Upbeat piece in the Economist about the imminent impact of "adaptive technology" on school eduction in the US (and then on the world).

Worth bearing in mind from the point of view of the course as a service

Worthwhile piece by John Duhring commenting on MOOC production methods, and with plenty of emphasis on Keith Devlin's Introduction to Mathematical Thinking. For more on the latter see my http://fm.schmoller.net/2013/06/second-report-from-keith-devlins-itmt-course.html

Interesting, trenchant riposte to the http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/the-faulty-logic-of-the-math-wars/

An interesting (?) commentary, by implication, on the long division / quadratic equation formula debate. Argues that the reason why learning effortlessly to use "mechanical alogorithms" matters is that this (can) give learners a clear understanding of an alogorithmic approach to solving mathematical problems. Not my field enough to know whether the arguments are well founded, however.

A "how to" about embedding Khan Academy exercises in Google Coursebuilder. Over my head, but worth being aware of this kind of capability becoming available.

Would there be scope to use Mozilla Open Badges as a core element of the Applied Maths Course? If there is, should we be investigating the practicalities?

With apologies for pointing to my own stuff, here is my second report from Keith Devlin's "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" Coursera MOOC. The first report is here: http://tinyurl.com/bqe9jck.

I'm not a fan of lists of most important things, but I like the work of Will Thalheimer and have kept vaguely in contact with him over the years. I think this list is worth having in mind when designing (online) courses

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.

Slightly verbose, but authentic blog post by Cathy Davidson about what it is like at the sharp end of MOOC production and teaching. Note her point about 150 hours of production time per hour of MOOC learning time.

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

MOOCs and Open Education. Useful, if HE-focused, 21p report [PDF] by Stephen Powell and Li Yuan from Jisc Cetis. Worth most project people at least scan reading, for orientation purposes.

The edX open source platform software is now publicly available on GitHub.

This caught my eye. I think it is probably run in Google CourseBuilder.

Interesting article, with nice density maps by Koller, Ng and others, about Coursera participation.

Mick Fletcher (whom Seb knows) provides an overview of the double challenge faced by English FE from August 2013 when all those without GCSE Maths or English at Grade C must continue to study hose subjects, and even those with such an achievement should be expected to go further. "The logistical challenge, including the requirement to find hundreds of extra specialist teachers, is immense."

This article gets in a great deal deeper than a lot of other recent coverage. As always, the focus is on HE.

Comprehensive filleting by Donald Clark Edinburgh University's excellent self-review of its first 6 MOOCs. DC's review and the Edinburgh report are each worth reading.

Getting on for 15 years ago I put David Wiley's precursor to Creative Commons "Open Content" licence on the wholly online Learning To Teach Online Course that I played a role in, having read about Wiley and the licence in the Economist. Wiley is still active in this field and this post has a very incisive observation in it about personalisation. I do not know whether I agree with it fully (adaptive learning and algorithms may/should have a role too): "There is simply no way to scale the centralized creation of educational materials personalized for everyone in the world (cf. the 15 years of learning objects hype and investment, which feels very similar to the current MOOC mania). Perhaps the only way to accomplish the amount of personalization necessary to achieve high quality at scale is to enable decentralized personalization to be performed locally by peers, teachers, parents, and others. And given the absolute madness of international copyright law there is no rights and royalties regime under which this personalization could possibly happen. The only practicable solution is to provide free, universal access to content, assessments, and other resources that includes free 4Rs permissions that empower local actors to engage in localization and redistribution."