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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

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."

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

I'm not a fan of lists of most important things, but I like the work of Will Thalheimer and have kept vaguely in contact with him over the years. I think this list is worth having in mind when designing (online) courses

A "how to" about embedding Khan Academy exercises in Google Coursebuilder. Over my head, but worth being aware of this kind of capability becoming available.

Interesting sample of findings from use of analytics in xMOOCs

Curious lightweight (side project?) Google-branded guidance on how to set up a mooc. Obviously it promotes Course Builder, but it all seems a little under-cooked.

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

Worth bearing in mind from the point of view of the course as a service

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

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

Apparently, this is the "first adaptive MOOC", in the area of computational molecular dynamics (CMD). We might have to wait for the second part of the article to understand more about how the adaptivity works.

Yes. I spent a while looking at a talk given by Nish and the kind of adaptivity seemed limited, and not particularly driven by what a learner has been doing.

(This is more to jog my memory of the paper than develop further discussion) Key section of the paper seems to be "Adaptive learning strategy - At the beginning of the course, learners were presented with a diagnostics quiz and were required to answer a few questions about how they learn. This process identified each learner's preferred learning strategy, based upon which each learner then was guided on an adapted learning path throughout the course, by which process designers hoped to accelerate learning and improve score results." I.e. quite different to CogBooks main approach.

Interesting commentary which I'm sure can be debated...

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.......

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?

With apologies for pointing to my own stuff, here is my second report from Keith Devlin's "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" Coursera MOOC. The first report is here: http://tinyurl.com/bqe9jck.

Designed for use in the US (mapped against the Common Core State Standards, which groups things into six concept areas: Number and Quantity, Algebra, Functions, Modeling, Geometry, and Statistics and Probability), and designed to cover the equivalent of a year-long, traditional school curriculum. Worth poking about in. Comments from IOE and OCR particularly welcome.

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.

Case study describing how Indiana University integrated Drupal with Coursebuilder. There is more on this issue in my notes from the Coursebuilder workshop I attended in Zurich with Jim Thompson http://tinyurl.com/qc2u6uu