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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?

"To better organize and direct the efforts of our open source community, and to ensure that every contribution gets handled appropriately, edX is forming the Open edX team. This team will always have at least one person who is employed by edX (the company), but may also contain individuals who work on the edX codebase without working for edX the company."

Just saving this to log the commitment "In the future, we will provide an upgrade path to Open edX and MOOC.org from Course Builder"

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.

Open source issuing, management, and user achievement tracking platform for Mozilla Open Badges

This reads as if it has had the attention of a PR person. Here is the key para concerning maths: "We know that students learn at different speeds. This is particularly the case in the mathematical sciences, where it just takes a while to really understand certain concepts. Rushing students through a timed curriculum with a pre-defined pace cannot be the best way to achieve lasting success. In our remedial math class, we only gave students a single chance to pass various exams. If they even failed the first midterm, they failed the class. On campus, multiple chances are offered. There are clear opportunities to rethink assessment as a whole, especially as we open up new pacing options."

It feels to me there are important lessons from this that should be incorporated in our Marketing and Learner Engagement work. e.g. how much do we leave it open vs target hard-to-reach learners

A new @coursera #MOOC. Can Venture Capital Deliver on the Promise of the Public University? Proposed in Open Letter from Bob Meister (President of University of California Faculty Associations) to Daphne Koller (Coursera Co-founder). It concludes: "Would you be willing to co-teach this course with me? I'm sure that together we could reach a very large audience indeed."

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."

Needs keeping an eye on, as much as anything else in view of Coursebuilder/EdX collaboration points made by Peter Norvig during telco in April.

Interesting article, with nice density maps by Koller, Ng and others, about Coursera participation.

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.......

The edX open source platform software is now publicly available on GitHub.

Would there be scope to use Mozilla Open Badges as a core element of the Applied Maths Course? If there is, should we be investigating the practicalities?

Interesting sample of findings from use of analytics in xMOOCs

About 15 years ago David Wiley sort of invented Open Content and laid the foundations for Creative Commons. This post is worth reading. Concluding para, but don't ignore the one that precedes it:: "MOOCs provide an extremely rare opportunity to completely rethink pedagogy, from the ground up, for a completely new context and configuration. However, until someone gets serious about this line of thinking and looks for legitimate inspiration outside of classroom-based pedagogies-for-30, it's going to be hard times."

A concentrated 2 page summary from Educause. Possibly a bit think on Mozilla's Open Badges system.

80 hour OER course from the OU. Pitched at a different audience to Citizens' Maths, but may have some points we can learn from.