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

Kansas and AI
Tim Bray, Ongoing, 2026/03/02

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I have never understood the logic of responding to downturns with layoffs. It seems to me magical thinking to expect that earnings will increase when you reduce your productive capacity. It's like responding to being in debt by saying "I'm going to work less to cut back on expenses." Tim Bray cites 'the Kansas experiment' showing that tax cuts and government workforce reductions made it more difficult, not less difficult, to address financial issues. The same with companies. You have all this qualified staff and infrastructure just sitting there, and instead of figuring out how to make money with it, they just let it go. So wasteful. And now companies think they can cut their way to grown using AI. Now at this point it's still an experiment, the way Kansas was before they ruined it. But it's not just that that the experiment is likely to be a failure, it's that with AI they could have (say) doubled their capacity, and they chose to just lay off half their staff instead.

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There Is Such A Thing As A Dumb Question
Alex Usher, Maïca Murphy, HESA, 2026/03/02

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The team of Alex Usher and Maïca Murphy point to what is an everpresent reality in New Brunswick, the desire to cut spending on education. They link to a list of proposals circulated by the government - here's a good copy, the copy on HESA is unreadable - that range from closing campuses to limiting financial aid to in-province students only. The list of options displays the usual lack of imagination displayed by governments around higher education, viewing reducing enrollment as a demographic crisis. What is missing (from both the list of questions and the critique) is any discussion of getting more value from the system, such as offering broader community-based services to the whole population (not just 18-25s). And missing is the obvious way to make up $35-50M - tax the Irvings, New Brunswick's local billionaires. This kind of money can be found in their seat cushions.

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Fraunhofer is Developing an AI-Supported Learning Management System for the Bundeswehr
IDW, 2026/03/02

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There was a time when the organization where I work was urged to be more like Fraunhofer, the German research and development organization. Now Fraunhofer is building an LMS for the German military while our organization has no interest in anything to do with learning. This I think is reflective of culture more than anything, of what is viewed as productive and practical, and what is not. Anyhow, integrated into their Moodle installation have been a chatbot, a a competence assessment app (KoApp), and "a dashboard provides them with a statistical overview of the knowledge level on each course." Here's the original press release.

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Learner Support Practices in Open and Distance Learning Institutions in Gaborone, Botswana | Online Learning
Linda Sameta, Sourav Mukhopadhyay, Fazlur Moorad, Online Learning, 2026/03/02

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I found the long 'Findings' section to be the most interesting and useful p[art of the paper (24 page PDF). Here, the authors don't tru to generalize or summarize (that's done in other sections), the just report what they heard from the 42 ODL practitioners surveyed and interviewed. The authors report "effective learner support - comprising online technical assistance, improved Internet accessibility, virtual learning evaluation, and fostering learner communities - is essential for enhancing completion rates" but that's part of a larger picture. Contrast this paper with the one on factors in student retention in a Malaysian Entrepreneurship Education MOOC (29 page PDF) suggesting those with the greatest internal locus of control (ILOC) were most likely to complete the course. If I had to summarize from both papers (and really, I shouldn't) I would say agency was the major factor at work here.

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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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