What Do Online Students Want? 3 Findings From a New Survey Offer Some Clues
Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/06/14
Watch out for the marketing with this one. The Chronicle article is simply a restatement of the first page of 'key findings' (p. 6) (except it changes the title of the third from "Online learning is providing a positive return on students" investment' to "Regrets" since it is the Chronicle, after all). The report (62 page PDF) is a lot more detailed than that. Learning House, which produced the report, wants your data in return for the download (though typing "no spam" works). More...

Open source community calls in the wake of GDPR
Doug Belshaw, Open Educational Thinkering, 2018/06/14
So I ended up adding three comments to Doug Belshaw's post. He reports that the lawyers have said they have to delete all their meeting recordings because of GDPR. I firmly doubt that mass deletions of recordings are taking place in actual law offices, because the risk of not having a record exceeds the risk of not having deleted it. More...

Concentric Sky Announces BadgeRank - a New Search Engine for Digital Badges
Cision, Concentric Sky, 2018/06/14

Quoted, with useless adjectives removed: "Following the release of the digital badge stacking tool - Badgr Pathways - BadgeRank allows anyone to explore the digital badges published by Open Badges compliant systems around the world." More...

Developing world leaders agree education is their top priority
World Education Blog, 2018/06/12
This is a summary of a newly published report (120 page PDF) surveying priorities selected by citizens and leaders in the developing world. Education, along with peace and security, are at the top of the list. That said, "Poorer and less democratic countries are more concerned about ensuring access to basic public services — health, water, food, and energy." Interestingly, climate change just doesn't rank as a priority. More...

UF Online’s New Corporate Partner: Discover Financial joins Walmart with Online Education benefit
Phil Hill, e-Literate, 2018/06/12
As mentioned here last week, Walmart is getting into the business of providing access to education for its employees. One of its partners is University of Florida (through UF Online). Today Phil Hill reports " UF Online announced another partner: Discover Financial Services, issuers of the Discover Card and Diners Club International, with its 14,000 employees."  UF Online calls this type of program Employer Pathways. More...

The Ad Hoc Government Digital Services Playbook
Kaitlin Devine, Paul Smith, Ad Hoc, 2018/06/12
This got passed around the office today and it's a pretty good guide (and required reading) for administrators of technical services. 'Ad Hoc' is the name of the company that drafted this. It's focused on understanding customer and user needs, designing simple solutions, and phased-in migrations. More...

Models for online, open, flexible and technology enhanced higher education across the globe – a comparative analysis
Dominic Orr, Martin Weller, Rob Farrow, International Council for Open and Distance Education, 2018/06/12
This large report (65 page PDF) is a survey of what the authors are calling OOFAT - 'online, open, flexible and technology enhanced' resources. The unwieldy acronym should perhaps be seen as a warning. The authors define an 'OOFAT Model' combining content, deliver and recognition. Then by evaluating them along two dimensions - organizational flexibility and procedural openness - they created six 'OOFAT Types', which I won't list here. More...

What makes a great leader, explained in eight counterintuitive charts
Shane Snow, Quartz, 2018/06/11
I'm not so sure the charts are counterintuitive, but the eight 'magic quadrant' tables capture aspects of diversity and adaptability that contribute to great leadership (or, maybe, great groups). Though there are eight charts, the theme is consistent throughout: it's better if individuals have diverse core values, because this brings in a variety of perspectives, but they need to stick to them (otherwise they're just panderers and opportunists). More...

CORE becomes the world’s largest aggregator
Balviar Notay, JISC, 2018/06/11
According to this report, "As of May 2018, CORE has aggregated over 131 million article metadata records, 93 million abstracts, 11 million hosted and validated full texts and over 78 million direct links to research papers hosted on other websites." There's a link to a table comparing CORE with seven other open access paper harvesters: BASE, OpenAIRE, Paperity, SHARE, 1findr, OneRepo, and Unpaywall. More...

Has Google Become a Journal Publisher?
Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/06/11
The answer to this question is "no". But Google does publish a fascinating journal called Distill - this article on AI and Interpretation distracted me for a good fifteen minutes before I could finish this post. And Distill seems to bother Scholarly Kitchen writer Kent Anderson a lot. The Scholarly Kitchen is, of course, largely an advocacy blog for publishing companies, so the take is not unexpected. More...