as we know it, already passé? The Chronicle of Higher Education recently evaluated this in a recent article with the headline “Online Education Is Everywhere. What’s the Next Big Thing?” and goes on to discuss open educational resources and their impact of the future of education: self-directed learning. Social networks, MOOCs, OpenCourseware, ePortfolios, and Open Educational Resources are just a few of the many resources available to, and used by, students and professionals to expand their learning and demonstrate their knowledge. So perhaps the Next Big Thing is the formal rise of the PLE, the Personal Learning Environments. PLEs help students to pull their learning resources, and the evidence of how they’ve used them, into one place. They include the resources and work done both formally (in the classroom) and informally (outside the classroom). In this workshop we’ll examine PLEs and begin building our own.