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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 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.

Worth checking for a pretty nifty way to learn a language. Lots of interactivity; personalised; and with absolutely no explanations. For how it works and its business model see this 16 minute talk by its inventor https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/massive-scale-online-collaboration.

A big, somewhat breathless, piece in the Scientific American about adaptive learning.

This is a long shot, but might the IMF want to encourage some of its learners with limited maths competence/confiden to do our course first?

Short article hinting at the broader gameplan behind/beyond Open edX