Presence, Structured Exposure and Desire
Keith Lyons, Clyde Street, 2016/09/01
I can understand the desire on the part of some (many, even) to put down the screens and engage face-to-face, uninterrupted. My sympathy with this view ends when professors - even Clay Shirky - are "moving from recommending students set aside laptops and phones to requiring it." At the point something is required the arguments in its favour become irrelevant, and it is simply the exertion of power that makes it so. More...

The Cons of Social Media for E-Learning
Tom Kuhlmann, The Rapid E-Learning Blog, 2016/09/01
The link to his ebook (73 page PDF) appears in his RSS feed, but not the web version of the same post, which is interesting. No matter, it's free and worth a look. To the post: it caught my eye when I found myself sympathizing with how difficult it is to keep up. More...

“The fun they had” or about the quality of MOOC
Patrizia Ghislandi, Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society, 2016/08/31
I remember the Isaac Asimov story referenced in this article (16 page PDF). I credit my extensive reading of science fiction with a lot of the foresight I've been able to bring to our field, including with respect to MOOCs. More...

B.C. Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit
Tara Robertson, Sue Doner, Amanda Coolidge, BC Campus, 2016/08/31

Needless to say this is an important resources that will be appreciated by a wide public. More...

OER Policy Development Tool
Daniel DeMarte, Amanda Coolidge, Lumen Learning, 2016/08/31
This tool will help institutions and organizations develop the open access policies they wish to support. It's a bit text-heavy (for example, a one or two work selector should be used for a check-box option, not an entire paragraph) but it should serve as a useful guide. More...

Analysing writing
Doug Peterson, doug — off the record, 2016/08/29
Doug Peterson introduces us to a lovely application called FoxType, which I tried out this morning. Essentially, the idea is that it provides a number of services to help you understand your own writing. More...

Assessing soft skills in PBL
Kelli McGraw, 2016/08/29
As is so often the case, an answer to what appears to be a simple questions results in layers of complexity. Even the question itself bears examining (is it a marketing ploy? for example). It is essentially this: should problem-based learning employ an assessment grid to evaluate soft skills. More...

Charter Schools: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
John Oliver, YouTube, HBO, 2016/08/29
John Oliver examines the performance of charter schools in the United States and finds enough wrong with them to fill an 18 minute comedy video. More...

Why America’s MOOC pioneers have abandoned ship
Jonathan Rees, More or Less Bunk, 2016/08/29

Jonathan Rees citing Alex Usher is a bit like Bernie Sanders citing Ronald Reagan. There's an incongruity there. Usher's point is that MOOCs never made money. More...

The MOOC revolution that wasn't
Audrey Watters, The Daily Dot, 2016/08/29
'Tis the season to dissect the "failure" of MOOCs - or, to be specific, the rarefied Silicon Valley version of MOOCs, which is all anyone ever talks about. That narrative was that "MOOC startups Udacity, Coursera, and edX all promised that their free online courses with massive enrollment figures would 'democratize education.'" Of course that didn't happen. More...