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Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

OER / ZTC Advocates Have an AI Problem
David Wiley, improving learning, 2023/03/21

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Most of this post is directed against zero textbook costs (ZTC) advocacy, which I guess is a thing somewhere (Wiley says it prevails in U.S. higher education institutions) but the real intertesting discussion comes right at the end when he gets to Large Language Models (LLM) like GPT-4. "As with courseware, LLMs have real costs associated with their hosting and delivery, meaning that learning materials that incorporate LLMs will have a price greater than zero. And this means that students whose faculty, department, institution, or state have guaranteed that students will pay zero dollars for their course materials will miss out on these next-generation learning materials." Well, that does follow at all. Heating and light also have costs associated with them, but students don't pay extra for heating and light. More and more, interaction with these LLM will be the course, not 'resource materials that support the course'.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Lessons Learnt from a Multimodal Learning Analytics Deployment In-the-wild
arXiv, ACM, 2023/03/21

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This is quite an interesting paper (35 page PDF) that might expand your understanding of learning analytics a bit and offers a comprehensive study of practical applications of multi-modal learning analytics (or to use their expression, which I don't really like, "in the wild", that is, where "studies are commonly conducted in human-computer interaction (HCI) research with the aim of investigating the implications of embedding new technology interventions in everyday situations"). If you want a quick summary of the results, scroll down to section 6.1 (page 22) for a really nice presentation. I found the study of the integration of video, sensors, and other analytics in clinical settings interesting, and it's worth keeping in mind what will happen when this sort of data is combined with advanced AI.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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