Report on the Assessment and Accreditation of Learners using OER
Dianne Conrad, Wayne Mackintosh, Rory McGreal, Angela Murphy, Gabi Witthaus, Commonwealth of Learning, October 1, 2013

From the abstract: "This report shares the findings and lessons learned from an investigation into the economics of disaggregated models for assessing and accrediting informal learners, with particular attention to the OER University (OERu) consortium. It also relies on data from a small-scale survey conducted by two of the authors on perceptions, practices and policies relating to openness in assessment and accreditation in post-secondary institutions." (58 page PDF)

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Learning in a Small, Task–Oriented, Connectivist MOOC: Pedagogical Issues and Implications for Higher Education
Jenny Mackness, Marion Waite, George Roberts, Elizabeth Lovegrove, International Review of Research in Open, Distance Learning (IRRODL), October 1, 2013

Case study describing a cMOOC in which "the expectation that knowledge would be co-created through active, autonomous participation and that learning would ‘emerge’ through the interactions around the key activities of aggregation, remixing, repurposing, and feeding forward." The authors identified four major challenges for learners in this environment:

• learning across distributed platforms
• social construction of knowledge
• open academic practice and building an identity
• embracing uncertainty

I would have worded the second differently; I don't think the knowledge that emerges in a network-based course is in any meaningful sense "constructed" - my own take is that it consists of patterns of interaction that are recognized as new knowledge by participants.

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OERScout technology framework: A novel approach to open educational resources search
Ishan Sudeera Abeywardena, Chee Seng Chan, Choy Yoong Tham, International Review of Research in Open, Distance Learning (IRRODL), October 1, 2013

The educational resource search engine finds new wings in this article focused on OER disocovery. The problem with existing approaches, say the authors, is that "these methodologies depend on human annotated metadata for approximating the usefulness of a resource for a particular need." Even adding simple tags or keyswords can be a problem. "The OERScout text mining algorithm is designed to 'read' text based OER documents and 'learn' which academic domain(s) and sub-domain(s) they belong to." Results are sorted using a keyword matrix and desirability (based on license and search engine ranking fo the resource).

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Measuring Use and Creation of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education
Ross McKerlich, Cindy Ives, Rory McGreal, International Review of Research in Open, Distance Learning (IRRODL), October 1, 2013

Discussion of the employment of open educational resources (OERs) at institutions focusing on both creation and use. "If use and creation do add emotional ownership and reduce a barrier of non-attachment to shared resources, then a ratio of use:creation could be useful for measuring OER adoption at an institution. The small gap between OER use and OER creation could be a possible indicator of healthy adoption of OER." See also more articles from the most recent edition of IRRODL.

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How to Build an Ethical Online Course
Jesse Stommel, Hybrid Pedagogy, October 1, 2013

"The best online and hybrid courses are made from scraps strewn about and gathered together from across the web," writes Jesse Stommel. "We build a course by examining the bits, considering how they’re connected, and creating pathways for learners to make their own connections." Good article in which Stommel outlines many of the principles that guide the development of MOOCs the way they should be created. "The openness of the internet is its most radical and pedagogically viable feature," he writes. "We can’t make our courses 'academically rigorous' by design, especially at the level of content or assessment. Rather, rigor arises through the development of a critically voracious learning community." Agreed. Photo: Henry Stern.

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The brains behind an exhibition
John Hawks, john hawks weblog, October 1, 2013

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks compares the Wellcome Collection's recent "Brains: Mind as Matter" exhibition: The travels of a head whith his own blog and MOOC coverage. "[The] exhibition across three months had 105,000 visitors. Some blogs will compare favorably to those numbers -- for almost no investment of resources. My MOOC will be on this scale, again for vastly less money spent." Yes, the traveling exhibit and the blog and MOOC do different things. "Online activity can be vastly broader in terms of total visitors and international reach. Museum exhibitions can reach more deeply." But they are comparable. They have the same sort of purpose.

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