OLDaily

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

LinkedIn & Anthropic killed their specialist roles. Are learning design roles next?
Philippa Hardman, Dr. Phil's Newsletter, 2026/02/26

---

Here's the argument in a nutshell: "The pattern is clear: AI is collapsing specialist work, expanding what one person can do, and shifting the premium from niche expertise to end-to-end capability.The same pattern hasn't yet fully emerged in learning design - but there are signals to suggest that it is on its way." The instructional design function in particular seems headed for automation, but also a lot of the content-generation function, including in particular on-demand content generation, is headed that way. In my opinion, anyway.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Building a Simple MCP Server in Python
Jason Brownlee, Machine Learning Mastery, 2026/02/26

---

OK, I haven't tried this yet, but it's in my list of things to do on my 'Stephen Follows Instructions' video series. "In this article, you will learn what Model Context Protocol (MCP) is and how to build a simple, practical task-tracker MCP server in Python using FastMCP." I can think of all kinds of things I want to do with an MCP server (and I'd like to do at least one of them before MCP servers are superseded by the next new technology).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Beyond Zoom: Why We Took Control of Our Video Conferencing with Jitsi Meet
Ian O'Byrne, 2026/02/26

---

Sure, you could use Microsoft Teams, if you enjoy complexity and pain. Or you could use Zoom, which works well but, as Ian O'Byrne says, is "a rented space where governance is centralized, and participants have no meaningful choice." Or you could use Jitsi. "Jitsi Meet is an open-source video conferencing platform. Think of it as the community-owned cousin of Zoom or Google Meet. It runs directly in the browser, requires no participant accounts, and supports encrypted video conferencing out of the box." Yes, you're hosting it yourself, but a service like "Reclaim Cloud offers a one-click Jitsi installer that handles most of the complexity while still allowing full control under the hood."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Bluesky
• Read OLDaily as a LinkedIn Newsletter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed