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MOOCs represent the latest stage in the evolution of open educational resources. First was open access to course content, and then access to free online courses. Accredited institutions are now accepting MOOCs as well as free courses and experiential learning as partial credit toward a degree. The next disruptor will likely mark a tipping point: an entirely free online curriculum leading to a degree from an accredited institution.
MOOCs are moving from an early entrepreneurial stage into the reality of more and more educational institutions. Gaining participants, visibility and a growing community worldwide in many occasions the question rises to the surface: Are MOOCs the new model of online education for all? Are they fit to democratize education? and above all – what is a good quality MOOC?
The MOOC Quality Project, an initiative of the European Foundation for Quality in E-Learning (www.efquel.org), addresses the latter question not by trying to find one answer which fits all, but by trying to stimulate a discourse on the issue of Quality of MOOCs. A series of BlogPosts  of worldwide visible experts and entrepreneurs  of MOOCs  will address the issue from each particpant’s viewpoint. After each BlogPost we will allow a one week period of time to react and comment on the post made available. At the end of the week  the discussion will be shortly summarized and made available to all. Read more...

I gave a presentation last week with the above title. In my preparation it wavered between 10 reasons to do one, and 10 reasons NOT to do one, which indicates my ambiguous take on MOOCs, so I settled for half and half.
By "do a MOOC" here I mean for an instructor or an institution to offer one, rather than a learner take one, although you can infer some of the learner reasons also. Later in the week I followed the uniteMOOC session up at Newcastle via Twitter and some very similar responses were being given there. My presentation is below, but actually, you'd be better off looking at Sheila MacNeill's splendid Prezi on the subject, which was part of the Newcastle event. Read more...

I admit it, I'm slow on the uptake, but I had a lightbulb moment David Kernohan pointed me at Donald Clark's post on MOOCs "More action in 1 year than 1000" (no hype there then). As Brian Lamb has reported a wikipedia edit battle around MOOCs to remove the early MOOCers such as David Wiley and George Siemens from the picture has also taken place. Initially I thought this was just a bit of ignorance, but Clark's post made me understand - it is part of a wider narrative to portray MOOCs as a commercial solution that is sweeping away the complacency of higher education.
So Clark dismisses the impact of early MOOCers, claiming it was Khan that caused it all: "It took a hedge fund manager to shake up education because he didn’t have any HE baggage." Why? Because it appeals to the narrative to have a saviour riding in from outside HE to save education. If you acknowledge that these ideas may have come from within HE then that could look like venture capitalists latching on to a good idea in universities and trying to make money from it. That doesn't sound as sexy and brave. Read more...

By David George Glance, Martin Forsey, and Myles Riley. Abstract
In 2011, the respective roles of higher education institutions and students worldwide were brought into question by the rise of the massive open online course (MOOC). MOOCs are defined by signature characteristics that include: lectures formatted as short videos combined with formative quizzes; automated assessment and/or peer and self–assessment and an online forum for peer support and discussion. Although not specifically designed to optimise learning, claims have been made that MOOCs are based on sound pedagogical foundations that are at the very least comparable with courses offered by universities in face–to–face mode. To validate this, we examined the literature for empirical evidence substantiating such claims. Although empirical evidence directly related to MOOCs was difficult to find, the evidence suggests that there is no reason to believe that MOOCs are any less effective a learning experience than their face–to–face counterparts. Indeed, in some aspects, they may actually improve learning outcomes.
Introduction
In 2011, the respective roles of higher education institutions and students worldwide were brought into question by the rise of the massive open online course (MOOC). MOOC platforms Coursera (2012a), edX (2012) and Udacity (2012) have partnered with 33 universities, offering more than 200 courses to over two million students in 196 countries (Coursera, 2012b). Courses offered have attracted enrolments of up to 160,000 students (Fazackerley, 2012) lending the “massive” portion to the name MOOC. These courses are also free or “open”. Given that these courses are being offered by some of the most prestigious of universities, the potential disruptive nature of MOOCs was recognised early on. After all, if a student could take a course from Princeton University for free, why would they pay for an identical course given by their local (less famous) institution? Given the growth in availability of MOOCs, the question could be extended to why someone wouldn’t do an entire degree programme in this way. Of course, there are a number of practical issues that need to be resolved before this happens. Providing proctored examinations to students who have had their identities verified being the most salient. However, a more fundamental question has been raised on both sides of the argument. Namely, do MOOCs represent a pedagogically sound format for learning at a tertiary level? Claims for and against the pedagogical foundations of MOOCs have been made by a variety of interested parties (Association for Learning Technology, 2012; Baker, 2012; Moe, 2012) but these claims have been backed with only a scant amount of evidence or indeed agreement as to the defining characteristics of a MOOC and the pedagogical foundations it rests upon.
For the purposes of our study, we have taken the representative format of MOOCs as they exist on sites such as Udacity (2012), Coursera (2012a) and edX (2012). These courses exhibit common defining characteristics that include: massive participation; online and open access; lectures formatted as short videos combined with formative quizzes; automated assessment and/or peer and self–assessment and online fora for peer support and discussion. There is no absolute definition of each of these characteristics, however. Even the concept of massive is open to interpretation. Although claims have been made to large registrations of up to 160,000 participants (Fazackerley, 2012), the number who complete the course is typically much lower, of the order of 5–15 percent of initial enrolees (Korn and Levitz, 2013). Realistically, in order to qualify as massive, the participation at any point during the running of the course should be large enough that it couldn’t be run in a conventional face–to–face manner.
The pedagogical foundations claimed for MOOCs follow on from their attributes and in part are justifications for those attributes. So it has been argued that online learning is particularly effective, formative quizzes enhance learning through the mechanism of retrieval practice, short video formats with quizzes allow for mastery learning and peer and self–assessment enhance learning. Further claims have been made that short videos complement the optimal attention span of students (Khan, 2012) and that discussion forums provide an adequate replacement of direct teacher–student interactions that would be considered normal for a class delivered on campus. The justification of pedagogical benefits of MOOCs is in all likelihood teleological. The benefits have been retrofitted after the fact to a course format pioneered by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig (2012). The fact that their original course and others that have followed have proved so popular, however, would suggest that there are positive aspects to the way they have been presented. The structure and format of MOOCs is being adapted as more experience is gained with their delivery and so it is important to understand in a systematic manner their benefits and shortfalls.
The purpose of this review is to examine the evidence regarding the pedagogical foundations of MOOCs and indeed validate that these foundations actually relate to the attributes of MOOCs as they are currently envisioned. These attributes and their pedagogical consequences are shown in Table 1. A difficulty with the analysis of MOOC structure and its pedagogical foundations is the question of how similar a MOOC is to existing online courses offered for distance learning or as an extension of face–to–face delivery of courses as part of a so–called blended delivery. In some ways they are not and so the analysis of MOOCs is inherently not that different from research examining the benefits of online delivery of courses generally. The difference lies in the particular combination of the underlying characteristic components of MOOCs, their massive participation and the fact that they are open. The subtlety in the novelty of MOOCs is not the point of this paper, however, and will be left for exploration in future work.
Contents
Methodology
The efficacy of online learning
The importance of retrieval and testing for learning
Mastery learning
Peer and self–assessment
Short format videos
Online forums and video discussions
Conclusion.

By Kevin Bell. The recent announcement from the California State University System regarding its embrace of edX massive open online courses (MOOCs) is interesting and depressing at the same time. As with many aspects of the MOOC phenomenon, it comes packaged with good and bad aspects bundled up together. Instructors will offer a "special 'flipped' version of an electrical engineering course ... where students watch online lectures from Harvard and MIT at home." So the good is the flipped part because it's more interactive and dynamic and there's less lecture-based didacticism in the classroom due to watching videos at home? Really? The 1970s just called: they want their Open University courses back. Read more...

IAU Horizons, the Association's news and information magazine is addressed primarily to IAU Member Institutions and Organizations, but is also sent to a selected audience beyond the IAU Membership such as Ministries of Higher Education, international organizations, national and regional associations of universities and others.
Internationalisation of higher education (IAU Horizons Volume 18, No.2)
By Gilles Breton, Graduate School of International and Public Affairs, University of Ottawa, Canada. A topic becomes the object of deep debate because it cristallises a call for references, a demand for renewed understanding of a situation that seems more and more complex, or the search for new forms of action. This is, to my mind, the impact and interest of the document Affirming Academic Values in Internationalization of Higher Education: A Call for Action launched by IAU a few weeks ago.
At the time when I received the IAU text, I was deep in the reading of the remarkable book by Marie Scot on La London School of Economic and political science 1895-2010 Internationalisation universitaire et circulation des savoirs which seems to me a major contribution to the discussion on the internationalisation of our universities. Obviously, the London School of Economic and political science (LSE) is not a representative example, since it is a university that is solely specialised in social sciences and humanities and one of the most international universities in the world. If in 1925, it already had 20% of foreign students, in 2010 they represented 68% of its 10 000 students and 57% of its teachers were foreign. But its history and present position on the world university chessboard make LSE a privileged observatory to give true meaning to the internationalisation of higher education and to understand the impact and limits of the international strategies of an institution on its academic life.
The contribution of Marie Scot’s book seems twofold to me. On the one hand, the analysis over a long period, in this case 1895-2010, enables us to understand the changes in internationalisation and its various contributions to the life of an institution. If the first period of internationalisation that goes from 1920 to 1944 is a time of refoundation of academic life and international expertise in the fields of international relations, colonial studies and economics, it is also a time when international recruitment becomes a prominent line of action and the implementation of embryonic networks of alumni (network of former students). The second period, which covers the years 1945-1974, is that of the years of the Cold War and the special relations between the British Empire and the United States. At the academic level, it witnesses the creation at LSE of new fields of study such as development studies, econometrics, demography and, of course the ‘Area Studies’. The international strategies focus on greater international student and teacher mobility, the redefinition of courses of study to be offered to foreign students according to their cycle of studies, the export to the Third World of the British university model and last the multiplication of networks of former students. Last a period of “world- class university in academic globalisation 1975-2010”, which sees the LSE faced with the crisis in university funding that affects both the education programmes – sale of educational products and factory to produce masters – and research activities which are becoming more and more activities of extrauniversity and international expertise. If the two periods preceding the networks of former students developed in the perspective of their contribution to the funding of the institution, the current period enriches this ‘alumni’ stake by presenting it as an indicator of the soft power of LSE on the international scene.
If the embedding of internationalisation in an historical perspective is welcome, the perspective of the author of the circulation of knowledge seems to me to enrich the discussion and give depth to the concept of internationalisation because the circulation of knowledge does not limit itself to the usual analysis of academic mobility by policymakers, students, professors and ‘alumni’, but also includes the study of the impact of internationalisation on academic and disciplinary mobility, the recomposition not only of training programmes to which an international element would be added, but also of the disciplines themselves and the research activities. In this book, we find a proposal to read internationalisation as something that, by including the circulation of scientific paradigms, opens on to promising axes of research and action and offers a new light on the proposition that internationalisation is an institutional project that is at the heart and not at the periphery of the life of a university. This book should be read by both researchers and the actors of internationalisation. Read more in IAU Horizons Volume 18, No.2.

Massive Open Online Support for Education (MOOSE)
Keynote presentation delivered to University College of the North, Thompson, Manitoba via Google Hangout.
Discussion of the concept of Massive Open Online Courses as they evolved from the development of open online learning and evolved into a means of offering social and immersive learning online. The context was a discussion of officials from the University College of the North in manitoba, which is mandated to provide learning to numerous communities scattered across a large northern environment. [Slides] [Audio]

Against Digital Research Methodologies
Keynote presentation delivered to Digital Research Methodologies, Preston, UK, via Skype.
This is a description of my approach to research, based on problems inherent in traditional descriptions of scientific method, and the ways I have adapted my own work to compensate. It is a research process more like discovery, more like learning a language, than it is about forming hypotheses and confirming theories. Please note that the video was created May 9, 2013, one day ahead of the presentation, and that the audio is from the presentation itself, May 10, 2013. Both use the same slides. [Slides] [Audio]

Questions-réponses DGEFP - n°2 relatif aux emplois d’avenir - 10 avril 2013. Télécharger le document.
VIII- La formation des jeunes en emploi d’avenir
VIII-1) Que doit-on exiger d’un employeur en termes de parcours d’insertion et de qualification au moment de la signature de l’emploi d’avenir?
Aux termes de l’article L. 5134-114, l’emploi d’avenir est attribué à l’employeur au vu des engagements que celui-ci prend sur le parcours d’insertion et de qualification qu’il propose au jeune. Afin de ne pas allonger les délais d’attribution et alourdir la phase de préparation du contrat, il est recommandé de demander à l’employeur de s’engager en amont de la signature de l’emploi d’avenir sur:
- les types de compétences et qualifications visées;
- le principe d’actions de formation correspondantes (en précisant s’il est envisagé des actions qualifiantes ou non).
Le parcours de formation et son ingénierie peuvent être précisés ultérieurement, à l’issue de la phase d’intégration du jeune chez l’employeur. Dans le cadre de ses actions de suivi, le prescripteur veille à ce que la construction du parcours se poursuive au cours de la période aidée, à l’occasion de points d’étape (trois mois après le début de l’activité et au-delà).
VIII-2) Quels sont les financements spécifiques à l’emploi d’avenir pour les jeunes reconnus travailleurs handicapés?
L’ensemble des actions et prestations de droit commun et des actions de l’Agefiph et du FIPH FP peuvent être mobilisées dans ce cadre, comme pour les autres demandeurs d’emploi, avec un accent particulier pour la POE individuelle.
L’offre de service de l’Agefiph
L’offre d’interventions de l’Agefiph est mobilisable pour les emplois d’avenir chez les employeurs éligibles (principalement employeurs du secteur marchand et associations). Les prestations et les aides de l’Agefiph peuvent être prescrites par les Missions locales et, dans ce cadre, pour les employeurs éligibles, être mobilisées directement au bénéfice des jeunes qu’elles accompagnent. La Délégation régionale de l’Agefiph peut organiser, à l’intention des Missions locales, une réunion d’information spécifique sur l’offre d’interventions. Le CA du 13 décembre 2012 a validé la mise en place d’une aide spécifique aux emplois d’avenir, pour les employeurs du secteur marchand, qui consiste à compléter la subvention de l’Etat pour la rapprocher de l’aide de l’Etat au secteur non marchand avec une logique dégressive: pour un temps plein, 40% du Smic la première année, soit 6 840 €, et 20% l’année suivante, soit 3 420 € = 10 260 € par jeune. L’Agefiph prévoit 1 000 aides de ce type en 2013 soit 9,2 M€.
De plus, l’AGEFIPH mobilisera une enveloppe de 10 M€ pour financer la formation du jeune, à tout employeur éligible à l’intervention de l’Agefiph, selon les modalités suivantes:
- lorsque la formation vise l’obtention d’un diplôme (par définition en centre de formation);
- ce financement pouvant aller jusqu’à 80% du coût de la formation, en complément du financement de l’employeur, de l’Opca ou du Conseil régional.
L’offre de service du FIPHFP
Dès lors que le contrat emploi avenir est signé par l’employeur public, celui-ci peut mobiliser l’ensemble des aides du FIPHFP au bénéfice de la personne concernée:
- aides techniques et humaines (études ergonomiques, aménagements du poste de travail, auxiliaires de vie, transports adaptés…);
- aides à la formation (bilans de compétences/d’orientation, formation aux aides techniques, formation à la compensation du handicap…);
- s’agissant des personnes dont le handicap ne peut pas être compensé par des aides techniques (handicaps psychiques, cognitifs, mentaux notamment), les employeurs publics peuvent mobiliser les aides du dispositif spécifique proposé par le FIPHFP (évaluation des potentialités professionnelles, maintien du suivi de la relation psychothérapeutique, accompagnement par une équipe spécialisée externe, tutorat).
Les employeurs publics pourront bénéficier du dispositif financier associé à la pérennisation des emplois d’avenir lorsque celui-ci donne lieu à titularisation du jeune.
VIII-3) Quelle prise en charge de la formation des emplois d’avenir recrutés par les collectivités territoriales et leurs groupements?
Une contribution au CNFPT à hauteur de 0,5% des rémunérations attribuées aux jeunes recrutés en emplois d’avenir a été instituée par décret du 10 janvier 2013 (et non 0,25% comme annoncé initialement dans le guide opérateurs), selon les termes prévus à l’article 2 de la loi du 26 octobre 2012 portant création des emplois d’avenir. Les jeunes en emploi d’avenir dans les collectivités auront de ce fait accès aux formations du catalogue CNFPT, qui s’est également engagé à mettre en oeuvre des actions spécifique à destination de ce public. Une convention nationale viendra préciser l’action du CNFPT.
Par ailleurs, une réflexion est en cours pour ouvrir la possibilité aux jeunes embauchés en emplois d’avenir dans les collectivités territoriales d’avoir accès à des formations qualifiantes en complément de celles qui sont organisées par le CNFPT.

Priorités et critères pour l’année 2013
Le FONGECIF PACA est amené à procéder à des choix, quand le budget des demandes est supérieur à ses disponibilités budgétaires allouées à chaque Commission, selon un échéancier mensuel voté chaque année par son Conseil d’Administration.
Sont considérées comme prioritaires dans l’examen des dossiers:
Les demandes de CIF faisant l’objet d’une convention (FPSPP, FSE, Conseil Régional, DIRECCTE, SAMETH, ADEC…).
Celles faisant l’objet d’un cofinancement par l’OPCA ou par l’entreprise.
Les demandes de Formations Hors Temps de Travail
Les formations préconisées par un jury de VAE ainsi que les formations faisant suite à une formation relevant du « Socle de compétences ».
Les dossiers sont examinés selon l’ancienneté dans la vie professionnelle (calculée selon la date d’entrée dans la vie active, attestée par le 1er contrat de travail obtenu après la fin des études, en formation initiale) et en fonction des critères suivants:
- le niveau d’études du demandeur, en favorisant les salariés de bas niveau de qualification ou ne justifiant d’aucune certification
- la qualité du projet personnel et professionnel en termes de présentation, de démarches engagées (sur le plan de sa faisabilité) et de choix de formation
- n’avoir jamais bénéficié de financement d’un CIF ou d’une formation Hors Temps de Travail, sauf dans 2 cas:
     1) le délai entre les 2 demandes est supérieur à 6 ans
     2) la durée de la précédente formation n’a pas excédé 300 h et la nouvelle demande s’inscrit dans la même logique de parcours
- le choix du dispositif de financement (plan de formation, période de professionnalisation)
- le coût et la durée de formation - la certification obtenue en fin de formation
- la taille de l’entreprise à laquelle appartient le demandeur en favorisant notamment les TPE et les PME
Les demandes de financement des congés (bilan de compétences, VAE, pré-VAE, PACRE) bénéficient d’un taux d’acceptation de 100%.
Ne sont pas prioritaires:
- les demandes pour lesquelles l’autorisation d’absence aura été accordée dans des conditions plus favorables que celles prévues par les textes
- les mêmes demandes présentées plusieurs fois
Ne sont pas recevables les demandes de financement de prestations (formation, bilan de compétences, VAE, PACRE…):
- envoyées hors délai et/ou incomplets
- ayant commencé avant l’envoi du dossier.