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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."

The Community College Research Center is based at Columbia University. It describes itself as the US's "leading independent authority on the nation's nearly 1200 two-year colleges". Since 2009 CCRC has been doing (amongst other things) a range of interesting and important qualitative and quantitative research about online courses in community colleges (which sit somewhere between FE and HE in a UK context, overlapping with both), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and led by Shanna Smith Jaggars. This page has links to abstracts and presentations, which highlight general and specific disparities in outcomes between face-to-face and online provision, and which point to action that can be taken to deal with these problems. (Instructor presence seems to be key.....)

This article gets in a great deal deeper than a lot of other recent coverage. As always, the focus is on HE.

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.

This publication was developed by Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić and Sir John Daniel who are Senior Advisors to Academic Partnerships as well as Neil Butcher and Merridy Wilson-Strydom. It has a traditional feel, and is HE oriented. But the underlying principles are clear and useful. The 28-page, 2.7MB document is available from http://www.academicpartnerships.com/docs/default-document-library/newbooklet15_singleb.pdf?sfvrsn=2 It covers the following topics: - What is online learning? - How is online learning offered? - What constitutes quality in online learning? - How can institutions assure quality? - What institutional structures and staffing resources do you need for ensuring quality in online learning? - What resources should you allocate to developing quality online learning? - How can students judge the quality of online courses? - How can instructional design, learning materials, and course presentation contribute to quality online learning? - How can the structure of the virtual environment facilitate quality online learning? - What do web design and web usability factors contribute to quality? - How can you use media (video, graphics, audio, animation and simulation) to enhance quality in online learning? - What online assessment and assignment methodologies promote quality learning? - How do you ensure examination security? - What strategies can you deploy for interaction and student community building? - How can teaching and facilitation contribute to ensuring quality? - What support should students receive? - Annotated Reading List: Benchmarks for Quality Online Learning

"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.

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."

50 minute presentation on use of Scratch to teach some maths concepts 10-year-old and 16-year-old kids. Interestingly even the 16-year-olds thought the cat made it look like "kids stuff". There's a recording of the full presentation at https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/recording/playback/link/table/dropin?sid=2008350&suid=D.9FA226957D30A14AB25F33DEBBF5D3 (note worth using the Blackboard recording rather than the video, even though it's more of a faff, as the former includes a shot of the speaker where he demonstrates things physically, whereas the latter just shows the presentation)

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.

Mike Schatz from Georgia Tech spoke at the Trieste MOOC workshop I and Donald Clark also contributed to. Mike's running introductory Physics MOOCs on Coursera, with Gates Foundation support. He spoke very highly of Piazza as a forum platform. This PDF describes its features.

I have been in touch with this writer before (he sent me a review copy of an earlier book and I blogged about it) on the off chance this might be any help

A kind of maths-specific Khan Academy. I was wondering at first if 'Patrick' might want to mix in some Citizen Maths video tutorials, but it seems he just features his own. Could be that someone else could mix together his stuff and CMs if there were any areas in which they complemented each other. His stuff is mostly beyond Level 2, however.