OLDaily
by Stephen Downes
April 15, 2014
Building a Google custom search engine for LRMI-tagged pages
Phil Barker,
CETIS Blog,
April 15, 2014
This is an interesting exercise in coding: "trying to create a search engine for finding learning resources by searching LRMI-tagged web pages." The search engine they created works pretty well. But it only returns results from BBC and Open University, so far as I can tell. Which proves (yet again) that designing the standard and creating the search engine are the easy part - getting the rest of the world to tag their materials using it is the hard part.
One World
Rodd Lucier,
The Clever Sheep,
April 15, 2014
In his first blog post in almost a year, Rodd Lucier reflects on his experiences at the Microsoft Global Summit (no link but probably this) focused on the the Millennium Development Goals. He describes a project pitched at the conference, "an inquiry project called 'One World'... an open and social hub was created for this project at www.about.me/oneworldnetwork." It's interesting to see him react to the evaluation experience: "My project team invested many hours in a project that took but minutes to be judged according to a rubric. We invested our time, talent, emotions and intellect, yet to date, we have received no feedback on our work." I guess a lot of students feel the same way.
Why successful consortia for online learning are so difficult
Tony Bates,
online learning, distance edcuation resources,
April 15, 2014
Numerous online learning consortia have come and gone over the years, and none has really emerged as a market leader. Why not? Tony Bates examines how this mode of organization is fraught with difficulties. These comments are made in the context of Rachel Fishman's recent report, State U Online. "What the report does not adequately address are the economics of online learning," writes Bates. When courses are shared, who provides online support? Additionally, "Another major barrier is academic distrust of other institutions: 'Our courses are always good; yours are garbage.'" P.S. Russ Poulin comments, " WCET is maintaining a list of consortia in the U.S. and Canada."
Two-Year Anniversary of Blackboard Acquisition of Moodlerooms and NetSpot
Phil Hill,
e-Literate,
April 15, 2014
Phil Hill reports on the extent and impact of the changes Blackboard made two years ago while acquiting open course vendors Moodlerooms and NetSports and reorienting their corporate strategy. But: "While Blackboard has kept their word and made a major change in strategy, the question arises of whether that matters. According to the Campus Computing Survey for 2011 and 2013, Blackboard’s market share (combining Learn, WebCT, and ANGEL product lines) has continue to fall in the US over the past two years, from 51% of institutions to 41%."
Where is Higher Education’s Digital Dividend?
Terry Anderson,
Virtual Canuck,
April 15, 2014
Terry Anderson poses the question in the title by means of an example from David Wiley: "the cost of renting 75,000 movies ($9.00 a month from NetFlicks) or renting any of 20 million songs from Spotify ($9.99/month) with the cost of renting a college text book . A single biology text book rents for $12.99 a month from BookRenter." Thus, he writes, "the time is right for a 'market correction' that exploits the affordances of the Net to create drastically lower cost of quality higher education experience." It's long past due.
Offering cMOOCs Collaboratively: The COER13 Experience from the Convenors’ Perspective
Patricia Arnold, Swapna Kumar, Anne Thillosen, Martin Ebner,
eLearning Papers,
April 15, 2014
This short paper reflects on the offering of a cMOOC on the topic of Open Educational Resources in 2013. I'm curious to know what platform is used, but this is not described. The experiences, though, are similar to my own. For example, "All the convenors reflected on the challenge of managing multiple virtual spaces and following the conversations that participants had in those virtual spaces." As well, "It remains an open challenge to balance collaborative planning with “playing-by-ear” facilitating in newly emergent situations."
Cultural Translation in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
Bernard Nkuyubwatsi,
eLearning Papers,
April 15, 2014
This is generally a good paper though I disagree with some aspects. Basically, the idea is that 'cultural translation`- which is roughly "flexibility to allow students from diverse cultures to adjust the courses to their specific settings" - can be enabled in MOOCs through student-selected projects or student-formed groups. Where I disagree with the paper is in how this activity is framed - the author writes of "The inclusion of tasks, activities and assessments that are relevant to various cultural and professional settings" as though it's the professor that is doing this (or minimally, allowing this). But in fact these are activities created by supporting student autonomy and diversity in the course - the more the professor lets go of control, the more inclusive and relevant the course can be. And for that reason too I think that 'translation' is a particularly poor word to use in this context. (10 page PDF).
(p.s. papers in eLearning Papers are still branded 'Open Education Europa', with no mention of 'eLearning Papers' on the web page, but don't cite them as 'Open Education Europa' or they will complain and suggest that you are at fault for getting this wrong).
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