OLDaily

The Post-Covid New Normal is Looking Bipolar
Phil Hill, Phil on Ed Tech, 2022/06/23

As always with Phil Hill and his colleagues, I find myself wishing for a more global perspective. I wonder, for example, whether the decline in enrollments is strictly a U.S. phenomenon, or whether it is reflected internationally. That would tell us, for example, whether students having "more options than ever before" is actually a factor, or whether things like tuition costs, labour markets and the influence of elite institutions (all of which are more local to the U.S.) are significant contributors. I wish pundits would learn that you can't explain what's happening in one country without reference to other countries (think of it as international A-B testing).

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Twitter confirms it’s working on a built-in Notes feature
James Vincent, The Verge, 2022/06/23

I've never thought the 140 or 280 character limitation added much value to Twitter, and the ubiquity of multi-post Twitter threads seems to be evidence of that. And the price we bad for such brevity - lack of depth, focus on the quick comeback, etc. - seems not to offset any good the form produces. But what the shift really signifies is Twitter's long overdue recognition that it has transition from being a messaging service to being a publishing service. After all, you don't get much traction offering political candidates a messaging platform. But - also - to my mind none of this matters unless Twitter opens its API to the point that users can join the wider community of commentators, doing more than just talking among themselves.

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The tricky questions for assessment to answer
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2022/06/23

The question arises, says Martin Weller, "why would you want to return to traditional exams, giving the damage they cause and the student preference? A week to complete essays using the internet and library resources is much more realistic a task than sitting in a sealed room and writing with a pen?" One answer obviously presents itself: " The essay format is in a plagiarism arms race with sites such as CourseHero and Chegg – it's a race HEIs can't win." But as he says, " it's probably not as difficult as we think to move away from the default essay or exam." And I think that the more we can use AI to assess larger and larger bodies of work, the harder and harder it will be to cheat the assessment system. Not that most students even want to.

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Pressbooks: Gamechanger in Open Access Publishing? An Interview with Founder and CEO Hugh McGuire
Stefanie Panke, AACE Review, 2022/06/23

This is interesting: "Our development and business focus is now entirely the educational use cases for Pressbooks, with about 90% of our revenues coming from higher ed institutions who make PB available to their faculty to create, adapt, and deliver digital textbooks/resources, usually open and free." This makes sense to me, and is (IMO) the only way Pressbooks can be successful without selling data, imposing paywalls or running advertising.

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Are We in the Upside Down? Course Hero, Lumen Learning, and All Kinds of Strange Things are Afoot in Ed-Tech
Matt Crosslin, EduGeek Journal, 2022/06/23

There are references to in-group conversations that don't make a lot of sense out of context (except, I guess, to say there's a history here), but Matt Crosslin's core point seems reasonable: "it seems that Course Hero is working on getting access to conferences, school servers, and circles of respect that they didn't have in the past. But the questions still remains… for what purpose?" It seems to me that they're probably wanting to provide authors who work outside academia access to markets inside academia. Bundling this commercial content with OER probably feels like a pretty good way to do it.

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