By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Increasing Social Presence in Online Learning through Small Group Discussions
Mete Akcaoglu, Eunbae Lee, The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2016/05/18

This could have been such an interesting paper had the authors not succumbed to what is a disease in our field, small (n=33) and unrepresentative (graduate students pursuing a master's degree in education) samples. The idea was to determine the impact of small group size on social presence in learning, where social presence was measured in three dimensions. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Interested In The Moodle Academy?
Moodle News, 2016/05/17

In what looks like "a direct response to the Canvas Network," Moodle's Gavin Hendrik has announced the Moodle Academy, "a centralized MOOC hosting platform run and managed by Moodle. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Culture and effective online learning environments
Tony Bates, online learning and distance education resources, 2016/05/16

Tony Bates has some sharp and insightful points on culture. "Culture is a critical component of any learning environment," he writes. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Yet another AIMS misfire on e-learning in Nova Scotia schools
Grant Frost, Local xPress, 2016/05/31
Criticism of a recent report from the Atlantic Institute of Market Studies (AIMS) on online learning in eastern Canada. I covered the report reasonably favourably. But the Nova Scotia Teacher's Union (NSTU) was not happy and neither was Grant Frost, both of which call the report's author to task for understating the scale of online learning innovation in the province. More...