OLDaily

OPM Market Landscape and Dynamics: Summer 2022 updates
Phil Hill, 2022/07/22

This article and a longer follow-up outline Phil Hill's views on the current state of the online program management (OPM) market. The use of a graphic from Max Max: Fury Road summarizes that perspective quite well. "The company is losing its ability to steer and control its own destiny due to the financial pressures – more market valuation in nature than revenue or profit-based." Hill also comments critically on a Wall Street Journal 'gotcha' article. It missed, he says, what could have been a good story. "Aggressive recruiting of students for online programs – degree-granting and otherwise – is an annoyance and a weakness of the OPM market."

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Federated learning uses the data right on our devices
Zachary Chamption, Futurity, 2022/07/22

We've looked at this approach in the past and I expect we'll see much more of it. "An approach called federated learning trains machine learning models on devices like smartphones and laptops, rather than requiring the transfer of private data to central servers." Typically the edge devices (ie., your smartphones and laptops) will install an already partially trained model (say, something that already knows about musical genres) and then use your own data to complete the training (say, your own musical selections). Edge AI can also feed generalized results (not personal data) back to the central server. "Federated learning relies on an algorithm that serves as a centralized coordinator. It delivers the model to the devices, trains it locally on the relevant user data, and then brings each partially trained model back and uses them to generate a final global model."

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Enclouding education
Ben Williamson, Code Acts in Education, 2022/07/22

This article looks at the deployment of the cloud to support education (a practice that is well-entrenched, I would observe) and identifies five areas that require analysis: "corporate cloud enclosure of public education, enhanced extraction of economic and data 'rent' from the education sector by cloud operators, expanding infrastructural power over the edtech ecosystem, extension of capacities of automation and anticipation in education practice, policy and governance." The overarching concern being expressed is that the cloud is mostly a provate commercial space, and so the use of the cloud by education entrenches the corporate position as an education provider. There are risks, to be sure, but I'm not thinking anything like a non-corporate cloud deployment is in the works right now. Nor does it make any sense to not take advantage of what the cloud can offer. So, yeah, "taking up an advocacy position against cloud infrastructures or platforms" doesn't make sense. What does make sense (as always) are regulatory environments, taxation policies and service provision agreements that serve the public interest.

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