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This publication was developed by Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić and Sir John Daniel who are Senior Advisors to Academic Partnerships as well as Neil Butcher and Merridy Wilson-Strydom. It has a traditional feel, and is HE oriented. But the underlying principles are clear and useful. The 28-page, 2.7MB document is available from http://www.academicpartnerships.com/docs/default-document-library/newbooklet15_singleb.pdf?sfvrsn=2 It covers the following topics: - What is online learning? - How is online learning offered? - What constitutes quality in online learning? - How can institutions assure quality? - What institutional structures and staffing resources do you need for ensuring quality in online learning? - What resources should you allocate to developing quality online learning? - How can students judge the quality of online courses? - How can instructional design, learning materials, and course presentation contribute to quality online learning? - How can the structure of the virtual environment facilitate quality online learning? - What do web design and web usability factors contribute to quality? - How can you use media (video, graphics, audio, animation and simulation) to enhance quality in online learning? - What online assessment and assignment methodologies promote quality learning? - How do you ensure examination security? - What strategies can you deploy for interaction and student community building? - How can teaching and facilitation contribute to ensuring quality? - What support should students receive? - Annotated Reading List: Benchmarks for Quality Online Learning

Up to date monograph from highly regarded US researchers focusing on the learning effectiveness of several fairly widespread and standard learning techniques. The person who sent it to me said: "Nor is the evidence against some common 'instructionist' practices such as formative MCQ quizzes - in fact the effect size for those and for distributed practice is consistently higher than for more creative teaching and learning practices".

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."

Tony Bates (who is an "old-style" authority on online distance learning) concludes a long series of posts on productivity and online learning.

This Audrey Watters piece putting the boot into learning analytics, predictive modelling, and adaptive learning shows that our project is on quite highly contested ground.

Includes aforementioned Norvig piece, Seth Fletcher on Adaptive Learning; Salman Khan on blended learning; and several others.

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.

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.

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

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.

108 page US-oriented report by SRI International funded by the Gates Foundation. Describes the different design approaches taken by six providers, with a profile for each provider. Has some interesting concluding comments about instructional approaches, media design, and approaches to assessment/feedback, with a strong push for better (rather than non) use of analytics and adaptive learning approaches.

I'm not well placed to judge if this is "any good". Interested to know what IOE colleagues reckon to it.

Looks pretty familiar insofar as it reflects a lot of good stuff that has been going on in isolated classrooms in the UK for quite a few years or even decades. But nevertheless, it does seem to have the right sort of spirit to it. I found it odd that the first five sessions were essentially focussed on the utilities of geometry and then a probability session was thrown in at the end.

The usual thoughtful stuff from Keith Devlin about learning maths - in this case "Quantitative Reasoning" using MOOCs.

It gets a bit proselytising towards the end but the notion of evaluating proofs could generalise to evaluating other types of mathematical statement so, although we are not interested in mathematical proof in our course, the article could still have some relevance to us.

"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)."

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.

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

Interesting set of exchanges between Dan Myer and others on the relative merits of direct instructions, worked examples, inquiry learning, and some blend of the three. Towards the end there is an discussion about adaptive software.

According to Duolingo, which is the brainchild of the inventor of reCaptcha Luis von Ahn "Since its launch 15 months ago, Duolingo has reached 10 million students and become the most popular way to learn languages online. No ad campaign, no gimmicks; just your support and a mission of free language education for the world." See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duolingo

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