OLDaily

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

How accessible is the educational research literature?
Joshua Rosenberg, Educated Guesses, 2025/10/09

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Maybe it's just me, but how is the question "what is returned when you search for an educational research article on Google Scholar?" answered by studying "2,500 articles published between 2010 and 2022 across six AERA journals"? I get that the idea was to test Google Scholar by finding other versions of the articles that were't locked up. But even if you reference "AERA's role as a nationally and globally important organization," it's not like AERA comes even close to being 'all of education research' let alone 'all of Google Scholar results'. Nor is it representative of all educational research in any significant way. Anyhow, the article was published at Teachers College Record, where it's behind a paywall. There's an open version here (though who is ever going to find this version of the article?). These people in education, still publishing in paywalled journals... I don't know, I mean, I just don't know...

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The Future of Higher Education: The Age of Sponsored Knowing, and What This Means to Higher Education
Jeppe Klitgaard Stricker, National Education Policy Center, 2025/10/09

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The possibility - nay, probability - that companies like OpenAI will soon start placing advertisements into AI outputs will change education, writes Jeppe Klitgaard Stricker. "The problem is not simply that students will be distracted by banners or pop-ups. It is subtler and more insidious. Generative AI thrives on the frictionless answer - clear, confident, authoritative. Add advertising into the mix, and the very texture of those answers is shaped by commercial logic."

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TeachLM: Post-Training LLMs for Education Using Authentic Learning Data
Janos Perczel, Jin Chow, Dorottya Demszky, arXiv, 2025/10/09

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Large language models (LLM) may be experts but they have no experience conversing with students. This project addresses that by creating a student model using authentic student data and using it to post-train off-the-shelf LLM. This paper (28 page PDF) describes the development and evaluation of such a tool. "Our evaluations demonstrate that fine-tuning on authentic learning data significantly improves conversational and pedagogical performance – doubling student talk time, improving questioning style, increasing dialogue turns by 50%, and greater personalization of instruction." Via Philippa Hardman.

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HHMI Enacts “Immediate Access To Research” Policy For Its Scientists
ASAPbio, 2025/10/09

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This is how easy it is for an academic institution to embrace open access. "Going forward, preprints will form the basis of HHMI's assessments of its researchers' work. Although HHMI researchers have already been able to choose to include preprints in their evaluation materials, the policy change means that all researchers will now be required to do so. The policy enables HHMI to strongly center preprints in its assessment processes. Such a shift further removes the pressure for HHMI researchers to focus their efforts on publishing in particular journals." Via Paul Walk.

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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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