OLDaily

MOOCs on campus
Alastair Creelman, The corridor of Undertainty, 2019/10/14

Alastair Creelman reports, "The news that Coursera are now offering a concept called Coursera for campus seems to represent the closing of the circle as MOOCs become part of the traditional campus set-up." Maybe. It was always going to be difficult to sell courses directly to students. Especially when you had marketed those courses as free courses. But - as with academic publishing in general - there does seem to be a way to convince institutions to pay (and then pass the cost to students). That's what Lynda did with the government of Ontario. That's what Coursera is doing here.

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Time for a MOOC reckoning
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2019/10/14

Working on the basis of a few examples and an article, Alex Usher writes, "I think it’s time for retribution. To anyone who had the faintest idea how higher education worked, there was never any credible evidence that there would be nearly enough paying demand for these things to cover their cost of development and operation." Well, yeah. Given that MOOCs were supposed to be free, there was never going to be paying demand. Given that MOOCs were supposed to use open educational resources (the way our MOOCs did), there was never supposed to be a high cost for offering one. The problem with relying on e-Literate (as valuable a source as it is) is that it almost completely U.S.-focused. Even if they're on the decline in the U.S., MOOCs - offering genuinely free learning opportunities - can be found around the world. The failure of some U.S. institutions to commercialize them is a win, not a loss, for open online learning.

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Data: the Predicament and Opportunity in the Deep Learning Era
Andre Huang, Towards Data Science, 2019/10/14

As the author says in a Reddit summary, "the research community will gradually move from a model-centered research to data-centered research." However, even though we have access to big data, the size of the data sets has remained relatively unchanged, revealing a trend toward data scarcity. And data scarcity becomes more acute when looking at the distribution of data - for example, in research on human faces, we may seem to have abundant data, but that's only because some faces (those of celebrities and stars) appear far more frequently. The author argues that data scarcity is best addressed by focusing on making better use of data, for example, by researching data labeling technology.

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Assessing Smart Glasses-based Foodservice Training: An Embodied Learning Theory Approach
Jeffrey Clark, Philip G. Crandall, Robert Pellegrino, Jessica Shabatura, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2019/10/14

I'm not sure I've ever seen a paper covering learning technology in food services training, so kudos to this paper (19 page PDF) for that (and it allows me to reminisce about my own background in the industry). Also kudos to the authors for reporting what is essentially a negative result - compared to people who used video training only, the smart glasses group were less likely to wash their hands, and less likely to do it properly. Of course, the small number of participants means we can't rely on the quantitative results, but still, the finding that using smart glasses does not automatically improve performance in a physical task is worth noting.

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What is the Open Decision Framework?
RedHat, 2019/10/14

The core of the Open Decision Framework is slides 7-10 in this presentation on GitHub. It's basically a four-step processes that is iterated: ideation, research, development, and deploy. The idea is each of these four steps is conducted in an open and transparent manner. It's based on what they call a 'meritocracy' where "a free exchange of ideas is critical to creating an environment where people are allowed to learn and use existing information toward creating new ideas." Still, it defines community as commonality. "Communities are formed around a common purpose. They bring together diverse ideas and share work."

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Poverty-tackling trio win Nobel economics prize
Simon Johnson, Niklas Pollard, Reuters, 2019/10/14

I think it would be a nice change of pace if the focus of the Nobel Prize in economics shifted in the direction of social equity and alleviating poverty. It's especially gratifying to see the Nobels recognize the role of education in this regard. "The team have notably been associated with the 'Teaching at the right level' (TarL) program which has helped 60 million children in India and Africa and focuses on maths and reading skills for primary school pupils."

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