We're launching a MOOC in October called "An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching." The first week focuses on four key principles of learning that play out in every STEM classroom. As a reflective and synthesis activity, we'd like to ask each MOOC participant to share a story from their own experiences as STEM learners, a story that illustrates one of the four learning principles. We'd like each participant to tag their story, first with the learning principle (prior knowledge, knowledge organizations, etc.), then with their discipline (chemistry, biology, etc.). And we'd like this collection of stories to be searchable by both tags. That way, if one wanted to see stories of how, say, prior knowledge plays in a chemistry class, that would be an easy search.

I was thinking we would have to build a tool to provide this kind of crowdsourcing functionality, but perhaps Diigo will do the trick. Diigo is designed to share bookmarks (links), but one can also contribute a "topic" to a group, which is what I'm doing now. And Diigo provides the tag searching ability I described above, along with the ability for users to comment on each other's post. There's also a "like" button, but it doesn't look like one can use that to sort search results. Diigo groups also have RSS feeds, so if we wanted to pipe data out of Diigo into some other tool, we would have some options.

The downside is that Diigo provides a lot of functionality we don't need, which could be confusing for MOOC participants who are new to Diigo. We'd have to provide very specific instructions.

George Siemens weighs in on the pace of change.

One of Cathy Davidson's big things is giving students a bigger role in shaping the direction of a course. So it's not surprising that she would point out how most MOOCs don't include any structures for doing so. But such things *do* happen, as I noted in my post here: http://derekbruff.org/?p=2295.

All MOOCs are not created equal.

Here's what faculty right now are thinking about moving higher ed online.

Massive list of links to information on MOOCs

Was UVA's president fired because she wasn't responding fast enough to changes in the online learning landscape? Did UVA's board over-react to news about open education initiatives at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford?

Provocative title, but a nice overview of P2PU

The more I hear about Canvas, the more I think it has the potential to support useful changes in higher education.

Ryan Craig argues that the open education movement is waiting for its Southwest Airlines to revolutionize the business, and that none of the current big players (MIT, Stanford, etc.) will play that role.

A nice focus on the move beyond content-only online education in the last year or so.

Death knell of the lecture hall as college moves online? Yes, according to Stanford's president.

Three ways teachers are expanding their students' "learning palates"

A cognitive theory for the revolution?

Elon U. and Pew have released a report based on a survey of over 1000 thought leaders in the areas of education, technology, and cognition. The report argues for a "reinvention" of public education to better serve the millennial generation.