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Thoughtful piece by Keith Devlin, who is no naysayer, having put a lot of effort into making and running MOOCs. Key excerpt: "Teaching and learning are complex processes that require considerable expertise to understand well. In particular, education has a significant feature unfamiliar to most legislators and business leaders (as well as some prominent business-leaders-turned-philanthropists), who tend to view it as a process that takes a raw material -- incoming students -- and produces graduates who emerge at the other end with knowledge and skills that society finds of value. (Those outcomes need not be employment skills -- their value is to society, and that can manifest in many different ways.) But the production-line analogy has a major limitation. If a manufacturer finds the raw materials are inferior, she or he looks for other suppliers (or else uses the threat thereof to force the suppliers to up their game). But in education, you have to work with the supply you get -- and still produce a quality output. Indeed, that is the whole point of education."

The usual thoughtful stuff from Keith Devlin about learning maths - in this case "Quantitative Reasoning" using MOOCs.

It gets a bit proselytising towards the end but the notion of evaluating proofs could generalise to evaluating other types of mathematical statement so, although we are not interested in mathematical proof in our course, the article could still have some relevance to us.

US oriented & UK relevant. 50 min talk about inequity in maths learning by Uri Treisman. Data in 36 page PDF of Treisman's slides at http://tinyurl.com/cn85gp6. Keith Devlin writes " This month's column is short, but I am asking you to set aside 51 minutes and 36 seconds to watch the embedded video. It is a recording of the Iris M. Carl Equity Address given on Friday April 19 at this year's NCTM Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado. The title of the talk is "Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize" and the speaker is Uri Treisman, professor of mathematics and of public affairs, and director of the Charles A. Dana Center, at the University of Texas at Austin. I was not able to be at NCTM, but on the recommendation of several colleagues, I watched the YouTube video. I simply cannot write a column on mathematics or mathematics education in the same month as Treisman's immensely more important, profound-and powerfully articulated-words became part of mathematics education history. As a community, we now have our own "I have a dream" speech."

MOOCs can make up for much of the damage resulting from putting 21st Century students through a 19th Century school system. And we can do it on a global scale.......

This piece by Keith Devlin and this one by distance learning stalwart Terry Anderson http://terrya.edublogs.org/2013/11/19/all-moocs-dont-work-for-all-students-are-you-surprised/ between them provide the most constructive and well-reasoned reactions to Udacity's recent change of tack. Alex Usher's "Udacity has left the building": http://higheredstrategy.com/udacity-has-left-the-building/ is also worth reading, though I think he considerably underestimates Coursera's long term profit-making prospects.

Interesting 1/10/2013 post from Keith Devlin about the production of technology based maths education.

Worthwhile piece by John Duhring commenting on MOOC production methods, and with plenty of emphasis on Keith Devlin's Introduction to Mathematical Thinking. For more on the latter see my http://fm.schmoller.net/2013/06/second-report-from-keith-devlins-itmt-course.html

Interesting piece by Keith Devlin about instructional videos and the research evidence showing that they tend to reinforce preconceptions even if the learner's preconceptions are completely at variance with the instructional content.

Keith Devlin provides detailed insights into his increasing focus on "learning by evaluation" in the third run of his "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" Coursera MOOC, which starts on 2 September.

Lots of food for thought in this retrospective summary of mainly MOOC and maths learning related articles from 2013 by Stanford U's Keith Devlin

Interesting, trenchant riposte to the http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/the-faulty-logic-of-the-math-wars/

With apologies for pointing to my own stuff, here is my second report from Keith Devlin's "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" Coursera MOOC. The first report is here: http://tinyurl.com/bqe9jck.

Worth scan-reading at least.