OLDaily

A Global Effort to Improve Literacy
Results for Development, 2018/10/26

Back in April Results for Development promoted the use of mobile technology for early childhood development. In this article it promotes The Global Book Alliance, "beginning with the Global Digital Library, which was launched in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, earlier this year (which) aims to collect existing high-quality, openly-sourced early grade reading resources, and make them available online, mobile and for print." I'm sceptical of the focus on books (as opposed to the many other types of literature in today's environment) and suspect that's the publishers' influence speaking, but I do like the idea of getting writing into the hands of parents and children worldwide and helping them learn to read.

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YouTube Launches $20 Million Fund as Part of ‘Learning’ Initiative
Tina Nazerian, EdSurge, 2018/10/26

As the story relates, " On Monday, YouTube offered details around a new $20 million fund that is part of YouTube Learning, an initiative announced by YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki this summer, to invest in educational videos. "It's just a drop in the bucket of course, and will fund a tiny fraction of the educational videos offered on YouTube (personally, I suspect we'll see a tie-in between this program and YouTube Premium).

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Apps Installed On Millions Of Android Phones Tracked User Behavior To Execute A Multimillion-Dollar Ad Fraud Scheme
Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed, 2018/10/26

The story is in the headline. It's significant, first of all, because some of the apps were targeted at kids, and second, because it represents a significant distortion in the online advertising market. As the author commented on Twitter, "...let's think about how much better off media would be if $19 BILLION went to real companies with real audience — instead of criminals.” The operators would acquire real apps that already had users, shift ownership to a shell company, analyze audience behaviour and then transfer that behaviour to bots, and then flood the app with bots in order to collect revenue from the ads viewed. More on ad fraud.

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IRUS-UK collaboration: consistent, comparable usage statistics to demonstrate the growth of OA
Hilary Jones, JISC, 2018/10/26

This article offers a brief overview and, more importantly, three case studies (quoted from the article):

• CORE is an aggregation of open access content from UK and worldwide repositories and open access journals. View the case study here.
• The OAPEN Foundation is dedicated to open access, peer-reviewed books and operates two platforms, the OAPEN Library, a central repository for hosting and disseminating OA books, and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), View the case study here.
• OpenAIRE is an initiative supported by the European Commission with the general remit to implement EC Open Access and Open Data policies and mandates. View the case study here.

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Problem-Based Learning and Learning Analytics
Christian M. Stracke, Olga Firssova, Open University of the Netherlands, 2018/10/26

This is a MOOC from OUNL starting in November. " This open online course will introduce you to the concept of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) first. We will compare two highly successful PBL approaches – the PBL 3.0 approach based on the model from the Aalborg University, Denmark, and the PBL approach developed at the Maastricht University, Netherlands. Through literature and also live presentations of representatives of the two institutions you will learn about their PBL visions and practices. Furthermore, you will be introduced to the concept of Learning Analytics (LA) and will learn how PBL can be supported with LA."

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