OLDaily

Ontario Extend mOOC: the soft opening
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2019/01/18

Alan levine has just announce the 'soft launch' of the Ontario Extend mOOC (which officially starts January 28). "Because eCampusOntario wants to do further research and evaluation, the way inside the mOOC site is a link shared after completing a short online survey (for those who loathe surveys, we have an option to submit nothing and still get the link)." There's a link here to a form. Image: Devanth.

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2019: The year MOOC platforms start to die? Adieu Open2Study
Apostolos K., Multilitteratus Incognitus, 2019/01/18

Courses from Open2Study were being advertised on Class Central as late as this month, but I can confirm this report from Apostolos K. that Open2Study has shut down its free short courses service. The home page now has a notice saying "you can find undergraduate and postgraduate courses taught entirely online through 15 top Australian universities with Open Universities Australia." Apostolos writes, "it does seem a little weird that no announcement was made. Even as late as December 2018 their Facebook page sent kind reminders for students to finish up work before the next iteration of the course started, and a number of facebook posters indicated that they had signed up for the new round of courses starting in early January (this month)."

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EdTech Journals is Seeking Volunteers
Jennifer Maddrell, Design for Learning, 2019/01/18

Jennifer Maddrell has passed along a request from Ross Perkins for volunteers to help look at and update this list of academic journals in the field of education. The list ran into difficulty late last year when the WordPress-to-GoogleSheet tool suddenly stopped functioning. "Perkins hopes to get around 25 volunteers who will each examine a small set of assigned journals and, within 30 days or so, update the information about the journals for the website."

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New Issues for OERs
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2019/01/18

There's a new Creative Commons 'Education Platform' discussion of issues related to open educational resources (OERs). This is the next step following the development of a set of principles for the Platform. I think the suggestions came from a discussion list (it's not clear). Anyhow, I've taken the liberty of adding a set of my own 'issues' based on work in new technologies, as well as categorizing and reframing the set of existing 'issues' posted by others. These are reprinted in this blog post, allowing Creative Commons to simply delete my contribution if it's unwelcome.

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LEGO in the Lab
Charles Rapple, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2019/01/18

This article doesn't have much article to it, but there is a set of links pointing to interesting examples of how Lego is used in the lab and in the classroom (I wish I could see more than just the abstract for the Lego-Github presentation). I have to confess, though - when I was a kid there were two types of people in the world, Lego people, and Meccano people, and I was a Meccano person. Related: Pinterest Lego in the Classroom.

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A Collaborative Way of Learning Project Management with Minecraft
Claudia Alcelay, International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning, 2019/01/18

This is a short paper (3 page PDF) on the use of Minecraft to support game-based learning for project managers. Minecraft was chosen, writes Claudia Alcelay, because it is collaborative and user actions are traceable. The idea is that students plan their projects, and then enter Minecraft and build according to their project plans. Then they can measure how they performed against what was plan, calculate things like earned value, and essentially emulate the planning and reporting process. I think it was a good idea, which is why I'm linking to it here.

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Why Data Is Never Raw
Nick Barrowman, The New Atlantis, 2019/01/18

There's so much emphasis on things like evidence-based decision-making, or data-driven learning, as though the proponents had never read Kuhn, Lakatos and Laudan. It bears repeating, especially in these days of big data, that "data is never simply given, nor should it be accepted on faith. How data are construed, recorded, and collected is the result of human decisions — decisions about what exactly to measure, when and where to do so, and by what methods." Theory informs data in two key ways: first, the terms we use to describe the world themselves suggest that the world is one way, and not another; and second, what we already believe about the world informs what we believe we see or perceive in the world.

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Web Authentication: An API for accessing Public Key Credentials
W3C, 2019/01/18

This probably belongs in the E-Learning 3.0 course (under the 'identity' section) but it's part of educational technology in general (we don't talk about it a lot, but authentication and passwords make up some of the biggest usability issues in ed tech). "This specification defines an API enabling the creation and use of strong, attested, scoped, public key-based credentials by web applications, for the purpose of strongly authenticating users." We are at some point going to get this right (even if the web technology silo companies don't like it). Here's the full document, which is now up for review and comments.

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