OLDaily

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

AI-powered textbooks fail to make the grade in South Korea
Junhyup Kwon, Rest of World, 2025/10/16

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All the standard anti-AI tropes are rolled out in this article, and even the subhead asserting "South Korea's $850 million AI textbook program was scrapped after four months" is an exaggeration (as the story says, "the government in January shifted from mandatory adoption to a one-year voluntary trial... (and then) Lawmakers revoked the status of the AI textbooks in August, leaving it up to schools to use them"). From a third-hand view, it appears much more to resemble a far-too-common phenomenon: the botched tech launch. "The overall quality was poor, and it was clear it had been hastily put together... The program failed because everything was rushed; it should have been rolled out gradually after testing its effectiveness."

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Building Trust and Rigor in Microcredentials: Synthesizing Standards, Taxonomy, and Frameworks
Sherri Braxton Castanzo, EDUCAUSE Review, 2025/10/16

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This is a very brief introduction to the TrustEd Microcredential Framework. This defines three types of microcredential: 'knowledge', 'application', and what might best be described as a 'participation badge'. The 'application' credential; applies somewhat vaguely to skills ("proficiency: applying and analyzing") and ability ("mastery: evaluating and creating").

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A systematic literature review of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) literacy in schools
Joonhyeong Park, Education Sciences, 2025/10/16

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This is a by-the-book literature review of studies concerning the literacies involved in the use of GenAI in educational contexts. They are, at a very high level, what you might expect: know and understand GenAI, use and apply GenAI, evaluate and incorporate GenAI, GenAI ethics, and attitudes towards GenAI. Joonhyeong Park takes the time to dive into some detail describing what each of these means. Drawing on these literacies, Park argues for "a holistic approach to enhance students' GenAI literacy." Specifically, "While learners often demonstrated curiosity and interest in using GenAI, three issues consistently emerged as critical: sustaining student agency, developing prompt engineering skills, and ensuring critical evaluation of AI-generated outputs." Someone more cynical than me might suggest that these are the GenAI literacies revealed in the review.

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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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