OLDaily

Disadvantages of a Lingua Franca in Philosophy
Eric Schwitzgebel, The Splintered Mind, 2019/07/26

The use of English as the common language (lingua franca) for any discipline, not just philosophy, has its risks (and this would be true for any language, not just English). The author identifies three concerns (quoted):

• The current situation puts disproportionate burdens on non-native speakers.
• The nuances of ordinary language matter.
• Robust, partially separate traditions can nurture diversity of thought.

All quite true. Thinking and learning in different languages forces you to see the world differently and talk about it differently.

Case in point: in English, you can start a sentence without knowing where it's going to end. That's because things like tense and gender are relatively fluid. But in French (so I learned) what you really need to do is to frame the entire sentence first, before uttering the first word. What is the tense? What is the subject? Only then can you know the correct words to use. This is a different way of thinking, and causes you to think of sentences themselves differently.

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Case Study as a Research Method for Analyzing MOOCs: Presence and Characteristics of those Case Studies in the Main Scientific Databases
Ramón Montes-Rodríguez, Juan Bautista Martínez-Rodríguez, Almudena Ocaña-Fernández, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2019/07/26

I'm not really a fan of case studies, but I'm even less a fan of pseudo-scientific research based on opinion surveys. Not that, in the end, it makes much of a difference. "This analysis suggests that researchers tended to choose a quantitative rather than a qualitative approach, even for case studies." The authors note that "This might suggest that more interpretive, hermeneutical, or qualitative research is needed." This is especially the case given that the quantitative data is geographically skewed (and, I would argue, unrepresentative in other ways).

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Goal Setting and MOOC Completion: A Study on the Role of Self-Regulated Learning in Student Performance in Massive Open Online Courses
Erwin Handoko, Susie L. Gronseth, Sara G. McNeil, Curtis J. Bonk, Bernard R. Robin, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2019/07/26

Though this study involves 643 students contacted by email, it still represents a small percentage of the total MOOC participants, and does not represent them (to judge by the 49% completion rate in the sample). Still, the question is interesting: "Perhaps specific components of Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) are more powerful contributors to a student’s likelihood to complete a MOOC than are some other components." The results are unsurprising: "MOOC completers scored higher in particular aspects of goal setting, such as establishing standards for the assignments, setting short-term goals (i.e., daily or weekly) and long-term goals (i.e., monthly or for the semester), and self-monitoring to maintain what they perceived as a high standard for learning in their MOOCs." The usual caveats for self-selected surveys of this type apply.

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Teaching and Learning Without a Textbook: Undergraduate Student Perceptions of Open Educational Resources
Hong Lin, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2019/07/26

I think readers will appreciate the summary of Hegarty's model of open pedagogy (Hegarty's paper is on Wikimedia - download it now) which "used eight attributes to guide successful OER integration." This paper asks the question, "how do students perceive their learning with OER replacing traditional textbooks?" (or perhaps more accurately, "what do students think about learning with OER?"). The usual caveats concerning a study of "fifty-eight students enrolled in an introductory education course in a large American public university" should apply, and while I quite liked the literature review, studies of "fifty-eight students enrolled in an introductory education course in a large American public university" should be automatically disqualified from publication.

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China govt goes all in on education reform from this July
GETChina Insights, Medium, 2019/07/26

This article is a summary of the “Opinions on Deepening the Reform of Education and Teaching to Improve the Quality of Compulsory Education” issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council a couple of weeks ago. The opinions focus on quality and reiterate that local schools should not deviate from the national curriculum nor "introduce overseas curriculum and textbooks" as these need to be reviewed before being used. Also, interestingly, " disclosing students’ grades and ranking in any form is banned so the enterprises that are still providing relevant services need to change their business layout.

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