Online Courses Are Harming the Students Who Need the Most Help
Susan Dynarski, New York Times, 2018/01/23
I was sent this on Twitter today. You can get the gist of the argument from the headline. I've seen this sort of article before. This is irresponsible journalism. More...
The One Answer to All Questions in Education
George Couros, 2018/01/23
Just so you're not hanging in suspense: "The answer to all questions in education keeps pointing me back to one thing; leadership." Well, no. More...
Higher Education's Top 10 Strategic Technologies and Trends for 2018
EDUCAUSE, 2018/01/31
Educause has a bunch of 'top 10 lists for 2018' and it's a bit hard to keep track. But I think this is the over-arching one. In any event, it's the most recent. The top 'strategic technology' for 2018 is "Uses of APIs," which would accord with my own thinking. More...
EdX Quietly Developing ‘MicroBachelors’ Program
Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge, 2018/01/31
According to this article, EdX "is quietly developing a 'MicroBachelors' degree that is designed to break the undergraduate credential into Lego-like components." The work is funded by a $700,000 Lumina Foundation grant. More...
Classes taught online on snow days
Amelia Harper, Rocky Mount Telegram, 2018/01/31
This could be any newspaper anywhere really. It could be snow, heat, torrential rain, whatever. More...
Darwin Would Approve: Levels of Learning Adaptation
Steven Loomis, Learning Solutions, 2018/01/31
While there is merit to this post I think the way it conflates different senses of 'adaptation' undermine its core message. We really have three very different senses of adaptation at work here: first, Darwin's concept of species adaptation in evolution; second, variability of individual responses to changing circumstances; and third, rule-based selection of responses based on varying trigger events. More...
A night at the gun club
Theresa Tayler, University Affairs, 2018/01/31
I am not sure why there is a push to have gun clubs opened on campuses across Canada, and I'm not sure why University Affairs requested and published this puff-piece supporting the idea, but in my own opinion there's no good reason for universities (and especially public universities) to be promoting gun clubs. More...
Why one professor live-streamed lectures for free on social media
Louisa Simmons, University Affairs, 2018/01/31
If things are important, you talk about them, you share the talks, and you celebrate the wide access that becomes possible. That, I think, is the lesson from this short article. "Graham Reynolds... is a professor emeritus at Cape Breton University who says he’s still got enough life left in him to teach a course called 'Viola Desmond’s Canada.'" A black businesswoman in Nova Scotia, Viola Desmond refused to vacate a whites-only section of a threatre in 1946 and the case that resulted kicked off the modern civil rights movement in Canada. More...
Driving Excellence in Education
Katie Gallagher, e-learn, 2018/01/31
This article is basically a marketing message in the Blackboard-ownes e-learn Magazine, but I think we should take note. Katie Gallagher writes, "Academic effectiveness serves as central focus for institutions of higher education across the globe." I see this as an effort to define (and perhaps own) the term 'academic effectiveness'. What does it mean. More...
2018 OLDaily Reader Survey
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2018/01/31
I got 64 responses to my survey, which is a response rate of 0.3 percent, which doesn't seem very high to me, but I've read refereed academic publications based on less robust statistics. This article summarizes the overall results and discusses some of the suggestions for improvements. More...
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