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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.

Article based on an interview with one of the authors of a new study about the importance of teachers' understanding student misconceptions. [The full paper is available here if you have access to the journal http://aer.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/03/06/0002831213477680.full.pdf+html] Excerpt from the paper:"An intriguing finding of this study is that teachers who know their stu- dents' most common misconceptions are more effective than teachers who do not. This particular component of PCK may allow teachers to construct experiences, demonstrations, experiments, or discussions that make students commit to and then test their own ideas. A teacher knowing only the scientific ''truth'' appears to have limited effectiveness. It is better if a teacher also has a model of how students tend to learn a particular concept, particularly if there is a common belief that may make acceptance of the scientific view or model difficult. This finding, too, has practical implications. In PD programs, an emphasis on increasing teachers' SMK without sufficient attention to the preconceived mental models of middle school students (as well as those of the teachers) may be ineffective in ultimately improving their students' physical science knowledge."

50 minute presentation on use of Scratch to teach some maths concepts 10-year-old and 16-year-old kids. Interestingly even the 16-year-olds thought the cat made it look like "kids stuff". There's a recording of the full presentation at https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/recording/playback/link/table/dropin?sid=2008350&suid=D.9FA226957D30A14AB25F33DEBBF5D3 (note worth using the Blackboard recording rather than the video, even though it's more of a faff, as the former includes a shot of the speaker where he demonstrates things physically, whereas the latter just shows the presentation)

Mike Schatz from Georgia Tech spoke at the Trieste MOOC workshop I and Donald Clark also contributed to. Mike's running introductory Physics MOOCs on Coursera, with Gates Foundation support. He spoke very highly of Piazza as a forum platform. This PDF describes its features.