About OLDaily

OLDaily - short for Online Learning Daily - covers the world of instructional technology and new learning media. From the early days of learning management systems and learning objects to open educational resources (OER) and massive open online courses (MOOC), OLDaily was there, providing an insider perspective, online (web and RSS) since 1998 and by email since 2001.

OLDaily is a free and open access publication providing direct links and commentary on news, publications, resources and discussion from practitioners around the world. While sharing our voice and perspective is important, we strive also to introduce the many and diverse voices in our field, new and old, famous and obscure.

Support OLDaily

OLDaily has been free and open to all readers for almost 25 years. No paywalls, no ads, no sponsor copy. Keeping it that way takes time and resources.

If OLDaily has been useful to you — saved you time, pointed you somewhere important, or helped you think through a hard problem — please consider a monthly contribution. Every donation helps keep OLDaily independent and free for everyone.

Funding for OLDaily is part of my retirement plan - see my Retirement FAQ for more details. To continue publishing OLDaily I have a target of 100 base-level subscriptions per month (or equivalent funding from any source). I'm currently at 3% of this target.

Payments are processed securely through Stripe. You can cancel at any time.

Supporter $10 / month Sustainer $20 / month Benefactor $50 / month Patron $100 / month

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Get OLDaily delivered to your inbox. We offer a daily edition (Monday–Friday) and a weekly digest every Friday. Free, no spam, unsubscribe any time.

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Ways to Read OLDaily

Pick whatever fits your workflow. We publish in more formats than just about any other newsletter in the field.

Web Today's OLDaily on the web
Updated every weekday. No account needed.

Email — Daily or Weekly Subscribe above for the daily edition (Mon–Fri) or the weekly Friday digest.

RSS Individual posts feed
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Bluesky Follow @OLDaily on Bluesky — posts appear as they publish.

LinkedIn Subscribe to the OLDaily LinkedIn Newsletter directly within LinkedIn.

Podcast OLDaily Audio — subscribe to the audio edition via this RSS feed.

JSON / API Open JSON feed for developers and anyone who wants to integrate OLDaily into their own tools.

Our archives go back to 2001. Browse the full archive.

What We Cover

OLDaily covers the world of online learning, and as a daily there is an expectation that it will be fresh, that it will contain the news of the day. True enough. But:

Not everything that happens on a given day is news. Thus the endless reports about mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, alliances, layoffs, and other run-of-the-mill coverage does not form a part of OLDaily's content.
What makes news is the fact that it's new. That is, it reflects a rising trend, it describes a new approach to online learning, it recenters our thinking. Only items which look forward are included in OLDaily.
Not all the news that's important today happened today. A groundbreaking essay, written six months ago, may be newly relevant. Or a valuable resource, laying hidden and unrecognized, may rise, or deserve to be raised, to widespread attention. OLDaily is not fixated on the date of a publication, only its content.
News appears everywhere, not just on the wire services, the online magazines, or the press release circuit. Some of the best items appear in discussion lists, forums, and personal pages. OLDaily scours all these sources and more for content.
Events outside the discipline have an echo within the discipline. Fields such as online publishing, software and multimedia design, information and communications studies - to name a few - impact on online learning. OLDaily casts a wide net to spot trends before they hit the education scene.

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About

I'm Stephen Downes. I spent 25 years as an expert researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, specializing in new instructional media and personal learning technology. With degrees in Philosophy and a background in journalism and media, I have been a popular keynote speaker and have presented at conferences around the world. I am one of the originators of the first Massive Open Online Course, have published frequently about online and networked learning, and am the author of OLDaily. It (and this website) is the thing I've kept going the longest, and I still enjoy writing it every weekday.

Full biography · Publications · Presentations · stephen@downes.ca