OLDaily

The Relationships Between Self-Efficacy, Task Value, and Self-Regulated Learning Strategies
Daeyeoul Lee, Sunnie Lee Watson, William R. Watson, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2020/01/13

The authors study the relationships between self-efficacy, task value, and the use of self-regulated learning (SRL) strategies in MOOCs. They find "positive relationships between self-efficacy and SRL strategies" as well as "positive relationships between task value and SRL strategies". So: if students think the content is important, and if they are self-starters, then they are more likely to successfully manage their own learning in MOOCs. As a broad generalization that's probably true (and was likely known to be true before this study). If I had more room I'd look at the definitions of the terms (they're provided in the literature review) and question the measurement of specific elements of those definitions. Why would we think self-reporting on a survey would be reliable here, for example? Image: Home of Bob.

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The Quality Factor: Learning to Blog FOR your Students
Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano, LangWitches, 2020/01/13

Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano has completed a seven part series on blogging in education. Here are the segments:

1. Reading Blog
2. Writing Blogs
3. Commenting on Blogs
4. Connecting Blogs
5. The Reciprocation Factor
6. The Consistency Factor
7. The Quality Factor

What caught my eye was the discussion of quality blogging in part seven. Of course, you could tell students about what counts for quality, but it is far better to show them by blogging yourself. Any teacher that wants students to write, in my view, should model what is expected by writing themselves.

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Three ways to combat peer review bias
Verena Weigert, Jisc Blog, 2020/01/13

I'm not sure exactly how the headline writer got 'three ways' out of this article. By my count it could be four, or more likely, one. Or maybe one thing that is three things, like the Trinity. The article centers around an open-access scholarly publishing platform called F1000Research and cites it as an example of full open peer review. (One?) It references a project to "to test if reviewers would judge research papers differently if they can see who else has reviewed the paper." (Two?) It also describes a tool that does sentiment analysis of peer reviews. (Three?) Finally, it describes an open peer review prediction tool. (Four?) Ah, easier studying the Athanasian Creed.

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Black Wednesday
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2020/01/13

I don't like commenting on world events on this blog because I would imagine most people hear enough about them from other sources. However, the recent loss of Ukrainian International Airways Flight 752 from Tehran is an exception because, as Alex Usher notes, many of the passengers were en route to Canadian universities and research institutions. "All day Wednesday and Thursday, stories poured in from across Canada. Thousands of hearts breaking in a dozen cities across six provinces.  So many good people, so many dear friends….and just so, so much talent. Gone, in an instant." This was our community that was hurt in a conflict we had nothing to do with, a community we share with our brothers and sisters in Iran and around the world. To the leaders of the countries involved, I can only say that it is long past time you made peace.

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Graphy
Blake Regalia, 2020/01/13

As the website says, "graphy is a collection of high-performance RDF libraries for JavaScript developers with a focus on usability. Each package works with both Node.js and the browser (with the help of a bundler such as Browserify or Webpack)." You would be forgiven if you've forgotten about the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which is a world wide web standard for encoding semantic data in 'triples' (subject-verb-object) using standardized vocabularies. It is still current, though, being used (for example) in Tim Berners-Lee's Social Linked Data (SoLiD) project. It's open source, of course.

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A Pedagogical Perspective on Big Data and Learning Analytics: A Conceptual Model for Digital Learning Support
Sabine Seufert, Christoph Meier, Matthias Soellner, Roman Rietsche, Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 2020/01/13

This is a pretty good paper. The authors draw on three meta-analyses of learning analytics literature in order to create a framework for describing learning analytics projects. They then apply this framework to four use cases: socal learning analytoics for prediction and for reflection, and individual learning analytics for the same two functions. I think this reading of learning analytics is a bit narrow, and the divisoion between social and individual a bit arbitrary, but the tables produced by the literature search are a valuable reference.

This is the first paper I've posted here from Springer-Nature's SharedIt service (which has been running since 2016). The idea is that authors can share read-only PDFs using access tokens to social media and blogs. That's how I was able to read the paper and how, presumably, you will as well. Does this service provide a sufficient level of access? It's really awkward to read the sideways pages. But it does allow me to cut and paste extracts to use as references in my own work. I don't need an actual copy of the paper, so long as the access token keeps working. The jury is still out.

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