They may be a little late to the MOOC party, but two newly-launched European open course platforms might still be able to carve out a niche.
Coursera and edX, the two main players in the US at this point, have been up and running for almost 18 months. And although both ventures have a long list of international partners, the rising cost of higher education is building interest in MOOCs in Europe and the UK. The founders of new European platforms  – Future Learn in the UK, and iversity in Germany — are betting they can still make headway in an increasingly crowded market. More...

Habits of Effective Connected Learners by Stephen Downes
Working and learning in an online environment is fundamentally different from working and learning in a physical environment. It becomes much more important to make connections and leverage the store of knowledge at your disposal. Relations between people depend more on cooperation and less on collaboration. Information that was valuable only when withheld is now valuable only when shared. Marketing gives way to meaning. In this presentation, Stephen Downes reviews the habits he has cultivated to thrive as a learner and researcher online, providing practical advice from network theory and a lifetime of experience.
Stephen Downes works for the National Research Council of Canada where he has served as a Senior Researcher, based in Moncton, New Brunswick, since 2001. Affiliated with the Learning and Collaborative Technologies Group, Institute for Information Technology, Downes specializes in the fields of online learning, new media, pedagogy and philosophy.
Downes is perhaps best known for his daily newsletter, OLDaily, which is distributed by web, email and RSS to thousands of subscribers around the world, and as the originator of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). He is a popular speaker, appearing at hundreds of events around the world over the last fifteen years. He has published hundreds of articles both online and in print through two decades of research and development into learning networks and related technologies. More...

By Owen Youngman. A month in to my first experience as a Mooc teacher, I'm certainly learning: institutions must adapt fast to serve the best students. Those of us who are engaged in teaching "massive open online courses", or Moocs, find ourselves answering a lot of questions these days, and that's one we hear a lot.
One month into my own effort for Northwestern University, I've heard so many versions of that one on the street, in meetings, and even when doing TV interviews, that I have a quick and facile answer: the students and the software. The more interesting questions, however, are about the kinds of teaching and learning possible through platforms like Coursera (that's where my NU class – "Understanding Media by Understanding Google," with an initial enrollment of more than 45,000 – is offered). More...

Around 150 participants, including representatives from higher education institutions and associations, public authorities, quality assurance agencies and the media, gathered last week for the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA)-EUA Seminar “Making Sense of the MOOCs”. The event was designed to enable participants to discuss and find out more about the development and potential impact of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which have been developing rapidly and are creating much discussion and debate in Europe and further afield. Speakers at the event included representatives from HE institutions in Europe and the US, MOOC platforms and representatives from ACA and EUA.
While the initial development of MOOCs was largely concentrated in the US, there has recently been a sharp increase in the number of European HE institutions offering them. According to the European MOOC scorecard on the EC’s Open Education Europa website there were more than 250 MOOCs across Europe at the end of August.
Some institutions in Europe have preferred to offer courses through platforms/activities initiated in the US such as Coursera, edX and Udacity. Others have joined the growing number of initiatives launched in Europe (such as FutureLearn and Iversity), some of which have received public funding or government support (such as France Université Numérique), or have launched their own MOOCs. In April, with the support of the European Commission, the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities also launched OpenupEd, described as the first pan-European MOOC initiative. More...

By Peter Galuszka. According to many, higher education in the United States is a corrupt, self-serving, unsustainable mess.
We need to fire college administrators wholesale, go whole hog to the fad of Massive Open Online Courses, admit our major failings in another fad (STEM), get rid of art and Aeschylus and privatize the University of Virginia while turning oversight to a bunch of New York-based hedge fund Wahoo grads who, no doubt, are the source of all wisdom and virtue because they made zillions seeking alpha and playing edges. Real humanitarians, in other words.
This is the conservative refrain coming from a bunch of white, mostly male and mostly well off people who still resent the supposed liberal bias of professors back in the 1960s and 1970s. They are still seeking revenge. More...

"Moocdemic" is an online game in which users fight a virtual pandemic using their mobile devices. The game is running in tandem with Penn State's MOOC "Epidemics: the Dynamics of Infectious Diseases."
More than 29,000 people are signed up for a massive open online course (MOOC) titled "Epidemics: the Dynamics of Infectious Diseases" that opened this week. During part of this course, thousands of participants will be simultaneously fighting a virtual epidemic on their cellphones and tablets.
The course, offered by Penn State University's Eberly College of Science, "is different from all the other massive open online courses out there in a number of ways," said Marcel Salathe, the assistant professor of biology and of computer science and engineering who leads the team of eight Penn State faculty members teaching the eight-week course. "This is a multi-faculty course, meaning learners are exposed to the material from a leading expert in the field. On a weekly basis, we will release a video discussing questions that the learners have posted in the forums, making the course much more interactive than traditional MOOCs. Finally, a virtual epidemic will be unfolding during the course, and the learners will be able to determine the fate of the epidemic with their mobile device."
The location-based game "Moocdemic" simulates the spread of an infectious disease, and lets players spread it and attempt to control the outbreak. It is playable from any mobile device with a Web browser. More...

By Cindy Londeore. In September 2013, Hybrid Pedagogy published an e-book of graduate student essays focused on student experiences in MOOCs -- from EdX, Udacity, and other xMOOCs, to improvisational MOOCs created by the students themselves using open web resources. The full collection, Learner Experiences with MOOCs and Open Online Learning, was published via GitHub. The following article from Cindy Londeore is one of the essays from that volume. You can read more about the e-book in George Veletsiano’s introduction, “How Do Learners Experience Open Online Learning?”
Dropout. It’s such a nasty word. The high school dropout rate is held up by reformers to bolster their argument that the American public school system is failing. Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have an expected 90% dropout rate which is not considered a problem. This juxtaposition begs the question; when is dropping out not a big deal? More...