A report published Monday by Moody's Investors Service says that the spread of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, is "credit positive" for universities that offer them but "credit negative" for the majority of lesser-known institutions that lack a prominent brand name.

Karen Head is an assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Literature, Media, and Communication, and director of the university's Communication Center. She reports periodically on her group's efforts to develop and offer a massive open online course in freshman composition.

MOOC resource run by the cMOOC founders.

Nice account of taking an edX class.

A liberal arts technologist crunches numbers on the MOOC he just passed.

Could be a useful doc. Lots of interviews. Very Harvard-centric.

Very interesting discussion including U Penn's pro-MOOC president and the head of edX.

Millions of students have signed up for massive open online courses, and hundreds of universities are offering some form of Web-based curriculum. Most students aren't paying much for these classes, if they're paying anything at all. So where is all that knowledge-and all the cash-coming from?

OpenupEd: a multinational, multilingual European MOOC enterprise: "Courses range from mathematics to economics, e-skills to e-commerce, climate change to cultural heritage, corporate social responsibility to the modern Middle East, and language learning to writing fiction. Each partner is offering courses via its own ..."

Good stuff in here.

Some very interesting reflections. Two stood out for me: 1: A missing forum element: "The worst thing was getting behind and being unable to catch up. There was no forum on which to discuss this, and I was not comfortable sharing with strangers," 2. Students wanting talking heads: "the developers of Edinburgh's e-learning course opted against having the content driven by audiovisual footage of lectures delivered to camera, choosing instead to curate open-source online content, including YouTube footage and academic papers. The decision proved unpopular with some students, Knox says, as they had been expecting to see professors imparting knowledge as they would in a lecture theatre."

Impressions on the Mod-Po class.

Sounds exciting, doesn't it? And a fine example of a humanities MOOC.

Case study of MOOCifying one MIT class.

The recent wave of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has highlighted the potential for making educational offerings accessible at a global level. The attention MOOCs have received is well deserved, but it belies the fact that various forms of online education have existed for many years.

Some interesting notes, reflecting MOOC instructors' thoughts: -students shouldn't get credit at their school for passing a MOOC -MOOCs will lower college costs -teaching one takes time from other responsibilities

Heh! Darkness.

During any given semester at a liberal arts college like Wellesley, students may experience what will prove to be a transformational moment in their lives. A pre-med student from El Paso might come to Wellesley and publish research with her biochemistry professor.