OLDaily

Building AI that teaches: What nine years at Coursera taught me about scaling learning systems
Rohan Benkar, EdScoop, 2026/07/20

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Nice article from Rohan Benkar, who spent nine years building learning systems at Coursera, and who argues that educational AIs are very different from regular chatbots. An educational AI is more that just an answer machine, and errors can have a long-lasting impact. "Most platforms today personalize within individual components, but the real opportunity lies in architectures that treat learning as a continuous feedback system," writes Benkar. And failures in infrastructure - like, say, lab support - are also learning failures.

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Does Practicing on an AI Actually Work?
Mike Kentz, How We Frame Machines, 2026/07/20

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This article describes a number of studies on the effectiveness of what the author calls 'friction bots' - chatbots that emulate difficult people (for example, the person who agrees with everything but won't execute the plan). Overall: "role-playing has been proven time and time again to be good for learning. Rehearsal is good for the brain, too. lLM’s are really good at mimicking human beings. Human-human “simulations” are great! We shouldn’t abandon them. But what LLM’s may introduce is a way to scale the practice."

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A Coherent Program-Level Response to Generative AI
Derek Bruff, Agile Learning, 2026/07/20

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This post outlines a set of "a robust and coherent set of changes" introduced by the University of Chicago Law School in response to AI. In sum: device-free classes and in person or oral exams. That doesn't seem very robust to me. How does this prepare a future lawyer where working with AI will be the core skill? Or where - maybe - voluntary AI-based meditation will eliminate the need for most civil and many criminal cases.

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This Week in Student Success
Glenda Morgan, On Student Success, 2026/07/20

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Glenda Morgan writes, "Universities spend enormous amounts of time trying to understand what employers want. Perhaps the more urgent question is whether students understand what universities actually offer. If students are less convinced of the value of higher education than employers themselves, we don't have an employability problem; we have a confidence problem." But messaging isn't the issue. Relevance is.

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Affordability Is Not Just Inflation: It's Time For A Historic Shift In Wages
Josh Bersin, JOSH BERSIN, 2026/07/20

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This might not seem like an edtech story but it is. Josh Bersin observes, "productivity is going up and CEOs and shareholders are hoarding the benefits and not passing them on to employees." This (and not, say, AI) is the largest issue facing education, at least in the West. It doesn't matter if education makes you more productive if you see none of the benefits (just like: it doesn't matter if education is necessary for democracy if you don't get to vote).

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"Not employee surveillance," Microsoft defends Teams' new location tracking feature, now rolling out
Mayank Parmar, Windows Latest, 2026/07/20

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I'm so glad I'm not working in an office environment any more, what with Return-To-Office and MS teams features that enforce that. "If the organization chooses Inform mode, Teams workplace check-in will be enabled for everyone without their permission." 'Inform mode'. Lovely. Like a parody. But it's not. People should own their own software; software should not own people.

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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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