OLDaily

#OpenedMOOC Week 6: The Triumph of the Immaterial
Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, 2017/11/10

I don't know if it counts to say I've been 'attending the Open Education MOOC' for the last six weeks if all I've done is create some videos ahead of time and read some blog posts during the course. But hey, it counts for me, and I'll chalk it up as a 'completed MOOC' even if I didn't really visit the course website (sorry Dave and George, it was an EdX page-turner, I hope you understand). As usual, Jenny Mackness captures some really useful insights, including especially the idea of OER as ephemeral art. Anyhow , the course did what it was supposed to, generated some controversy, and a good time was had by all. Now we'll all wait for the open analytics from the course. 

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If You Adopted H5P On Moodle Early, You Are A Pioneer. If You Haven’t Now, You Are Missing Out
Moodle News, 2017/11/10

This is pretty interesting. According to the documentation, "H5P is a plugin for existing publishing systems that enables the system to create interactive content like Interactive Videos, Presentations, Games, Quizzes and more. Currently we support Wordpress, Moodle and Drupal. Everything is open source and free to use." My experience is that it's really hard to get ed tech developers to think that content creation tools are important (I have a long history of arguing with developers about this). Now the moment here (or if we believe the headline, just past here). No matter."Educators and designers can already take advantage of the growing list of interactive “content types” H5P offers, which continue to grow, improve, and become easier to customize." Yay. I mean, YAY. Now, next step, put this into students' hands.

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CIOs: OER will storm campuses in next 5 years, “high cloud” just isn’t happening
Laura Ascione, eCampus News, 2017/11/10

The trends reported here are the result of the Campus Computing project, an ongoing research initiative (flip through the slide show on their page). The term 'high cloud' was new to me; it refers to cloud support for enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, high performance computing (HPC) and business continuity. By contrast, by 'low cloud' they mean stdudent email, and by 'middle cloud' they mean calendar, learning management systems (LMS) and customer relations management (CRM) applications. Meanwhile, on OER, "Eighty-two percent of institutions say open educational resources (OER) will be an important source of course content in 5 years." Nice.

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College Complaints Unmasked
Yan Cao, Tariq Habash, The Century Foundation, 2017/11/10

According to this report, the vast majority of complaints about being defrauded by a college are against for-profit institutions. This from "new data from the U.S. Department of Education about nearly 100,000 “borrower defense claims”—applications for loan relief from students who maintain that they have been defrauded or misled by federally approved colleges and universities." According to the data, out of the total of 98,868 complaints, "for-profit colleges generated more than 98.6 percent of them (97,506 complaints). ​​​​​​" Via the Chronicle.

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Teaching Newsletter: One Way to Fight Fake News
Dan Berrett, Beth McMurtrie, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2017/11/10

This article covers a study (covered here October 29) explaining how fact checkers are more able than studens or historians to spot fake news. I'm not sure why the Chronicle is two weeks late with this story. Anyhow, it makes a good point: "The students and historians tended to read 'vertically,' the report notes, delving deeply into a website in their efforts to determine its credibility." Right. What's key is the method: "That, the researchers point out, is more or less the approach laid out in many checklists designed to help students use the internet well, which tend to suggest looking at particular features of a website to evaluate its trustworthiness. This is why I complain (for example, here) about the 'pop' critical thinking found so often on education sites. The fact checkers, um, check facts - and don't rely on tone, source, motive and how it makes you feel. A checklist is not enough. Image of a checklist: National Geographic.

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YouTube to restrict 'disturbing' children's videos, if flagged
BBC News, 2017/11/10

I've been reporting on the disturbing videos on YouTube (here on October 23 and here when James Bridle's article appeared November 6). According to this article, Google will remove the videos if they are reported. But the scale of the problem is overwhelming. As James Bridle noted, "the videos had been algorithmically generated to capitalise on popular trends. 'Stock animations, audio tracks, and lists of keywords being assembled in their thousands to produce an endless stream of videos,' he said." How many human hours would it take human viewers to report these? Thousands? Millions? And why is Google trying to offload its responsibilities on its viewers? There's a limit to what companies should expect to crowdsource - this is one of them.

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