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New employees too infrequently "possess habits of discipline, ready obedience, self-help, and pride in good work for its own sake". Thus a 1906 Board of Education report. So "for as long as we have evidence, employers have been critical of the ability of the education system to provide the workers they need." Concluding para: ".... the world's most efficient and effective education systems, from Finland to Singapore, have some strikingly common characteristics: they are unremitting in their focus on the core skills of literacy and numeracy, but they set those skills in the wider context of developing higher-order complex thinking. Most of all, they take equality seriously: they focus, in a way which education systems historically did not, on ensuring that all - not just a privileged few - develop the higher-order skills needed to use and analyse information, and that they have access to rewarding higher-level training. Put at its crudest, conventional subjects still matter, but they need to be taught and learnt in innovative ways."

MOOCs and Open Education. Useful, if HE-focused, 21p report [PDF] by Stephen Powell and Li Yuan from Jisc Cetis. Worth most project people at least scan reading, for orientation purposes.

"But as Gates's higher-education activism grows, so does anxiety over the consequences." Worth us being properly aware of issues associated with how charitable money is beginning to be viewed in HE in the US. The discussion of the piece is interesting, in that there are some strong counters to the line advanced in the article.

"New niche certifications being offered by providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are aimed at satisfying employers' specific needs. Available at a fraction of the cost of a four-year degree, they represent the latest crack in the monopoly traditional universities have in credentialing higher education."

Up to date monograph from highly regarded US researchers focusing on the learning effectiveness of several fairly widespread and standard learning techniques. The person who sent it to me said: "Nor is the evidence against some common 'instructionist' practices such as formative MCQ quizzes - in fact the effect size for those and for distributed practice is consistently higher than for more creative teaching and learning practices".

Karen MacGregor has written a useful internationally focused summary drawing on parts of the recently published BIS "Maturing of the MOOC".

Argument that MOOCs can be used as part of a 'flipped' and/or blended approach for students in (what they call in the US) community colleges. This quote suggests Bill has lecture-based MOOCs in mind "Of course it's quite controversial, what software can take over, but once you get a great pool of lectures out there that incorporate problem solving and drill practice, this frees up time" for more-personalized instruction in the classroom, Mr. Gates said. With more work done at home and online, students could spend less time on campuses, freeing up classroom space to accommodate more students, he said. That approach works well, he added, with remedial mathematics, where only about 10 percent of students who start courses end up getting two-year degrees within three years."