By Mona Chalabi. Datablog: Moocs appear to be revolutionising the world of education. We study the numbers to find out whether it's all just a lot of hype.
Distance learning is nothing new. In 1938, the International Council for Correspondence Education was founded in Canada. In the same year, they held their first world conference, attended by 87 delegates. Only three of them weren't from America or Canada. More...

Quiz: Did these famous faces study at Oxbridge or online?
Where did Arnold Schwarzenegger study international marketing of fitness and business administration?
Oxbridge graduates tend to dominate the media, but which of these well-known people studied through distance learning? More...

By Roy Greenslade. Academics across the world are up in arms at a proposal to bar the senior members of the International Studies Association (ISA) from blogging. The proposal says:
"No editor of any ISA journal or member of any editorial team of an ISA journal can create or actively manage a blog unless it is an official blog of the editor's journal or the editorial team's journal.
This policy requires that all editors and members of editorial teams to apply this aspect of the code of conduct to their ISA journal commitments. All editorial members, both the editor in chief(s) and the board of editors/editorial teams, should maintain a complete separation of their journal responsibilities and their blog associations." More...

By Richard Adams and Libby Page. Ucas reveals 4% increase in the number of applicants to UK universities despite slight decline in number of 18-year-olds. The proportion of British 18-year-olds applying to university has reached its highest-ever level, according to figures for undergraduate applications in 2014 – thanks to a surge in applications from London and among women. More...

By Nushy Rose. I thought Oxbridge was for the elite, but after a degree at another university I'm doing a postgrad course there. When I was 16, I wrote an article that ended up on the front page of the Guardian education supplement. That article – based on a weekend taster course at Oxford that my school had sent me on – insisted that Oxbridge was socially elitist, and its application procedure so biased towards private sector applicants that I would no longer consider it as an option for my own higher education. More...

By Nick Petford. Vice-chancellor Nick Petford writes from the Kurdistan camp where refugees have lost an education as well as their homes. As dusk approaches the temperature fall is dramatic. The small groups of residents still outside turn their backs on the cold and return home. Except of course they don't. Home is not here, among the muddy UNHCR-branded tents and water trucks but somewhere all together more hostile. There are now more than 250,000 Syrian refugees in the Kurdistan region of Northern Iraq, itself no stranger to suffering. Remember Saddam Hussein's chemical warfare against the inhabitants of Halajba? They were Kurds, the same people now offering sanctuary to their desperate neighbours. More...

By Nigel Vincent. Michael Booth took a few well-aimed shots at the myth of the Nordic Utopia this week. Like him, I too am married to a Dane and regularly spend time there, and I can testify to one thing that they definitely get right: their school language policy. One foreign language, English, is obligatory for all pupils. We used to have a similar principle here until the last government abandoned it in 2004. More...

By Matthew Taylor. Students with three years' residency say they are being unfairly targeted by rule changes aimed at stemming a flood of migrants. When the letter landed on Crina Petrariu's doormat at the home she shares with her husband and young son in Hull, she assumed there had been a mistake. The short, official note stated that the second-year chemistry student's financial support had been frozen – and that she now owed the government £3,500. More...

By Melissa Benn. Test-obsessed schools are producing women who are getting an A* for compliance but are unprepared for their lives ahead. More girls are applying to university this year; 62,000 more of them to be exact. To anyone who has followed the steady rise in girls' educational achievements over the past few decades, this should come as no surprise. While boys may be gaining ground in recent years (notching up more top A-level marks), overall girls now "outperform" boys from the early years through to postgraduate qualifications. More...

By Andrew Martin. Andrew Martin grew up in York, upped sticks to London and never moved back north. This week he swam against the tide of migration to the south-east, and went home. When I read the news this week about the migration of talented young people from "the regions" to London and the south-east, where four out of every five new private-sector jobs were created between 2010 and 2012, my first thought was: "That's scandalous." My second thought was: "That's exactly what I did."
I grew up in York. After university, I moved to London to study law, and I never moved back north. More...