By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Are MOOCs Just Moneymaking Scams? Providers Challenged To Substantiate Grandiose Claims
Keith Button, Campus Technology.
So the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education has launched a video and campaign against MOOCs, depicting MOOCs as schemes designed to make money. This follows the release of three working papers  last year "questioning the basic positive assumptions about online education." I will admit, Coursera, Udacity and EdX make good targets. But it doesn't make sense to tar all MOOCs (and all online learning) with the same brush. More on this item at Inside Higher Ed, Huffington Post, L.A. Times. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Conventional Online Higher Education Will Absorb MOOCs, 2 Reports Say
Steve Kolowich, The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog.
I think that the most interesting thing about this headline is that it asserts that there is such a thing as 'conventional online higher education'. Even a few years ago the words would have choked in the Chronicle headline writer's pen. So the two reports are from Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute, which released the Bellwether report, and Teachers College at Columbia University, which released a report cited here the other day. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The MOOC Problem
Rolin Moe, Hybrid Pedagogy.
Interetsing article about the appropriation of terms like 'MOOC' and '2.0' to support marketing. The author concludes "MOOCs have been sold not only as an agent to democratize education, but also as a necessity because the real crisis is about employment and not learning." But also, this is worth noting: "in reality the MOOC as a learning system has underperformed traditional models and shows no large-scale cost benefit to education providers. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. An Alternative Perspective on Group Dynamics
Jenny Mackness.
In this post Jenny Mackness offers a rethink on the need for group formation. "How could it ever be right to not support the weakest member of the group? ... There were some lovely people in our walking group who shared these values, but also some who didn’t seem to understand that in a situation such as walking the West Highland Way, commitment to the group was important." It's an interesting challenge. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why We Hate Recommending Software Downloads To Our Readers
Editorial, HowToGeek.
Good article pointing to some of the problems associated with software download sites (and I would add that it's not only freeware - you will be subjected to these scams on pay sites as well). Even good and reliable sites change hads and start doing things like bundling search-hijack services (like Conduit, which actually in stalls software that blocks your attempts to change your search provider back to DuckDuckGo). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. LAe-R: A new learning analytics tool in Moodle for assessing students’ performance
Ourania Petropoulou, Katerina Kasimatis, Ioannis Dimopoulos, Symeon Retalis, Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology.
This paper summarizes the state of the art in Moodle analytics tools and presents "a new cloud-based assessment tool, called Learning Analytics Enhanced Rubric (LAe-R), which has been developed as a Moodle plug-in (version 2.2+). See the current issue of the Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology. Past issues. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. “In Over Our Heads” – My Simmons commencement address
David Weinberger, Joho the Blog.
David Weinberger hits the mark with this talk about information overload. We don't feel overloaded by the effects of 1.3 million apple pie recipes or 7.6 million cute cat photos. Why not? Because we're not expected to master them. But with information it's different, because there used to be so much less that we could master all the information. But not any more. "We’re all in over our heads. Forever. This isn’t a temporary swim in the deep end of the pool. Being in over our heads is the human condition." But hey - that's a good thing. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Disrupting Colonial Mindsets: The Power of Learning Networks
Catherine McGregor, In Education.
This paper offers an example of "how one particular teacher-learning network—the Aboriginal Enhancement Schools Network (AESN) in British Columbia, Canada, offers a powerful example of how teacher learning networks can enable deep and transformational change among participating teachers and leaders." It merges the concept of the community of practice with the need for non-hierarchal and inclusive leadership. More...