Open source issuing, management, and user achievement tracking platform for Mozilla Open Badges

Free tool for graphing/plotting maths functions. Works on smartphones and tablets. Free.

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.

"The key is all about the depth of understanding of the subject that they receive - it is not about 'doing maths' but much more about 'thinking mathematically'.

"Because students come to the course for many different reasons, course designers should make it easier for learners to meet a variety of objectives. Since many participants in online courses may just want to learn a few new things, we can help them by releasing all course content at the outset of the course and enabling them to search for specific topics of interest. as course designers, we should be paying more attention to creating effective, relevant activities than focusing so heavily on course content. We hypothesize that learners also use activities' instant feedback to help them determine whether they should spend time reviewing the associated content  We also believe that we haven't given enough weight to teaching learners how to evaluate their own work. We plan to keep experimenting with self-evaluation in future courses."

"Because students come to the course for many different reasons, course designers should make it easier for learners to meet a variety of objectives. Since many participants in online courses may just want to learn a few new things, we can help them by releasing all course content at the outset of the course and enabling them to search for specific topics of interest. as course designers, we should be paying more attention to creating effective, relevant activities than focusing so heavily on course content. We hypothesize that learners also use activities' instant feedback to help them determine whether they should spend time reviewing the associated content  We also believe that we haven't given enough weight to teaching learners how to evaluate their own work. We plan to keep experimenting with self-evaluation in future courses."

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.

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

I hadn't come across OpenMOOC before, though it seems to have been around for at least a year. Not an alternative for us, but a model to compare against our open...?

Suggestion that social networks could be instrumental in helping MOOCs extend reach beyond those who are already enfranchised and educated. Potentially relevant to Citizens' Maths?

I have been in touch with this writer before (he sent me a review copy of an earlier book and I blogged about it) on the off chance this might be any help

Included here merely as a 'light relief' anecdote on the potential to apply maths (albeit beyond Level 2) to 21st century life. And it's a good read, with a sharp punchline.

"New niche certifications being offered by providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are aimed at satisfying employers' specific needs. Available at a fraction of the cost of a four-year degree, they represent the latest crack in the monopoly traditional universities have in credentialing higher education."

Argument that MOOCs can be used as part of a 'flipped' and/or blended approach for students in (what they call in the US) community colleges. This quote suggests Bill has lecture-based MOOCs in mind "Of course it's quite controversial, what software can take over, but once you get a great pool of lectures out there that incorporate problem solving and drill practice, this frees up time" for more-personalized instruction in the classroom, Mr. Gates said. With more work done at home and online, students could spend less time on campuses, freeing up classroom space to accommodate more students, he said. That approach works well, he added, with remedial mathematics, where only about 10 percent of students who start courses end up getting two-year degrees within three years."

"In the future, we will provide support for users of the most recent version of Course Builder to import their courses into the Open edX or MOOC.org format. If you aren't running the latest version of Course Builder, we advise that you upgrade in order to align with Google App Engine updates."

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

Just saving this to log the commitment "In the future, we will provide an upgrade path to Open edX and MOOC.org from Course Builder"

Short article hinting at the broader gameplan behind/beyond Open edX

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)