OLDaily

Feature Article
Pedagogical Principles of Design for Active, Reflective and Self-Regulated Learning
Stephen Downes, Oct 16, 2017.

Session summaries from the World Conference on Online Learning, Toronto.

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The crowdsourcing fallacy
Jake Orlowitz, Wikimedia, 2017/10/16

Jake Orlowitz makes the important point thta crowdsourcing isn't simply about assembling a crowd. A number of things need to be in place before the crowd can work effectively, and he lists a bunch of them: the crowd has to be diverse, there are areas for growth and engagement, there are mechanisms to address abuse, and there aren't hoops you have to jump through to participate, among others. "Knowing all this, next time you have a problem and want to add some crowd to it, at least consider the people, ideology, task, mission, platform, journey, adaptations, mores, resiliency, motivators, barriers to entry, prerequisites, distractions, and competitors." Good advice.

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Celebrating ORCID@5 with the launch of new resources!
Laura Wilkinson, 2017/10/16

ORCiD is an identification system for scholars and researchers, and is often used in journals to establish unique identity. This is useful because different researchers often have the same name (in my case there's another Stephen Downes who works in philosophy of mind - very confusing). This post marks five years of ORCiD with some new resources. The resources are fairly basic and introductory, but if you're unfamiliar with ORCiD they'r the perfect place to start.

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Udacity Official Declares MOOCs ‘Dead’ (Though the Company Still Offers Them)
Jeffrey R. Young , EdSurge, 2017/10/16

Udacity's latest word on MOOCs, reported first by Economic Times in India: “Our mission is to bring relevant education which advances people in careers and socio-economic activities, and MOOCs aren't the way.” I don't think that's an accurate statement of Udacity's mission. I think that what drives the company is investor demands for profits. Really, I don't know why for-profit companies bother with a mission statement that says anything else, because we all know that they're in it for the money, nothing else - that's not a criticism, just a statement of fact. But Udacity's not having it. "It’s not a comment on our business model, but on what we aim for as success metrics with our students... As you can see on our site, free content is still available." Henry Kronk points out (accurately) that "MOOCs are not dead." Inside Higher Ed's John Warner wonders, "Udacity was truly limited by its failure to impact a marketplace. Adaptive software has a much more welcoming host. How much money will be wasted on this latest fad?"

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Raising Robot Literacy: Universal Robots Expands Unique Online Academy, Offering Free Interactive Modules in Robotics Programming
Press Release, Business Wire, 2017/10/16

OK, this is just a press release for a free course in robot programming, though of course its claims that you can "become a robot programmer in only 87 minutes" is obviously ridiculous. Don't follow this link; it will only encourage them. It reminds me once again that advertising is the original fake news. But it sent my mind off in a different direction: robot literacy training. After all, eventually we will madd produce robots, and they will learn using artificial intelligence, but artificial intelligence needs to be trained. Right now all that is pretty specialized but eventually there will be a new field of employment: robot training. There will be robot training academies, a discipline of instructional design for robot training, and all the rest. And I'm wondering how much overlap there will be with human training, and how much each field will learn from the other.

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Why Is Live Interactive Video Streaming So Rare Among MOOCs and LMSs?
Henry Kronk, eLearning Inside News, 2017/10/16

I can answer that question from my own experience. It's really hard to put hundreds of people, let alone thousands, into a live interactive streaming conference. This article doesn't seem to recognize that difficulty. "It’s possible—in a course with scheduled lectures—for students to tune in, listen to a lecture in real time, ask questions, and participate in discussion from a remote location." Well yes, it's possible, but not in video. We've had interactive sessions in things like Big Blue Button or Google Hangouts, but you have to limit the number of participants. This means that the rest are relegated to tyoing comments in the chat. That's what Arc - touted in this article - also does. But even that can get out of hand if you have thousands of participants. 

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