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

Are marketing orthodoxies limiting online student recruitment?
Neil Mosley, Neil Mosley Consulting, 2026/01/30

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"I've begun to increasingly question whether the playbook for online student marketing and recruitment has become too formulaic and rigid," writes  Neil Mosley. "I've also begun to speculate on whether this is limiting recruitment opportunities and, in some instances, constraining universities from being more competitive."

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blento
Florian Killius, 2026/01/30

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This is a service where you can "create your own beautiful personal website, with your data being saved to your bluesky profile." You can find my blento here (fwiw). Blento's beta launches on Sunday. Via Picalilli. I think we're about to enter a renaissance of sites like this, now that people are able to free their imagination with AI-generated software the way Florian Killius did with bento. Here's another one, via Alan Levine: Wobble. 

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Introducing the Forge, a New Innovation in Open Pedagogy | LibreTexts
LibreTexts, 2026/01/30

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I should have covered this last June, but oh well, better late than never. I didn't notice it until it was mentioned in today's LibreText newsletter (which doesn't seem to have a web version). Anyhow, the Forge "is an assignment platform specifically built to advance Open Pedagogy and provide actionable insights through integrated analytics. The platform enables instructors to design renewable, collaborative long-form assignments and gives students meaningful opportunities to produce public-facing, openly licensed work." Meanwhile, why doesn't LibreTexts use RSS?

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TikTok Won’t Be Another Twitter
Laurens Hof, connectedplaces.online, 2026/01/30

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The phrase "won't be another Twitter" doesn't refer to the content, which may well sink to the same levels under new ownership. It refers to the pattern of people leaving. "TikTok's structure differs from X in two meaningful ways," writes Laurens Hof. "The first is that its TikTok's architecture makes the network much more invisible to its own users... The second... is that where Twitter and X are the centers of political discourse, TikTok is the center of culture." Also (and in my view more importantly) "Video is in an entirely different category, with storage costs, bandwidth costs, transcoding costs, CDN costs that are both much larger than text." Still, "Skylight, the ATProto-based TikTok alternative, crossed 380,000 users this week with around 95,000 monthly active users." And there's also Loops, the ActivityPub video platform.

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CHEAT Benchmark
David Wiley, 2026/01/30

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David Wiley writes in this 'manifesto': "The CHEAT (Complicity in Harming Educational Assessment and Testing) Benchmark will measure the degree to which a model is willing to help students cheat. By publicizing CHEAT Benchmark scores for popular large language models, we can raise awareness of this clear and present danger to assessment integrity." I found reading the source of this document to be far more interesting than the HTML text - my curiosity was intrigued when my own software retrieving the content displayed only: 'Lovable Generated Project'. You can't actually find the text in the page at all! If you're curious, you can play with Lovable yourself - use it to "create apps and websites by chatting with AI." Anyhow, back to CHEAT: "CHEAT LMS is a 'honeypot' server that mimics core learning management system functions while capturing deep telemetry. It supports three assignment types - quizzes, essays, and discussions - and tracks everything from HTTP requests to client-side behavioral events like mouse movements and keystroke timing." CHEAT was built with Claude. Now to be clear - I have no objection to the use of AI to set up this project. But it's a bit audacious to use it to catch AI helping students 'cheat'.

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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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