OLDaily

Why Canada needs five new digital learning universities
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2018/11/15

The main reason, writes Tony Bates, is that "no higher education system, including Canada’s, is moving fast enough to cope adequately with the challenges of a digital society. Universities and colleges in Canada are changing, but not fast enough." So we should "establish five new regional universities-colleges that are designed from scratch as possible prototypes for the higher education institution of the future, but also designed to maximise the impact they have on existing institutions." But he intends them to be blended institutions with physical campuses; for example, Ontario's would be in Waterloo and Toronto. That would be a mistake - if there is to be a physical campus, then it needs to be a network of smaller campuses, serving the entire geographical region. Otherwise, if you're not within commuting distance of these virtual universities, they may as well not exist. (p.s. if anybody wants to actually fund these to get them up and running, send me an email; I'm on board).

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How Much Do You Rely on Research About Teaching?
Dan Berrett, Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018/11/15

In this article Dan Berrett and Beckie Supiano respond to readers "asking us to cite research more often, and lean a little less on anecdotal classroom experiences." It's a good discussion, but I would want to shift the perspective. Consider this: "if journalism is already several degrees removed from scholarship, the newsletter is further still." It's a world view where research is the foundation, and everything flows from that. But my own view of 'scholarship' is that it is secondary literature, often reporting on things long since developed (and sometimes abandoned) in the field. In may ways, I view my own newsletter as being placed somewhere between that work in the field and academic literature. They also note, " I can think of plenty of examples (that) despite being 'evidence-based,' those interventions don’t work." Me too. We all can. The fact is, the secondary literature (aka 'academic research' or 'scholarship') often gets it wrong. So, for that matter, does everyone else. Including me. There isn't a 'foundation'. It is a conversation, but nobody's voice is privileged.

(P.S. Dear Chronicle, when you send newsletters like Teaching Newsletter, as you did today, please grant your authors the dignity of last names, which you didn't today. It's pretty bad when your writers get more recognition in my newsletter than they do in yours.)

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Get The Research: Impactstory Announces a New Science-Finding Tool for the General Public
Rick Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2018/11/15

According to this article, "Impactstory recently announced a new tool in development. Called, Get The Research and aimed at serving the general public rather than an audience of scholars and specialists, it promises to provide a new level of accessibility (in multiple senses of the term) to published scholarship." Now to be clear, this tool doesn't actually exist yet; you can only sign up to be notified when the pre-release version is available (which I've done). Three things are planned: the search engine, which will be based on the Unpaywall database; "learning tools built on top of the literature" (which makes me wonder whether they'll enclose the literature); and "tools that actually translate articles into plain language" (same question).

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LinkedIn Becomes a Serious Open Learning Platform
Josh Bersin, Chief Learning Officer, 2018/11/15

It's true that LinkedIn has been a learning platform for some time now, but open? It depends on how you define it - "it’s now announcing it has completely opened up its learning platform to external content partners." That is, it is open in the sense that "customers who have purchased multiple content sources can offer their employees a single place to discover and access all of their organization’s learning content." That puts LinkedIn (and by extension, Microsoft) squarely in the LMS and Learning platform marketplace. And it has a key advantage: data. "When your employees use LinkedIn Learning, the platform knows a lot about them that your typical LMS does not understand. It has their job history, their connections and their social profile and inferred skills." But it is not in any sense that I would recognize "open".

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