OLDaily

Lumen Seeks Continuous Improvement of OER in Two-Prong Approach
Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology, 2018/11/08

According to this article, Lumen Learning "has launched the 'Learning Challenges Leaderboards' ... as well as RISE and Shine, a community effort to improve the OER." The leaderboards "provide a fine-grained view into the specific skill-level outcomes students struggle with the most." RISE and Sine is "a community-based continuous improvement process." What I find interesting is the vague phrasing of the learning objectives on the leaderboard, using verbs like "explain" and "describe" and "determine" (which at best require a rote response) rather than performance-based objectives, such as "calculate" or "measure" or "model". Maybe what RISE is measuring is bad learning objectives, not bad learning resources.

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Take Charge of Your Online Reputation
Cathy Bates, EDUCAUSE Review, 2018/11/08

This article "is a primer about online reputation management, which can be shared with students entering the job market." Like so many articles of this genre it focuses primarily on the negative, cautioning students to "partition and clean up your act." The idea is to avoid being sorted into left or middle "piles of applicants" and then to stand out in the "right hand pile of applicants" by highlighting their personal portfolio and "showcasing examples of positive traits that would prove your ability to contribute to a team effort." The idea of sorting applicants into "piles" shows why we need AI-based approaches to candidate selection based on non-arbitrary sorting criteria.

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Broad online learning EdTech and USA universities: symbiotic relationships in a post-MOOC world
Duncan A. Thomas, Maria Nedeva, Studies in Higher Education, 2018/11/08

This study (21 page PDF) focuses on how universities are adapting in what might be called the post-MOOC period of online education. With enrollment in online education growing substantially, MOOCs could be seen as helping rather than hindering universities succeed in an era of declining on-campus student numbers. This study is based on interviews with some Coursera staff and six US-based universities using Coursera. It explores the idea of whether universities can be in a symbiotic, rather than parasitic, relationship with Coursera (it's left as an open question). It also studies attitudes toward marketized higher education. Well-written, worth a look, though the view it offers is pretty narrow.

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