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This free, hour-long webinar, "The Legal Side of MOOCs," will discuss important legal considerations that come into play with MOOCs. How does copyright apply to the delivery of course materials in the MOOC context? What about laws governing accessibility for persons with disabilities? Are there important privacy issues to address? In this webinar, Madelyn Wessel, associate general counsel for the University of Virginia, will discuss the legal landscape pertaining to MOOCS, including course production, data creation, copyright, privacy, and conduct issues.

Seb, are you going to this? It's slap bang in middle of bath time, so difficult for me.

4 page PDF from a Stanford group including the venerable Roy Pea. Might be relevant to several aspects of our project. Focuses on the question "How can we make a MOOC work for as many of its diverse participants as possible?". Argues for the use of A/B testing to inform MOOC design. Silent on adaptive learning. Still pretty tentative, though.

Slightly verbose, but authentic blog post by Cathy Davidson about what it is like at the sharp end of MOOC production and teaching. Note her point about 150 hours of production time per hour of MOOC learning time.

Georgia Tech Computer Science teacher Mark Guzdial is a thoughtful (and in this instance somewhat geeful) opponent of MOOCs. His comment on an introductory physics MOOC that Georgia Tech ran with Gates Foundation funding are interesting. The completion rate was exceptionally low (less than 1%). The completers: "fell into three categories: those who came in with a lot of physics knowledge and who ended with relatively little gain, those who came in with very little knowledge and made almost no progress, and a group of students who really did learn a lot". According to Guzdial, they don't know why nor the relative percentages yet.

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."

Excerpt: "Now Stanford is looking to reclaim some leadership in the MOOC movement from the private companies down the street. For some of its offerings it has started using Open edX, the open-source platform developed by edX, an East Coast nonprofit provider of MOOCs. And Stanford is marshaling its resources and brainpower to improve its own online infrastructure. In doing so, the university is putting its weight behind an open-source alternative that could help others develop MOOCs independently of proprietary companies."

But... I understood that Open edX does not exist yet? I thought Open edX was the result of the marriage of (the currently only betrothed) edX and Course Builder. I suspect this is just sloppy journalism, but if Stanford has fast track access to Open edX, can we get it too? Something to check with Michel?

Curiously revisionist history of MOOCs that centres on a Maths MOOC aimed at preparing students for US college courses that requite some maths proficiency

[123 p PDF] - This is the BIS literature review of MOOCs and other forms of online distance learning. Published today.

Philip Guo presents preliminary research about video usage in some edX MOOCs. Strong evidence for keeping them short.

My instinct is to beware of research findings that purport to be universal and context-independent. But since the context here is MOOCs, broadly defined, this research on the optimal length of instructional videos may be relevant to us.

A constructive review by Donald Clark (Ufi Trustee) of one particular Coursera MOOC (with references to one of Edinburgh University's), with a focus on how the interaction design of the course could have been improved.

You can sign up here for a Udacity 10 minute "mini-MOOC", which from the fact of its target audience, is likely to have been very carefully implemented by Udacity. The promotional video gives some pointers to why Udacity withdrew (their focus is increasinly firmly on "higher" stuff). The min-MOOC should be seen in the context of Udacity wanting to attract Google-focused programmers onto its just launched $7000 Computer Science Masters, done in partnership with Georgia Tech.

Not the clearest learning experience I have known.

I particularly resent the "happy-clappy" over-enthusiastic tone of the feedback

Comprehensive filleting by Donald Clark Edinburgh University's excellent self-review of its first 6 MOOCs. DC's review and the Edinburgh report are each worth reading.

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.

Comprehensive overview by Paul Stacey of MOOC learning methods. (I do not wholly agree with his assessment of the AI/Udacity learning methods.)

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

This is a bit long-winded and not quite the Woodward/Bernstein exposé it thinks it is, but provides a critical assessment of whether the scaling up economies of MOOCs tend to disappear when you add back the elements that make the course equivalent to fully-fledged masters degrees

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.

Suggestion that social networks could be instrumental in helping MOOCs extend reach beyond those who are already enfranchised and educated. Potentially relevant to Citizens' Maths?

My gut feeling is that social networking could well be really important to us. In the Scratch context, I feel the Scratch community is potentially useful.

Nice open approach by Duke University to reporting on the development and running of Duke's first MOOC, with data about costs and operational issues.

Getting on for 15 years ago I put David Wiley's precursor to Creative Commons "Open Content" licence on the wholly online Learning To Teach Online Course that I played a role in, having read about Wiley and the licence in the Economist. Wiley is still active in this field and this post has a very incisive observation in it about personalisation. I do not know whether I agree with it fully (adaptive learning and algorithms may/should have a role too): "There is simply no way to scale the centralized creation of educational materials personalized for everyone in the world (cf. the 15 years of learning objects hype and investment, which feels very similar to the current MOOC mania). Perhaps the only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others. And given the absolute madness of international copyright law there is no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen. The only practicable solution is to provide free, universal access to content, assessments, and other resources that includes free 4Rs permissions that empower local actors to engage in localization and redistribution."