By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Ten Theses In Support of Teaching and Against Learning Outcomes
Jeff Noonan, Interventions, Evocations, 2016/08/09
I'm generally sympathetic with the objectives of this post but less so with how it is presented. The main point, that "Teaching at the university level is not a practice of communicating or transferring information but awakening in students a desire to think by revealing to them the questionability of things," is the least well supported assertion in the piece, though it is probably the most contentious. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. People analytics reveals three things HR may be getting wrong
Henri de Romrée, Bruce Fecheyr-Lippens, Bill Schaninger, McKinsey Quarterly, 2016/08/09
The important part of this study isn't that companies are hiring the wrong people - it has been pretty obvious for some time now that people graduating from 'good schools' aren't any better than the rest of us. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Could Open Research benefit Cambridge University researchers?
Lauren Cadwallader, Joanna Jasiewicz, Marta Teperek, Unlocking Research, 2016/08/09

Good series from the University of Cambridge Office of Scholarly Communications on the challenges facing contemoporary scientific research. Here's the list of articles:

• The mis-measurement problem - 11 July 2016
• The authorship problem – 12 July 2016
• Reproducibility, retractions & retrospective hypotheses – 14 July 2016
• Does peer review work? - 19 July 2016
• Solutions? – 2 August 2016
• Could Open Research benefit Cambridge University researchers? – 3 August 2016

The last is the least interesting, as it mostly surveys the preceding five, and then takes a self-centered look at the issues. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Invent something at a university? The size of any future fortune will depend on which one
Claire Brownell, Financial Post, 2016/08/08
Who should own the intellectual property arising out of a student's work on a thesis, or a professor's work in academia? How about government researchers? With respect to the former, the Financial Post reflexively says "institutions should get out of the way as much as possible." But it's far from clear institutions are actually in the way - they may well have created the conditions that made the invention possible in the first place. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Little tribute to Tim Berners-Lee from the learning community
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2016/08/08
A common trend in business writing recently has been to drop the determiner (so, for example, writing 'Business case is solid' instead of 'The business case is solid.') I think the belief is that it appears more efficient, but I just read it as more illiterate. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Open Educational Practice: the boring way and more interesting ways
David T. Jones, The Weblog of (a) David Jones, 2016/08/08
This is a pretty good post, but it leaves me hanging at the end. The 'boring way' of implementing Open educational Practice (OEP) is, as Jones describes it, is to "spend the time and effort to polish course materials into a book and make that book openly available to all." Fairly common, but yeah, fairly mundane. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. When Tenure Never Comes
Stephen Black, The Walrus, 2016/08/04
According to the (anonymous) author of this article in the Walrus, "Academia has become a high-stakes gamble—and the losers can barely afford pants." It's a fair point, but as critic Melonie Fullick writes in University Affairs, "the piece is basically written as if he is the first person to have discovered this is an issue that might be worthy of discussion.". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Lessons Learned From Building An Open Online Course

Chris Gaudreau, Torrey Trust, Weiyang Liu, eLearning Industry, 2016/08/04

I've seen these points raised before but I'd like to frame them with a question, which follows. The author asserts "the importance of using technology and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles to provide personalized, flexible, and accessible learning opportunities." Here they are:

1. Provide Multiple Means Of Representation
2. Provide Multiple Means Of Action And Expression
3. Provide Multiple Means Of Engagement

So here's the question: are these principles equally applicable in the case of the single learner. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Pressure to Spend More on Poor Students
Rick Seltzer, Inside Higher Ed, 2016/08/04
What this article shows most clearly is that there is no end to the reasons the rich can give to justify keeping their wealth to themselves. In this case, the proposal is that universities with large endowments could top their spending from endowment funds to reach the  5 percent minimum spending benchmark required of private nonprofit foundations. This money could add hundreds of millions of dollars of assistance to poor students. But, ah, no. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Learning needs a plan for the revolution we can already glimpse
Michael Barber, Pearson, 2016/08/04
If it were really a revolution there would be new people in charge after the dust settles rather than the same old gang. More...