OLDaily

Senior citizens hold more student debt: a Wall Street Journal report
Bryan Alexander, 2019/02/04

You won't be able to access this Wall Street Journal report unless you've paid for a subscription, but this post from Bryan Alexander will do the job just fine. Here's the gist: " American senior citizens are holding a growing amount of student loan debt." There are numbers and statistics showing the student debt held by people in their golden years remains in the billions of dollars. To put the issue in local context here in Ontario, about 40% of students qualified for free-tuition grants to low-income students under a program recently cancelled by the provincial government. Now these students will carry this cost as student debt after they graduate. Many others - especially older and lower income students - will not be able to afford tuition at all.

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Open Education in Chile: small steps in an adverse context
Werner Westermann, Carlos Ruz, Open Education Working Group, 2019/02/04

Several things are happening at once in this article as the new Open University of Recoleta is at once embarking on an institutional policy based on Open Educational Resources, and at the same time, as an "informal institution", pioneering the concept of the  “Pluriversity”, which they say "is similar to the concept of Volkshochschule in Germany, where the idea of popular universities is widely adopted and well regarded." The bulk of the article highlights the barriers against adopting open education in Chile, and lists a few initiatives already undertaken, such as the Open Textbook project developed by Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso.

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Is Blockchain Ready for Prime Time in Education?
Wayne Skipper, EDUCAUSE Review, 2019/02/04

The lede is buried near the end of this post: "In early 2018, Concentric Sky and partners BrightHive and the DXtera Institute proposed such a blockchain ecosystem, called EdRec. EdRec is a learner-centric, open standards approach to learning record storage 'on the blockchain,' with self-sovereignty of learner data as its key design principle." What I've l.earned over the last year is that while it's relatively easy to store information in a blockchain, maintaining it as a network is generates wider social and technical issues. See other winners of the US Department of Education's Reimagining the Higher Education Ecosystem Challenge from last eyar.

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