OLDaily

How to Prepare for an Automated Future
Claire Cain Miller, New York Times, 2017/05/04

Why are we preparing students for jobs that won't exist? Consider this: "We don’t know how quickly machines will displace people’s jobs, or how many they’ll take, but we know it’s happening — not just to factory workers but also to money managers, dermatologists and retail workers." As this Times article says, "The question isn’t how to train people for nonexistent jobs. It’s how to share the wealth in a world where we don’t need most people to work." Thant's not to say that we no longer need education. But the sort of education we need isn't skills upgrading, particularly. It's more like helping people become self-reliant and personally capable, not because they need to work in order to survive, but because they want to work to help society progress.

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Students to colleges: Please use our data this way
Meris Stansbury, eCampus News, 2017/05/04

The Ellucian survey cited is presented as nothing more than an infographic and so we learn very little about how it was conducted (other than that it was an online survey of 1,000 U.S. students conducted last October). We are told that "62 percent of surveyed students said they believe institutions should use their personal data to improve their graduation requirements, 59 percent for course selection and registration, and 53 percent for advising." The eCampus News story also has a couple of case studies. The survey also says that students do not want their data used for non-academic purposes. 

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Have You Heard: Education Can’t Fix Poverty. So Why Keep Insisting that It Can?
Jennifer Berkshire, National Education Policy Center, 2017/05/04

This is Harvey Kantor is professor emeritus in the Department of Education, Culture and Society at the University of Utah, making sense: "One of the consequences of making education so central to social policy has been that we’ve ended up taking the pressure off of the state for the kinds of policies that would be more effective at addressing poverty and economic inequality. Instead we’re asking education to do things it can’t possibly do."

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Building on Open Educational Resources – What’s Next?
TeachOnline.ca, 2017/05/04

The focus of this article is on "three particular developments to shape the future of OER (quoted):

• Developing replicable, scalable models for institutions and faculty members to adopt.
• Adopting and Adapting New Approaches to Assessment and Flexible Degrees
• Sharing The Tools for Generating Simulations and Games

As the authors say, "he key is not so much making new OER products, services and processes available but stimulating their adoption and use. What is needed are powerful examples of the adoption of OER models, practices, assessments and new approaches to credentials making a real difference to outcomes, performance and costs." The question I have is whether depending on a system that has depended for the last eight centuries on closed access is the best course of action to promote open access. See also: Making the Most of OERs.

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