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List of recent (back to 2010) startups in the online higher ed field. A range of target audiences.

critique of MOOcs and the direction MOOCs will take us in especially in higher education

Brian Lamb with another insightful and inciting post on the poverty of critical thinking in Higher Education regarding the future of that self same education. If they don't pull their fingers out their fundaments we are all doomed is the message. And by the way, the 'they' is us.

"A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities."

A briefing paper by The Higher Education Academy and JISC highlighting the benefits to UK universities and colleges of creating, sharing and using open educational resources (OER). 

"...students may be asked a question like 'Are you a runner?' when they log into the learning-management system. If a student checks 'yes,' he or she will thereafter see ads for a certain brand of running shoes on the home page."<--quick Troy write a plugin for Moodle!

President of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education argues that students fail because universities don't set up situations for them to succeed.

By this autumn, every university in England will have published a new set of information about every undergraduate course on offer. These Key Information Sets will include data on areas such as contact hours, graduate salaries and student satisfaction. But with little fanfare, one institution has already put itself ahead of the game by displaying information about its graduates in a way that could set a benchmark for the sector. The University of Oxford has created an online tool for comparing data about its graduates' careers and salaries. Tucked away on its main careers website and organised into a set of user-friendly tables, it allows immediate comparisons of the salary and employment status of its alumni from 2008-09 and 2009-10 - undergraduate and postgraduate - sorted by subject area, individual course and even constituent college.

"I've just been in an interesting panel discussion at the JISC Online Conference on the subject of 'digital literacy'. The recording of the Elluminate session is available. The session reinforced to me just how diverse people's views on digital literacies are. Most new to the field make the assumption that digital literacy is singular and consists of basic skills in the digital realm. In effect, digital competency. Those more experienced in the field, such as Helen Beetham, talk of the importance of this baseline - the 'ABC' of digital literacy as she called it, but higher-level skills as well."

Publishers of humanities and social science journals could go bankrupt if all academic papers became freely available after six months, a report >>commissioned by publishers<< has warned.

Probably higher level school/undergrad level. Ones I've seen are 'interesting' takes on maths rather than dry lecture type stuff.

Open textbooks - the new wave after Moocs?

The sky hasn't fallen in because Australia moved to an uncapped environment but there are questions about graduating standards.

Good set of slides bemoaning the way the PPT is used in university.

Ambitious plan @UniofAdelaide to replace large lectures with small group teaching, in part enabled by e-learning http://t.co/DozwtBQj01

Ambitious plan @UniofAdelaide to replace large lectures with small group teaching, in part enabled by e-learning http://t.co/DozwtBQj01

Point by point refutation of an article complaining about moocs.

Account of difficulty with Open Access and misunderstanding / misreporting. Not an argument to stop OA but a plea to make the OA change now mean something to readers.