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...

An Interactive Guide To The Fourier Transform
Kalid Azad, Better Explained, 2018/01/30
I love this analogy describing the Fourier Transform (quoted):

• What does the Fourier Transform do? Given a smoothie, it finds the recipe.
• How? Run the smoothie through filters to extract each ingredient.
• Why? Recipes are easier to analyze, compare, and modify than the smoothie itself.
• How do we get the smoothie back? Blend the ingredients.

If you like the analogy, go read the explanation. More...

The Central Challenge of Collaboration
Nancy Dixon, conversation matters, 2018/01/30
The more people make collaboration the core of sopcial, political and educational society, the more difficult it becomes to more forward. It's not simply because of our inclination to view those we disagree with as the enemy, as Nancy Dixon says. The difficulty with collaboration is that you have to work together to achieve some common objective. But that's usually precisely where you disagree with the other person. More...

Education’s dirty little secret
David McQueen, TallBlackOneSugar, 2018/01/30
Writing about "how some schools maintain these outstanding high level attainment grades," David McQueen writes "they weed out the ones who might make the figures not look too good." This, he said, is widespread. More...