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

Cloudflare creates AI crawler tollbooth to pay publishers
Thomas Claburn, The Register, 2025/07/02

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I've long wondered how Cloudflare would leverage its position as a prominent intermediary between web publishers and web readers. Here's one sign: "Cloudflare has started blocking AI web crawlers by default in a bid to become the internet's gatekeeper." They will, in effect, monetize the web. "Each time an AI crawler requests content, they either present payment intent via request headers for successful access (HTTP response code 200), or receive a 402 Payment Required response with pricing," explained Will Allen, VP of product, and Simon Newton, engineering manager, in a blog post."

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Here are the biggest misconceptions about AI content scraping
Sara Guaglione, Digiday, 2025/07/02

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The main thing to glean from this article is that the nature of web site scraping is changing. "There are two main types of AI bots - RAG AI bots and training data bots... Training scrapes are 'one-and-done' to feed a model's general knowledge... RAG AI bots, or agents, retrieve factual, current information in real-time. They respond to user prompts in AI products like Perplexity and ChatGPT by searching the web. Responses include links or citations to the original sources, such as publishers' sites. RAG can surface and summarize articles without storing them in training data, which makes the threat to traffic and monetization even more immediate and harder to regulate."

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University Autonomy Stems From Corporate Rights
Michael Banerjee, Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs, 2025/07/02

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According to this article, "To preserve institutional autonomy and defend academic freedom, universities should exercise their powerful claims to corporate rights." Without getting into the specifics of political affairs in another country, I would hasten to add that I have seen no case to support the idea that corporations are singularly immune to political pressure. Sure, I've seen corporations push back against government - but in the end, they all cave. Autonomy and freedom depend on the constitution of the people, not the constitution of the nation.

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Inside a plan to use AI to amplify doubts about the dangers of pollutants
Dharna Noor, The Guardian, 2025/07/02

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Following up from yesterday's thread. "An industry-backed researcher who has forged a career sowing doubt about the dangers of pollutants is attempting to use artificial intelligence (AI) to amplify his perspective." It is likely we will see such examples multiplied manyfold in the future.

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Google is opening its NotebookLM AI tools to students under 18
Antonio G. Di Benedetto, The Verge, 2025/07/02

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According to this article, "Teachers using Google Classroom will be getting new Gemini features, like assigning students curriculum-based AI Notebooks." A comment on Reddit (in between all the new crypto threads): "Google just killed MagicSchool."

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Open Educational Resources Search Index
OERSI, 2025/07/02

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"The Open Educational Resources Search Index (OERSI) provides a central point for searching for open educational resources in higher education by bringing together the content of distributed OER repositories and other sources of open educational resources." It's something I would like to add to CList (assuming I ever have the time to get back to working on CList). Here's the search API I would use.

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Open Syllabus
Open Syllabus, 2025/07/02

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I just want to make sure I record this as a link before I forget: "Open Syllabus is a massive non-profit archive of the main activity of higher education: teaching. It provides top-down views of the curriculum across thousands of schools to support curricular innovation, lifelong learning, and student success." There's also an associated Open Syllabus Analytics, with a free (pre-2018) version, and a commercial version priced at a per-FTE rate, with a minimum of $2500 per institution. And there's an Open Syllabus print store, which is pretty cool. Contents "are obtained by 'scraping' publicly-accessible university websites." 

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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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