OLDaily

Open Education Resources (OER) Applications from Around the World
Rory McGreal, Contact North, 2018/02/07

This is a set of thirteen OER case studies from around the world. The descriptions follow a common format, describing the opportunity, innovation, benefits, challenges and potential in turn. A contact person is provided for each. Some of the descriptions become fairly detailed. There's obviously some overlap with the OER world map (which has hundreds of projects listed) and in fact the text in both is the same  (eg. Athabasca University in this document and in the OER world map, or this one and this one from Scottsdale Community College) - it would be useful to know which of these (if either) is the authoritative source where we see this overlap.

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Observing and Deterring Social Cheating on College Exams
Richard J. Fendler, Michael C. Yates, Jonathan M. Godbey, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2018/02/07

This article (11 page PDF) contains a pretty good literature review and summary discussion on cheating. It "introduces a unique multiple choice exam design to observe and measure the degree to which students copy answers from their peers." What's fun is that it provides "a measurement of actual cheating frequency among students, as opposed to relying on reported cheating in anonymous surveys." The studied measured whether less cheating would occur if students were assigned seating randomly (thereby breaking up peer groups) and - surprise! - less cheating occured. Total N is 160, making it one of the larger studies in January's ijSOTL.

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Student learning with permissive and restrictive cell phone policies: A classroom experiment
Alexander L. Lancaster, International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2018/02/07

It's hard to know what conclusions you can draw from a study of 31 students in a Midwestern university class, but this study (13 page PDF) tries. According to the authors, banning cellphones did not improve the students' results in the course. More interestingly, banning cellsphones was associated with higher evaluation scores for the instructor. Here's the rest of January's ijSOTL filled with studies of similar scope.

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New Higher-Ed ‘Matchmaking’ Event Aims to Bridge Education Technology Silos
Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge, 2018/02/07

Jumping into the crowded event space are Micharl Feldstein and Phil Hill. Readers will recognize these names as their e-Literate blog is often cited here. "Their model will be to play the role of matchmaker to help get specific projects started. They’re encouraging pairs of people from each institution to attend, especially people from departments who might not usually interact." To make sure this happens they've already preselected all the attendees for the first conference. The real objective, though, is to have them continue the conversation between the events. " in between it’s really the same old thing,” Feldstein said when announcing the project. “If that happens with the Empirical Educator Project, we will consider it a failure and will not have another convening of the same type.”

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