OLDaily

VLE Review Toolkit
Fiona Strawbridge, et.al., UCISA, 2019/06/04

Via email I learned today that "UCISA (a UK membership organisation, similar to EDUCAUSE) have this week released a new VLE Review Toolkit, put together by the Digital Education specialist interest group." Basically it's a report covering things like planning, specifying, procuring and implementing a learning management system (LMS) (aka Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)). It's presented as a website with a fair number of pages - a PDF version might have been useful for the executive set, but I didn't find one. The advice looks good and there are links to case studies and resources.

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UNESCO OER Recommendation: One Step Closer to Adoption
Cable Green, Creative Commons, 2019/06/04

As Cable Green reports, "On May 28, 2019, UNESCO member state representatives took an important step for open education by adopting the 2019 UNESCO OER Recommendation (7 page PDF), providing unanimous approval to bring it to the next General Assembly" (there were some minor amendments which delayed the release of the text). The document contains many voices, as would be expected in a UN statement. It offers a new definition of OERs (but not really different from previous definitions): "an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions."

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The Authoritative Canadian Copyright Review: Industry Committee Issues Balanced, Forward-Looking Report on the Future of Canadian Copyright Law
Michael Geist, 2019/06/04

Michael Geist offers a detailed analysis (and accessible summary on BoingBoing) of the Canadian Copyright review: "the committee released the authoritative review with 36 recommendations (182 page PDF) that include expanding fair dealing, a rejection of a site blocking system, and a rejection of proposals to exclude education from fair dealing where a licence is otherwise available... that is the hallmark of a more balanced approach to copyright reform." With an election coming in October there's no chance these recommendations will be implemented in the current Parliament, but the next may consider them.

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Dylan Wiliam: Teaching not a research-based profession
Dylan Wiliam, tes, 2019/06/04

This is not to say that teaching is not informed by evidence, but rather, that teaching is not prescribed by evidence. The causal relations are simply not sufficiently strong. "Physics works because protons and electrons don’t have good days and bad days; they behave consistently, and predictably." And it does not follow that teaching is not a profession. "Teaching appears to be less "professional" than other professions because the problems that teachers need to solve are just much harder." I think of teaching - and education generally - to be more akin to designing than to engineering.

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Toolkit: How to build a newsletter list
Paul Jun, Own Your Content, WordPress, 2019/06/04

Needless to say, I already agree that an email newsletter is one of the best ways to have a voice in the community (so is owning your own blog). Much better than social media. "You’ll scream so much on social media you’ll end up losing your voice, whereas with newsletters, you have to be thoughtful, clear, and useful." Why? "Email is definitely not ideal, but it is: decentralized, reliable, and not going anywhere—and more and more, those feel like quasi-magical properties." The only drawback is that it's getting expensive to send email newsletters; RSS does the same job, without creating extra cost - which is why companies like Google and Facebook work so hard to depreciate it.

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