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The Community College Research Center is based at Columbia University. It describes itself as the US's "leading independent authority on the nation's nearly 1200 two-year colleges". Since 2009 CCRC has been doing (amongst other things) a range of interesting and important qualitative and quantitative research about online courses in community colleges (which sit somewhere between FE and HE in a UK context, overlapping with both), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and led by Shanna Smith Jaggars. This page has links to abstracts and presentations, which highlight general and specific disparities in outcomes between face-to-face and online provision, and which point to action that can be taken to deal with these problems. (Instructor presence seems to be key.....)

Philip Guo presents preliminary research about video usage in some edX MOOCs. Strong evidence for keeping them short.

My instinct is to beware of research findings that purport to be universal and context-independent. But since the context here is MOOCs, broadly defined, this research on the optimal length of instructional videos may be relevant 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)."

Interesting piece by Keith Devlin about instructional videos and the research evidence showing that they tend to reinforce preconceptions even if the learner's preconceptions are completely at variance with the instructional content.

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".

Interesting angle on "the order in which learners should do things" that has a strong resonance with Dave Pratt's introduction at the kick-off meeting in July. "Students are better prepared to understand and appreciate the elegance of a theory or a principle when exploring the domain by themselves first."

Based on 2010-2011 data, this BIS study (which I've not read) shows that it is not uncommon for adults who have already got, say, Maths GCSE (or equivalent) at Grade C or above to enrol on a numeracy course at a lower level. This probably strengthens our hunch that there are more people "out there" who might gain from CM than would be assumed from the proportion of adults who have already got a Level 2 Maths qualification.

Short paper on characteristics and motivations of learners on Coursera courses. May have some relevance to our learner engagement, though note the comments about possibility that these results may not be generalisable