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Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

Ai is Everything That is Not Needed in Education
Matt Crosslin, EduGeek Journal, 2025/12/19

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Remember Matter & Space? I wrote about it in April, quoting from George Siemens and Paul LeBlanc. As Matt Crosslin reports here, the website has disappeared (the URL now redirects to Southern New Hampshire University). Croisslin reports on "a LinkedIn post by Paul Leblanc, who says that Southern New Hampshire University has decided to bring the platform in-house," and a What I Learned post from George Siemens from September (covered here). Instead of finding out what's going on, Crosslin takes the opportunity to dump on AI in genmeral and Siemens in particular and to say "we know what works in education: time, funding, nutrition, safety for all, etc." which is about as empty as a comment can get. Me, I hope George is OK, I hope Paul finds himself at Harvard, and I hope Matt revels in the educational renaissance obviously happening in Texas.

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The Report of the LMS's Death is an Exaggeration
Glenda Morgan, Phil Hill, On EdTech Newsletter, 2025/12/19

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Glenda Morgan and Phil Hill respond to Alfred Essa's claim from yesterday that the LMS is dead. "Every dollar committed to LMS extensions," writes Essa, "is a dollar not spent on what actually advances learning: faculty innovation, curriculum design, program-level experimentation, and institutional capacity to shape its own tools." Morgan and Hill respond that the LMS was never intended to produce learning, but to handle important administrative functions. "Like Essa, we agree that higher education is facing structural change, not a temporary downturn. Institutions are under real pressure and will need to make difficult strategic choices and significant shifts. But abandoning the LMS is not one of the productive ones in our opinion."

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Reflections on the closure of the OER Foundation and the implications for OER policies
Paul Bacsich, 2025/12/19

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People aren't going to like the fact that this report (31 page PDF, LinkedIn summary) is mostly authored by ChatGPT, but I urge readers to set aside this and to engage with the content, which makes some compelling points. The point of departure is, of course, the shutdown of the OER Foundation, which resulted from the centralization and commercial focus of New Zealand's polytechnic sector. But it also raises broader issues for OER, specifically: "OER fails when it is treated as an educational movement; it survives when treated as public infrastructure." Worse, the community failed to act on the warning signs because "OER advocates overestimated their proximity to power. They were influential in discourse, visible in policy documents, and respected internationally - but rarely decisive in budgetary or structural terms." Against all this, readers my want to contrast my own views dating from 2018, which ChatGPT did not consult.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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