Presentation
The MOOC Ecosystem
Stephen Downes, [Sept] 06, 2015, Association of Medical Educators of Europe (AMEE) E-Learning Symposium, Glasgow, Scotland

The MOOC ecosystem is presented as a series of magnitudes akin to Ray Eames's  1977 'Powers of Ten' video, beginning from the original MOOC of 2000 people, through to a MOOC world of 2 billion people, and back down to the synapse at 0.00002 people. The talk looks at the interactions between the levels and challeges the 'educationist' presumptions of reduction and representation (pace Quine).

[Link] [Slides] [Audio]

Post Script to #AMEE2014 #PCW16 Workshop on Personalising Learning
Natalie Lafferty, eLime, 2015/09/07

I had the chance to listen to Natalie Lafferty today during the debate on whether online learning is a valuable tool in learning (spoiler: it is) and I thought I'd go back and have a look at her preconference workshop slides, contained here in this post. I like the way she focuses on the idea of students being the author of their own education. And she makes the distinction I've observed in the past as well: "I picked up on these themes in another section of the workshop and made the distinction between ‘personal’ learning which is made by and for oneself and self-organised and managed versus what seems to be the current trend around ‘personalised learning’ which to me seems to have become more about learning being customised for individuals and linked to machine learning." And she introduced me to a new term: Free Open Access Meducation - FOAMed.

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Performance-Based Funding for Higher Education: What You Need to Know
Dennis P. Jones, Academic Impressions, 2015/09/07

A couple of articles on performance-based education funding, this one, and another, on the topic of deliberations in Arkansas on the subject. Interviewee Dennis Jones of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS) suggests that attitude is the most important indicator of an outcomes focus. And "the condition at the state level that separates aggressive from lukewarm adopters is the presence of a clear and widely embraced set of state-level goals for higher education – a public agenda." So there's the dilemma. An outcomes-based approach is to be desired, in my opinion. But embracing the same outcome for everybody is not. There is also, in my opinion, a need to separate the delivery of education from the evaluation of education.

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OERu Discourse
OERu, 2015/09/07

Wayne Mackintosh writes, by email: "The OER Foundation has established a new site: community.oeru.org,  which will become the main community hub for our OERu conversations. This site is powered by the popular Discourse open source software engine. Discourse works rather well with mobile devices and has a number of powerful community building features."

[Link] [Comment]