Why Haven't MOOCs Eliminated Any Professors?
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, 2017/05/17

I clicked on this post by accident but while I'm here I may as well comment. Joshua Kim asks "why haven’t the MOOC robots taken the faculty jobs. More...

What’s now and next in analytics, AI, and automation
James Manyika, McKinsey, 2017/05/17
As I was reading this overview (12 page PDF) it occurred to me that despite all the attention being paid to learning analytics the major impact of analytics and machine learning in academic institutions will be in much more mundane areas: the physical plant, facility allocations, faculty workload allocations, and the like. More...

20 Best Platforms for Selling Online Courses
Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead, Small Business Trends, 2017/05/17
This is a bit of a throw-away article but I'm including it here, first, to make the point that an increasing number of people and platforms are focused on selling online courses, and second, to preserve a list of 20 platforms offering this service. More...

After Lots Of Talk, Microsoft’s Bots Show Signs Of Life
Mark Sullivan, Fast Commpany, 2017/05/17
This is quite a good read, moving from the hype ("bots are the new app") to the practical application ("'Good morning,' says the Language Learning Bot, in Chinese") and quite a bit in between. More...

Facebook promised to tackle fake news. But the evidence shows it's not working
Sam Levin, The Guardian, 2017/05/17
The problem with flagging fake news as "disputed" is that it encourages people to try harder. "A bunch of conservative groups grabbed this and said, ‘Hey, they are trying to silence this blog – share, share share,’” said Winthrop, who published the story that falsely claimed hundreds of thousands of Irish people were brought to the US as slaves. More...

Tracking of Teachers and Students in Edmodo
Bill Fitzgerald, 2017/05/17
If there's a constant in our field, it's the claim by service providers that they aren't tracking students for the purpose of selling the data to advertisers. Sometimes this comes back to bit the vendors, as it did this week when Edmodo was hacked. Now they face some hard questions. More...

A Model of Personal Learning
Stephen Downes, May 16, 2017, 1er Simposium Internacional de Investigacion, Desarrolle e Innovacion en la Sociedad Digital, Mexico City, Mexico
I look at the day-to-day routine of a personal learner with examples from my own practice and a live demonstration of learning activities. Through the presentation I explain the philosophy of Connectivism, a learning approach based on developing and growing personal learning networks, and will describe the ARRFF (Aggregate Remodel Repurpose Feed Forward) model of learning activities. More...

Pearson, an Investor in Knewton, Is ‘Phasing Out’ Partnership on Adaptive Products
Tony Wan, EdSurge, 2017/05/17

When you partner with a large corporation you put the future of your company in their hands. It's not a good place to be, as Knewton is discovering this week. "Pearson will no longer use Knewton’s adaptive learning engine for some of its digital offerings. More...