The Stanford Graduate School of Education’s H-STAR Institute received a Learning! 100 award from Elearning magazine this summer for its research on and innovation with massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

The Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute, under which Stanford professors from all disciplines study people’s interaction with technology, was named No. 10 among public sector organizations, including universities and government agencies. Keith Devlin, executive director and co-founder of H-STAR, traveled to a conference in Anaheim, Calif., in August to accept the award.

“It just came out of the blue,” said Devlin. “It was only when I got there that I realized what a big deal it was.”

At the convention, Devlin spoke about MOOCs and their effect on the future of higher education. “We’re well known within the academic world,” Devlin said about H-STAR after the conference. “But not in the business world. Now they absolutely know about us, and I hope they’ll become more engaged with our research.”

This is the third year Elearning has granted awards to 100 organizations that are breaking barriers in technology-enabled education. This year, 60 of the winners are in private industry, 40 in the public sector.

“When evaluating the top learning organizations in the world, the pioneering work by Dr. Keith Devlin and Stanford’s interdisciplinary research center, H-STAR, stood out as a clear leader in the arena of massively open online courses,” said Joe DiDonato, awards chair and director of the Enterprise Learning! Conference and Expo. “We look forward to learning even more from H-STAR’s pioneering work in this arena.”

As part of his H-STAR work, Devlin,  a mathematician, has developed his own MOOC: Introduction to Mathematical Thinking. The 10-week-long course began its third session on Sept. 2 and is offered by Stanford Online through the Coursera platform.  Devlin also has a blog, Mooctalk, that he launched in May 2012 to chronicle his experience in teaching a MOOC.