OLDaily

Driving High Inclination to Complete Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Motivation and Engagement Factors for Learners
Lee Yen Chaw, Chun Meng Tang, Electronic Journal of E-Learning, 2019/09/13

This is actually an interesting result, if it can be replicated. According to this study, "The findings provide support for hypotheses... that positive motivation leads to positive engagement behaviours in learners, which eventually promote a higher level of inclination to complete MOOCs." OK, no surprise there. But while "negative motivation leads to negative engagement behaviours in learners," "the relationship between negative engagement behaviours and inclination to complete MOOCs was not statistically significant." The authors still think MOOC designers should design to avoid negative motivation (which would result in things like failure-avoidance and self sabotage), but it's interesting to see that the factors related to positive motivation have a much greater impact.

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Mind outside Brain: a radically non-dualist foundation for distributed cognition.
Francis Heylighen, Shima Beig, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 2019/09/13

I'm not going to say that this paper does what it does well (it gets to be a bit much when "dog + meat → dog + meat eaten" is presented as a 'reaction') but what it does is well worth doing. From the abstract: "The separation between mind and matter is an artefact of the outdated mechanistic worldview, which leaves no room for mental phenomena such as agency, intentionality, or experience... networks of reactions constitute more complex super-agents, which moreover exhibit memory, deliberation and sense-making." My problem with the paper is that I don't think you can describe 'reactions' at the intentional level (ie., the level of beliefs and desires) in the same way you can describe reactions at the physical level. The physical impact of a sign isn't the same as the cognitive impact of a sign. But what is worth doing is trying to make sense of what to means to say things like "the cognitive impact of a sign".

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I Quit Social Media for a Year and Nothing Magical Happened
Josh C. Simmons, The medium is the messsage, 2019/09/13

I'll let you read this for yourself and draw your own conclusions, but my take is the Josh Simmons felt better after quitting social media, but he wondered why he was still taking photos. Fair enough. But I have a different take on all this. To me, social media is like radio. I like radio - real radio, not automated stations pumping out playlists - because of the immediacy. I like the idea that there is this person on the radio playing stuff, and if the world were to blow up, this person would tell me (unlike the automated radio station, which would keep playing old Beatles tunes through doomsday). I also like being the one that would tell other people things. If we don't have social media, or if we don't have live radio, then we're living in a small narrow little world, and while some people may feel that this is healthier, I don't.

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Ontario’s e-learning plan misses the mark
Rosie DiManno, Toronto Star, 2019/09/13

I don't agree with most of what Rosie DiManno says in this column opposing the Ontario government's  proposal to require students to take e-learning courses. Everybody DiManno talks to hates the idea, which leads me to wonder just what exactly she is saying to them. And she thinks this is better? "To keep students in the classroom, minimize distractions and promote coursework engagement with teachers, as well as each other." When I was in school the classroom was the last place I wanted to be. Sure, there will probably be errors in the way the Ontario government rolls out e-learning. But there will be creative successes, too. And the government can access people with a lot of background in the field who already work for them - the people at eCampus Ontario or Contact North, for example.

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Virtual and augmented reality
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2019/09/13

This is a section being added to a chapter of the second edition of Teaching in a Digital Age. It defines virtual, augmented and mixed reality. It then offers reasons to use immersive environments, offers some comments on designing for them, and discusses the unique characteristics of immersive technologies. It also offers a longish section describing examples of immersive technologies in education. Most of it won't be new to readers of this newsletter, but it does offer a good overall introduction to the subject and is a useful update to the book as a whole.

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