A 2008 report by the think tank Reform (non-political, but "on the right"). One of the authors, Liz Truss, is now a Conservative MP and DFE Minister. I'd be curious to know what colleagues at IOE and OCR reckon to it.
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.
Six page PDF from the Open University of Catalonia with some sensible perspectives on two broad classes of MOOC and on issues relating to their design.
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".
Here is a recently published table of courses (some Google's, most from others) using Google Course Builder. Includes the previously reported Scratch-based "Creative Computing".
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
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.
This looks (at least superficially) to be a company with an interesting, apparently platform-free approach to adaptive learning. Not that a web site is usually a good way to make judgements, on such matters other than instinctively.
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.
This free, hour-long webinar, "The Legal Side of MOOCs," will discuss important legal considerations that come into play with MOOCs. How does copyright apply to the delivery of course materials in the MOOC context? What about laws governing accessibility for persons with disabilities? Are there important privacy issues to address? In this webinar, Madelyn Wessel, associate general counsel for the University of Virginia, will discuss the legal landscape pertaining to MOOCS, including course production, data creation, copyright, privacy, and conduct issues.