OLDaily

The sudden urgency of online academic conferences
Moira MacDonald, University Affairs, 2020/04/08

Conferences have had to convert to an online format out of necessity, but this taps into an already pent-up demand, writes Moira MacDonald. In one case in January, the University of Ottawa's Orad Reshef was thinking "Whatever. I’ll do it and if there’s 50 people on the stream, that’s great." Instead, "On January 13, the day of the conference, more than 1,000 people participated in the free #POM20 (for Photonics Online Meet-up) from across the globe." So what's happening? “This conference form allows for a kind of accessibility that is unprecedented,” said Dr. Muehlebach earlier this year. “People are playing with the format and running with it.” That's what I think can also happen with online learning, if we just allow it.

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Amazon Lightsail Is AWS for Regular People
Anthony Heddings, Cloud Savvy IT, 2020/04/08

For anything like a personal learning environment to work there needs to be data synchronization, which means a cloud database. But the worst thing about cloud databases is, well, cloud databases. They are miserable to set up and manage; on Amazon, for example, you descend into the alphabet soup of ECS and IAM and other misery. Lightsail is Amazon's attempt to make the system slightly easier for people to manage. It's still not straightfoward, but it's better than it was, and maybe now I can finally move forward on the next generation of gRSShopper development without having to learn an entire new dictionary.

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Two learning engineerings?
Clark Quinn, Learnlets, 2020/04/08

One of my least favourite terms is 'learning engineering'. In this post Clark Quinn looks at two possible interpretations. In one, he says, learning engineering is "the application of learning science to the design of instruction. Which is ‘instructional design’." The second is a recognition that "new technologies, particularly when we get to content systems, require a considerable amount of engineering to put them together." So on this second view, learning engineering supports instructional design, but doesn't replace it. Quinn says he favours the first definition, and to be clear, I'm pretty sure that's how proponents of learning engineering have been using it.

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Wilson: Every Minute Counts — I Sat In on Some Classes at Success Academy’s Virtual School. Here’s What I Saw
Steven Wilson, The 74, 2020/04/08

I have no idea how much of this is representative or even real, but I felt it was worth sharing the story that is being told about online learning in this particular school. "Teachers cold-call unhesitatingly. There is an unrelenting focus on what students are producing and on what their in-class work reveals about their misconceptions and mastery, allowing for real-time course corrections. And student accountability has not been suspended." The argument being presented here is that schools should not suspend expectations in online learning. "Distinctive schools boldly shape culture; they present new models of engagement that other families would, in time, gladly emulate." While I think this may be possible, I'm less sure about whether this is desirable.

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In the North, open educational resources are being discovered
Jaime Caldwell, BCcampus, 2020/04/08

This short post describes how two open educational resources are being used in the north. They are both worth sharing. In one example, " Brad Bell, instructor at College of New Caledonia Burns Lake campus, uses the Adult Literacy Fundamental English books to empower his students." And in the other example, "the University of Northern British Columbia Student Services is using the Pulling Together: A Guide for Indigenization of Post-Secondary Institutions books to develop guidelines for their leaders and front-line staff." The latter would help support any public service professional development, not just those working in the north.

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Learner skills in open virtual mobility
Kamakshi Rajagopal, Olga Firssova, Ilse Op de Beeck, Elke Van der Stappen, Slavi Stoyanov, Piet Henderikx, Ilona Buchem, Research in Learning Technology, 2020/04/08

This article combines the concept of Open Education (OE) with something new, Virtual Mobility (VM), defined as "a set of ICT supported activities, organized at institutional level, that realize or facilitate international, collaborative experiences in a context of teaching and/or learning." That gives us Open Virtual Mobility (OVM). The discussion of OVM is this article's main contribution, though there is also a 'research' component consisting of "group concept mapping (GCM)" which "supports knowledge construction through collecting and organising ideas of individuals so that a collective visual geography of a concept can be created to be further analysed." The quantitative results are meaningless, but the resulting discussion provides a good overview of the benefits of OVM, which is a worthwhile result.

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Why The Resignation Of This Particular College President Matters
Derek Newton, Forbes, 2020/04/08

There has always been resistance to online program management (OPM) companies, but they haven't usually been referred to as "toxic assets". That may change. For one thing, it's possible "that an outside company influenced a college to relax its admissions requirements so it could boost its profits," something that is "both scandalous and exactly what critics of OPMs worried about." But even more, "now, as every college and university in the country has become a de facto online program, they could be fatal. If even some of the existing OPM contracts require sharing revenue from every online student and the private companies gobble up half that revenue, colleges will close." Though as Forbes says, "It’s difficult to feign shock that the fox you invited into your hen house ate the hens."

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Responding to Covid-19: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Teaching Online
Mark Brown, Eamon Costello, Mairéad Nic Giolla Mhichíl, ICDE, 2020/04/08

It's being called "the great onlining" and there's no shortage of commentary, both good and bad. Among the good I think is this: "Most importantly, what we want to avoid is using old 19th Century teaching methods on new 21st Century technologies to merely dump large volumes of undigested information down large digital diameter pipes to relatively inactive and passive learners. This pump it down a pipe analogy is the “ugly” and uncomfortable reality of online education when done poorly. Unfortunately, too often the default model of online education is just borrowing old delivery methods of teaching and supplanting them onto new online learning spaces and digital technologies with no transformative advantage."

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Facebook’s New Messenger Desktop App Lets You Skip the Browser
Andrew Heinzman, Review Geek, 2020/04/08

Facebook has long wanted to get people out of the browser and into its own applications, even to the point of having tried to actually replace the internet with its own proprietary version. This, in my view, is an extension of this. There's no particular reason to add an extra application to your desktop, except that it gives Facebook a direct pipeline to your device, eliminates all those annoying privacy protections, and more importantly, prevents you from being distracted by things that are not Facebook.

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