OLDaily

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

Online university offers lifeline to thousands of Afghan girls barred from education
Qaseem Azizi, Amu TV, 2025/05/28

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I trhink it's a great story but I wish I knew more - like, where it's based, and whether the Woman Online University is actually very accessible in Afghanistan. Here's the gist: "Amid sweeping restrictions on women's education under Taliban rule, a group of former university professors in Afghanistan has launched an all-women online university, offering a rare educational lifeline to thousands of girls barred from attending universities." Read more from this recent press release. I've seen it referenced in a few places recently, including this Mastodon thread that also recognizes the "vast number of people for whom internet is not a thing always on and in the pocket" raising the need for projects like those listed in Offline Internet.

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The State of GenAI
Carlo Iacono, 2025/05/28

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Good overview of where we're at with generative AI in education (TLDR: we've stopped panicking and started to experiment with the new tools, while the tools themselves are developing beyond their text-only roots). The best bit is saved to near the end: "Perhaps the most important shift has been in our collective attitude towards expertise and authority. The traditional academic model - where knowledge flows from expert to novice - has been thoroughly disrupted.... This has forced a new humility on academics and professionals." It also explains (to me, at least) a lot of the resistance and articles like this insisting AI can't do the things it very obviously does.

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The Lost Boys of the Online Right
Charlie Angus, The Resistance, 2025/05/28

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As someone who observed the same phenomena over a lifetime, I can say this is an accurate (if brief) history of the origins of the online extreme right in things like 4chan, Pepe the Frog, and dog-e-coin. "We have an obligation," says Charlie Angus, "to address the economic, political, and environmental dispossession that has left young people with little hope or opportunity." Quite right. But also, we have to meet young people in their own spaces. It's not enough to argue "nobody should be using social media (or artificial intelligence, or whatever the current tech happens to be)." It's not enough to say "these technologies are bad and ethically wrong" and then to disengage. If there is no voice to speak for tolerance and understanding, there will be none. "It comes down to our willingness to take time to mentor and encourage," says Angus.

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Ñ! #FREE&IGUALES
Issuu, 2025/05/28

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When I was in Grade 5 I was the editor of our class newsletter The Mad Mod Portable. Yeah, it was the 70s. I've had a soft spot for student media projects ever since. Here we have "an open educational project of Huron HS that develops language proficiency, digital skills, and critical thinking." Daniel Verdugo writes, "The theme of this edition is a reference to the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that declares all human beings 'free and equal in dignity and rights'." Projects like this foster dangerous traits in students, like creativity, independence, and free expression. We need more like this.

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Laying the Digital Rails: Why Nations and Economic Regions Need a New Kind of Infrastructure
Doug Heintzman, BRI Newsletter, 2025/05/28

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If Canada has learned anything in recent months, it is that we need to lay down the rails of our own national digital railway (Pierre Berton's The National Dream is essential for any Canadian and those interested in Canada, I think). This Op-Ed from Doug Heintzman lays out the four foundations:  self-sovereign digital identity; trusted and accessible data; frictionless payment rails; and universal access to artificial intelligence. I'd word them perhaps a bit differently, but I don't disagree with the essential premise. Identity, data, exchange and algorithms. These are the rails that will either bind us to our neighbours or enable us to create and maintain our own identity. Government should take note.

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Empowering Student Success through AI-Driven Collaboration
Bharat Khushalani, EDUCAUSE Review, 2025/05/28

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This is one of those cases where I misinterpreted a headline leading me to be disappointed in an otherwise decent article. The tagline is, "student success is a shared institutional commitment," and this tells you where the artile is going: getting different departments to work together using AI to help students through things like personalized learning paths, writing assistance, and early alerts. The usual. But what I saw in the headline was the use of AI to help students collaboarte with each other by helping them build teams, coordinate projects, and manage collaboration. These re useful skills to develop, and having an AI guide students through the process gives them models and patterns they can use later in life. But - sadly for me - that's not what the article was about.

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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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