OLDaily

Robo-Advisers Are Coming to Consulting and Corporate Strategy
Thomas H. Davenport, Barry Libert, Megan Beck, Harvard Business Review, 2018/01/12

What will the Harvard Business School do if its graduates are replaced by robots? It might not be long. "Robo-advisors, which were introduced in 2008, are steadily eating up market share from their human counterparts much the way that Amazon and Netflix have taken share from Walmart and Regal Cinemas." What's making this happen is not only the increased sophistication of the algorithms but also the increasing availability of corporate data. If we think about it, "

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Can a Test Ever Be Fair? How Today's Standardized Tests Get Made
Stephen Noonoo, EdSurge, 2018/01/12

This post interviews Mark Moulton, who works for Educational Data Systems, a company that makes exams in California. It's a good discussion of how bias can enter into testing and how it's detected. I appreciate the discussion of how difficult the problem of biias in testing can be. Also interesting was the discussion of how topic areas are chosen. Moulton discussed the lack of testing dfor 'soft skills' that are more in demand today. "For the most part, states want to keep it simple. They want to keep it politically uncontroversial and so the kind of constructs that end up getting measured tend to be your basic math and language and that’s it.

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Task Analysis or “How DO you do that?”
Brett D. Christensen, Workplace Performance, 2018/01/12

Today's new word is "scalaring", not only new to the author's colleagues but to me as well. It is part of the process of analyzing a task to see what the person actually has to do. It's a term from military training design and injvolves the process of creating a scalar diagram while competing a task analysis, where a scalar diagram "clearly defines the overall structure of the course content by graphically illustrating the hierarchy of EOs and teaching points for each Performance Objective" (the term 'EO' is left undefined but I assume it means something like 'Educational Objective'). As Brett Christensen notes, "One of the great challenges in task analysis is getting the expert to fully explain all the required knowledge, skill and abilities involved in successful task completion."

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WeChat reaches audiences conventional media in China cannot
Mia Shuang Li, Columbia Journalism Review, 2018/01/12

It's an interesting time in the world of social media. News agencies today are reporting that Facebook is changing it's news feed to show you more content from family and less from news sources (many of which were untrustworthy). They, along with Twitter and Google, are also being called to account for extremist content. But with Twitter, fame trumps discretion. The opposite is happening in China, as WeChat is becoming a major news source, despite the potential for misinformation spreading on WeChat just as it does on Facebook. But the tide is turning in China as well. In October, China banned anonymous social media registrations. That still leaves the problem of findind actual news not covered by authoritative news sources. In China there are Key Opinion Leaders (KOL) who dig up these stories. In the west we follow celebities and sports figures.

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Making Virtual Reality a Reality in Today's Classrooms
Meredith Thompson, THE Journal, 2018/01/12

This afrticle shares "three vignettes of three different approaches: a social studies class in a suburban school district, a district-wide perspective from an urban school district and a class designed entirely around understanding and implementing VR for other classrooms." I like the virtual field trips idea where students create theor own trip on their own phone and then share the experience with the entire class. Pro tip: ""I make sure to tell the students to turn off their notifications before they share their screen with anyone.

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Building a trusted skills network in the humanitarian sector with Open Badges
Don Presant, Open Badge Factory, 2018/01/12

This post looks at the issue of accrediting people who work in the humanitarian sector but who receive only informal training through workshops and on the ground experience. It's a way of helping people affected by crises play a bigger part in responses. It's a problem identified by ALNAP, a global network of aid providers. According to the article, learning programs and platforms mapped to skills frameworks such as the Core Humanitarian Competencies Framework are provided free to individuals by agencies like DisasterReady.org and Kaya. A proposal now "incubating" at the Humanitarian Leadership Academy called HPass is a 'community edition' of Salava's Open Badge Passport. Via Badge News.

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