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"'Massive open online courses: Higher Education's digital moment?' tracks the development of MOOCs from a small selection of specialist courses to major online platforms, offering hundreds of courses with millions of users.  The report explores MOOCs' surge in popularity and discusses whether this signals the beginning of a significant transformation in higher education, similar to those seen in other sectors, such as the newspaper industry. It pulls together the recent trends in online education delivery and looks at how universities can respond to the changing online environment."

"The public and college presidents differ over the educational value of online courses. Only 29% of the public says online courses offer an equal value compared with courses taken in a classroom. Half (51%) of the college presidents surveyed say online courses provide the same value."

Facilitating Online is a course intended for training educators as online facilitators of fully online and mixed mode courses. The Centre for Educational Technology (CET) produced a Course Leader's Guide as an Open Educational Resource to assist educators and trainers who wish to implement a course on online facilitation within their institution or across several institutions. The guide contains the course model, week-by-week learning activities, general guidance to the course leader on how to implement and customise the course and specific guidelines on each learning activity.

This study is an exploratory case study aimed at analysing one academic's teaching in terms of conceptions of teaching and its effect on student involvement or engagement. The research has been done by drawing on Gonzalez' dimensions of online teaching and data generated by the LMS and data analytics in general. There is growing interest in the use of academic analytics. However, most of the reported work is being done at the level of institutions/groupings of courses. Improving teaching can only be done through changing the conceptions of teaching/learning held by the academics. Can individual teaching staff, reflecting on their courses, learn anything important from examining their courses through analytics? How can this be done effectively? What do they find? This study uses an academic's approach to teaching + use as an indicator of involvement, therefore, an improvement of teaching.

"MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses for free to a virtual community of learners around the world. It will also enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences. The first MITx course, 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics), will be launched in an experimental prototype form. Watch this space for further upcoming courses, which will become available in Fall 2012."

Account of the Google Searching course and how Google Course Builder allows a variety of interaction.

LOOC = Little Open Online Course free courses with capped small numbers of enrolments

Article on demise of Coursera course.

"That the acronym MOOCs rhymes with "nukes" seems apt. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs - led by two profit-making start-ups, Coursera and Udacity, founded by entrepreneurial Stanford professors - are a new disruptive force in education. "

27 video primers by C.J. Bonk on e-teaching and learning topics such as planning online courses, managing online courses, etc.

"As students became more competent with online courses, the completion rates increased to match face-to-face completion rates. This may suggest that online courses require time for familiarisation."

Infographic on online education providers that offer online courses - including ones that are free and well known such Coursera & Udacity as well as others that are less well known  which charge subscription fees such as Benchprep and The Great Courses. 

"It was just 18 months ago that we were living in the "Year of the MOOC." Massive open online courses-MOOC for short-were supposed to revolutionize the way people learned and deliver high-quality education to the masses. But the idea faced a tough 2013. The co-founder of Udacity, an early pioneer in free online education, admitted that his company initially had a "lousy product," while studies showed that hardly any students were actually completing the courses offered by such services at all."

New way of getting a specialist Master's degree from MIT - do online courses open to anyone, then a proctered exam and a one-semester residential.

OCW Finder helps people find free online courses called OpenCourseWares (OCWs). Universities and other OCW providers can register their courses with OCW Finder to help people find them.

Reflecting on Massive OPEN Online Courses and Massive 'Open' ONLINE Courses.

Different tracks online students take with MOOCs e.g. do the bits which clear up the muddy points in the topic, take the course because the professor is famous, want to find out what MOOCs are like etc. These are the students lumped together as 'drop-outs' and unpacking their experience shows useful learning takes place, but they don't complete the course.

Online conference for the course Internet Communities and Social Networks.  Designed by students on course but open to all. This was part of their assessment.

Excellent post by Michael Feldstein on course design issues to be considered in the light of MOOC developments.

Stanford has unveiled a free online open source platform for running MOOCs called Class2Go.