Strong overview of the problems with current MOOC educational design and research, and recommendations for where the field should go.

Within the rapidly expanding field of educational technology, learners and educators must confront a seemingly overwhelming selection of tools designed to deliver and facilitate both online and blended learning. Many of these tools assume that learning is configured and delivered in closed contexts, through learning management systems (LMS).

Good study of learning in MOOC, comparing different types of MOOC students AND comparing MOOC with students in face-to-face classes.

Stanford study on how people respond to positive and negative feedback in comments. Poor students respond to negative attention by posting more and worse; good students don't respond to praise (they don't post more or better).

At the end of May, Harvard and MIT jointly released a dataset containing statistics about their online courses in the Academic Year of 2013. This Person-Course De-Identified dataset contains 641,138 events, chronicling 476,532 students who have taken up to 13 unique courses from a variety of topics: However, this assortment of courses is not a substitution for a typical college education, as the vast majority of students only take one class.

Published July 10, 2014 Rebecca Griffiths, Matthew Chingos, Christine Mulhern, Richard Spies Online technologies show promise for educating more people in innovative ways that can lower costs for universities and colleges, but how can higher education leaders move forward, confident in their choices about how best to integrate these technologies on their campuses?