MOOCs: learning analytics; interaction

Yesterday I attended a initial meeting of researchers who are interested in pursuing educational research concerned with FutureLearn (the UK-based initiative to provide Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs); my university is a member of FutureLearn. There were a few presentations and some workshops. I will just share a couple of resources related to the meeting:
- Steve Draper (Glasgow University) talked about MOOCs and peer interaction and these are his slides plus links to related material e.g. the Jigsaw approach to learning: http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/talks/mooc1.html
- Simon Buckingham Shum presented on learning analytics. I couldn't find the presentation he gave yesterday, but his slideshare is at http://www.slideshare.net/sbs and the latest presentation at time of writing was from a few weeks ago Learning Analytics (or: The Data Tsunami Hits Higher Education).
Also a recent paper by him which gives an example of the things he was talking about is:
Ferguson, R., Wei, Z., He, Y., and Buckingham Shum, S. (2013). An evaluation of learning analytics to identify exploratory dialogue in online discussions. In: Third Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK 2013), 8-12 April 2013, Leuven, Belgium http://oro.open.ac.uk/36664/
Finally, this gives an example of exploring coded data (from discussion fora):
Wegerif, R. (2010) Exploring creative thinking in graphically mediated synchronous dialogues. Computers and Education, 54(3), 613–621. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131509003054
Photo by Sheila Webber: on the way to Sheffield Station, early morning, September 2013