The Impact of Free Primary Education Inputs On Educational Outcomes in Kenya (2003 To 2013)
Dorothy Akinyi Owuor, European Journal of Educational Sciences, 2018/05/02
For any measure of educational outcomes there is a ready-made body of literature suggesting that increasing spending to support free primary education (FPE) will not increase outcomes. I have my doubts about this research and always keep my eyes open for counterexamples. More...

Personal Data has Entered the GDPR Era
CLUSIF, 2018/05/02

Good diagram (one page PDF) outlining the General Data Protection Regulation being implemented in Europe. It's complex but rewards a closer look. More...

Exploring the Open Knowledge Landscape
Lorna M Campbell, Open World, 2018/05/02
There's a lot going on in this post from Lorna Campbell consisting of the transcript and slides from her keynote at the FLOSS UK Spring Conference in Edinburgh. It's a pretty good overview of open education and open educational resources (OER). More...

Conceptualising OEP: A review of theoretical and empirical literature in Open Educational Practices
Catherine Cronin, Iain MacLaren, Open Praxis, 2018/05/01

This is a taxonomy more than anything but also "aims to provide a useful synthesis of OEP literature for education researchers and practitioners." The authors assert "one or more of the following bodies of work were cited in all subsequent academic literature in the area of OEP:

1. OLCOS (Open eLearning Content Observatory Services) project (2006-2007)
2. OPAL (Open Education Quality) initiative (2010-2011)
3. UKOER programme (2009-2012)
4. CILT (Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching) research, UCT (2009-present)."

This suggests to me that their focus was a bit narrow (surely discussion of open educational practices existed outside reference to these initiatives - like this one, for example, or this one, or this one, or even this one, or for that matter our discussions about MOOCs from 2008 and forward. More...

The Wisdon and/or Madness of Crowds
Nicky Case, 2018/05/01
This is a really nice visualization of some of the (very) basic concepts of learning in self-organizing networks. It takes a social perspective (as opposed to, say, a machine learning perspective) and offers an intuitive and accessible way to comprehend learning networks. More...

George Mason’s President Says Some Donor Agreements Fell ‘Short’ of Academic Standards
Nell Gluckman, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/05/01

According to this article, "agreements show that the Koch Foundation and other donors had room to influence the selection and work of the professors whose positions they spent millions to support." More...

Are Etextbooks Affordable Now?
Lindsay McKenzie, Inside Higher Ed, 2018/05/01
For most people in the world, the answer to this question is still "no". I have always worked on the principle of a two-times-order-of-magnitude reduction in cost as the standard for digitization. The textbook that used to cost $60 should now cost $0.60. More...

Moocs are a solution in search of a problem
Chris Fellingham, Times Higher Education, 2018/05/01
According to Chris Fellingham, MOOCs " arose from the boredom of Stanford University computer science professors fed up with teaching the same lectures each year. Out of idle curiosity, they wanted to see what would happen if they dumped their courses, lectures and all, online for anyone to take." According to this story, OOCs then searched for a problem to solve - providinbg new skills to university graduates, say, or offering new kinds of certificates. More...

OEP (Open Educational Pragmatism?)
Doug Belshaw, Thought Shrapnel, 2018/05/01
This is more from the OER 2018 conference in Holland last week. Doug Belshaw discusses his conversations with Michael Shaw from Tes Resources. Shaw described how warm the OER community had been. "He found the hosts and participants 'incredibly welcoming' and the debates 'more open than [he’d] expected on how commercial organisations could play a part' in the ecosystem." That's nice, but maybe a little too cozy. More...