Applied Maths for Ordinary Citizens

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."

Lots of food for thought in this retrospective summary of mainly MOOC and maths learning related articles from 2013 by Stanford U's Keith Devlin

Tony Bates (who is an "old-style" authority on online distance learning) concludes a long series of posts on productivity and online learning.

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

Ampp3d is a data journalism site from The Daily Mirror. It may provide some useful examples of data being presented and analysed, or of data that CM students could represent and reanalyse.

The OU's Doug Clow live blogs from today's London University conference.

"This document captures edX's product direction, as we see it today. As things get closer up and more concrete, we'll add more detail, link to specs. We try to describe the roadmap in terms of the problems that we'll be trying to solve, instead of just in terms of features that implement particular solutions. "

The usual thoughtful stuff from Keith Devlin about learning maths - in this case "Quantitative Reasoning" using MOOCs.

It gets a bit proselytising towards the end but the notion of evaluating proofs could generalise to evaluating other types of mathematical statement so, although we are not interested in mathematical proof in our course, the article could still have some relevance to us.

Ufi Trust Trustee comments on the emerging MOOC provider landscape.

I think this is a cannier- than-many assessment of the MOOC platform situation.

"To better organize and direct the efforts of our open source community, and to ensure that every contribution gets handled appropriately, edX is forming the Open edX team. This team will always have at least one person who is employed by edX (the company), but may also contain individuals who work on the edX codebase without working for edX the company."

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.

As an interview this is a bit of a thin brew, but it is worth at least scan reading.

4 page PDF from a Stanford group including the venerable Roy Pea. Might be relevant to several aspects of our project. Focuses on the question "How can we make a MOOC work for as many of its diverse participants as possible?". Argues for the use of A/B testing to inform MOOC design. Silent on adaptive learning. Still pretty tentative, though.