OLDaily

China has started a grand experiment in AI education. It could reshape how the world learns.
Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review, 2019/08/02

This is a chatty magazine-style article about Squirrel.AI, a Chinese learning technology initiatiave. "Squirrel focuses on helping students score better on annual standardized tests," writes the author. "It also designed its system to capture ever more data from the beginning, which has made possible all kinds of personalization and prediction experiments." The article doesn't really get into a lot of depth, being focused more on market positioning, comparisons with ALEKS (a similar US-based system we are supposed to believe inspired Squirrel), and how students feel when using it.

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Planning for the MoodleNet public beta
Doug Belshaw, MoodleNet, 2019/08/02

In my most recent evaluation of the MoodleNet public beta I commented that the focus seemed to be on replicating social networks, rather than on a tool for creating and sharing resources. This newly released MoSCoW prioritisation grid allays that concern, but only a bit. It still looks a lot (as I said in my video) like a modern version of del.icio.us. Is that enough? Is that what is needed in a Moodle-based OER resource-based social network? Have a look at the grid in this post.

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Can a diversity statement increase diversity in MOOCs?
René F. Kizilcec, Andrew J. Saltarelli, ACM Learning@Scale 2019, 2019/08/02

The answer to the question posed in the title is "yes, by three percent". The experiment was conducted with a general diversity statement on 14 MOOCs with 29,000 students. The authors suggest that more directed diversity statements might attract more under-represented people, but this is difficult to do with a single welcome page. Interestingly, "we implemented a diversity statement that both focused on equality and the value of diversity. This may have caused large and ultimately attenuating variation in the effects on women, older people, and people from less developed countries, while lower-SES learners interpreted the statement more as a cue about requisite prior knowledge."

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