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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

These are worth reading: 1. "Udacity: Creating A More Engaging MOOC" by David Carr in the 30/7/2013 Information Week. Also http://tinyurl.com/k2shmgv by David Evans, the teacher of the Udacity Introduction to Computer Science, who is now back full time at the University of Virginia - http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/

This is the best summary of "what happened between San Jose State University and Udacity". NB the results of an NSF-funded review of the data is due in August.

Longish not very searching piece in Information Week about Udacity's model, with teasing references to adaptive learning and to the way Udacity is turning its attention to adaptive learning.

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.

Definitely worth reading, if only for its excellent diagram.

Hagiography about Thrun, as Udacity switches focus. (The company's strap line has changed from "Invent your future through free interactive college classes" to "Advance your education and career through project-based online classes). A couple of reactions:http://hapgood.us/2013/11/14/thrun-enters-burgeoning-sieve-market/; http://hackeducation.com/2013/11/14/thrun-as-saint/ Aren't both tilting a bit at windmills?

This LA times piece seems to show little other than that the naysayers were too quick to naysay, that the case for "remedial maths" by Udacity-style MOOC is not proven, and that there are a large number of tricky variables at play.

Udacity's partnership with San Jose State University seems to be on the rocks.

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

"This course is for teachers of math (K-12) or for other helpers of students, such as parents. After the summer I will release a student version of this course. This course provides an opportunity for teachers and parents to preview the ideas for students and think about how they may be useful, as well as learn from new research ideas and share ideas with other teachers and parents who enroll in the course. The course will also include interviews with some of the world's leading thinkers, such as Sebastian Thrun (Udacity/Google) and Carol Dweck (expert on mindset)."

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

Long piece in Information Week by David Carr about Udacity's approach, with more references to adaptive learning, amongst other things.

[48 p PDF], and worth looking at thoroughtly. Excerpt: "The statistical model found that measures of student effort trump all other variables tested for their relationships to student success, including demographic descriptions of the students, course subject matter and student use of support services. The clearest predictor of passing a course is the number of problem sets a student submitted. The relationship between completion of problem sets and success is not linear; rather the positive effect increases dramatically after a certain baseline of effort has been made. Video Time, another measure of effort, was also found to have a strong positive relationship with passing, particularly for Stat 95 students."

Interesting sample of findings from use of analytics in xMOOCs

The comments to this article are (mainly) more interesting than the article itself which is sort of "boilerplate": disruption is coming, first mover advantage matters, business models are thin on the ground.

An (obviously) unusually able Sophia Pink summarises her experience skipping 10th grade to learn online instead. She's gone back to school for 11th grade......

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

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."