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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.

US oriented & UK relevant. 50 min talk about inequity in maths learning by Uri Treisman. Data in 36 page PDF of Treisman's slides at http://tinyurl.com/cn85gp6. Keith Devlin writes " This month's column is short, but I am asking you to set aside 51 minutes and 36 seconds to watch the embedded video. It is a recording of the Iris M. Carl Equity Address given on Friday April 19 at this year's NCTM Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado. The title of the talk is "Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize" and the speaker is Uri Treisman, professor of mathematics and of public affairs, and director of the Charles A. Dana Center, at the University of Texas at Austin. I was not able to be at NCTM, but on the recommendation of several colleagues, I watched the YouTube video. I simply cannot write a column on mathematics or mathematics education in the same month as Treisman's immensely more important, profound-and powerfully articulated-words became part of mathematics education history. As a community, we now have our own "I have a dream" speech."

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.

A kind of maths-specific Khan Academy. I was wondering at first if 'Patrick' might want to mix in some Citizen Maths video tutorials, but it seems he just features his own. Could be that someone else could mix together his stuff and CMs if there were any areas in which they complemented each other. His stuff is mostly beyond Level 2, however.

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

Despite her annoying vocie I found myself laughing out loud at these short videos, which came my way via Aaron Sloman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Sloman, who was an interview subject for the Scaling Up report.

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

[48 p PDF], and worth looking at thoroughtly. Excerpt: "The statistical model found that measures of student effort trump all other variables tested for their relationships to student success, including demographic descriptions of the students, course subject matter and student use of support services. The clearest predictor of passing a course is the number of problem sets a student submitted. The relationship between completion of problem sets and success is not linear; rather the positive effect increases dramatically after a certain baseline of effort has been made. Video Time, another measure of effort, was also found to have a strong positive relationship with passing, particularly for Stat 95 students."

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)

Interesting use of and ways of representing proportion in this video infographic.

Interesting sample of findings from use of analytics in xMOOCs