Whatever Happened to the Coalition of Essential Schools?
Larry Cuban, National Education Policy Center, 2018/01/02
The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) was an initiative launched in 1987 that "spread rapidly across the nation throughout the 1990s (see here, here, and here)." Based on a set of ten principles (listed in the article) the coalition sought to encourage a matery-based and personally-supportive mode of education based on a generally constructivist pedagogy. More...

Reflections on 20 Years of Open Content: Lessons from Open Source
David Wiley, OER18, Association for Learning Technology, 2018/02/02
David Wiley candidly admits that this history is written from his own point of view, which is a good thing, because my experience of these events was very different. For example, in the mid-1990s, when Wiley was working on an ISP startup, I was working on a FreeNet. I had been using and creating non-commercial shareware (including most especially extensive BBS systems and MUDLibs) for years by the time open source advocates gathered to launch the movement in 1998. More...

Return of the MOOCs
Mene Ukueberuwa, City Journal, 2018/02/02
This article offers a bit of a history of MOOCs but is mostly (starting about a third of the way in ) an article about the Modern States "freshman year for free" project (no explanation why they couldn't use the long-established gender-neutral term 'frosh', as in 'frosh year for free', or even 'first year for free'). It's marketing. More...