Three R’s that universities care about
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2015/06/30

With apologies to the 5 Rs oft-cited by David Wiley, writes Martin Weller, here are the three Rs universities are really interested in (quoted):

• Recruitment – depending on who you are, getting students is an issue. If you are an elite university it is not so much a matter of getting sufficient students, but getting the types of students you want. Either way recruiting students is the lifeblood of any university.
• Retention – having recruited students, you then need to keep them. Why do students drop out within a module, or fail to progress to another module? What can we do to help students with particular needs? How can we be flexible enough to accommodate non-traditional students?
• Reputation – what is the reputation of the university with potential students (see recruitment), the general population, the local community, the media, government, etc. What is it known for? What perceptions or misconceptions about it do people hold?

Weller is unquestionably right. These are the things universities care about. My question is: does anyone else care about these three things? Why should we care about them? When universities express these as priorities, are they serving society, they students, or merely themselves? Contra Weller, I ask, why should we make claims for MOOCs and other learning technologies against these three things?

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Niggles about NGDLEs - lessons from ELF
Jon Dron, Athabasca Landing, 2015/06/30

Jon Dron gets it right in his response to Malcolm Brown's defense of the concept of the NGDLE. "It has been done before," he writes, "over ten years ago in the form of ELF, in much more depth and detail and with large government and standards bodies supporting it, and it is important to learn the lessons of what was ultimately a failed initiative. Well - maybe not failed, but certainly severely stalled." You read the history of that here on OLDaily, first as the E-Learning Framework, and then the renamed E-Framework (note that many of the links no longer work). I remember being initially supportive but then becoming increasingly frustrated as the objectives of the program gradually drowned under a maze of standards and projects and disappearing web pages. Then, in 2008: "Our current approach, fundamentally, is totally, completely, utterly wrong, isn't it?"

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xAPI case studies available #xapi yeah!
Inge de Waard, Ignatia Webs, 2015/06/30

Inge de Waard links to this collection of xAPI case studies - these are "short (average 15 min) videos covering xAPI in a variety of settings.... real stories on how people in EdTech are using Experience API in their context. The videos were taped during the Orlando happening, and they include wonderful experts." See also the Connections Forum.

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Colombian student Diego Gomez is going to trial for sharing a research article online
Timothy Vollmer, Creative Commons, 2015/06/30

This tells me that exactly the wrong people are in charge of knowledge distribution policy: "Gomez is a student in conservation and wildlife management, and for the most part has poor access to many of the resources and databases that would help him conduct his research. He shared an academic paper on Scribd so that he and others could access it for their work. If convicted, Diego could face a prison term of 4-8 years." I mean, seriously?

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