OLDaily

Global Education Risk Monitor. July 2019
Holon, 2019/10/22

Evaluating risk is hard and I rarely see it done properly. You have to consider not only the likelihood of it happening in a given time frame, you also have to evaluate the severity of the impact. Also, risk depends on content - what's a risk for you may be an opportunity for me. That's why your survey sample matters - and you have an 'executive panel of education experts' like this survey has, probably you're missing out on some perspective. That's also why a risk like 'failure to adopt a sustainable mode" refers to making money instead of environmental responsibility, though the latter is more important. And that's probably why this panel isn't concerned about declining government funding and privatization. Still, a survey like this (28 page PDF) is important. That's because new ventures and industry support chase risk - they're looking for opportunities. I, of course, am different. The things I chase - rising student debt, issues of access, (real) sustainability - aren't generally seen as opportunities.

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Understand what's changing in Yahoo Groups
Yahoo, 2019/10/22

Yahoo Groups used to be a staple, being one of the first online community sites (Google Groups came much later). But now it's being killed by Yahoo. "Yahoo has made the decision to no longer allow users to upload content to the Yahoo Groups site. Beginning October 28 you won't be able to upload any more content to the site, and as of December 14 all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. You'll have until that date to save anything you've uploaded." They should at least donate the contents to Internet Archive or something, so we don't have a repeat of the destruction of Geocities. Via Motherboard.

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Learning Analytics and ‘Learning Design’
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2019/10/22

Tony Bates is helpfully writing summaries of areticles in the most recent issue of Distance Education. The closed-access subscription-based journal is running a special issue on learning analytics. The first article covered, 'Learning analytics for learning design in online distance education', reaches an interesting conclusion: "even with a large base of learning designs (55) and learners (nearly 50,000) the study failed to find any correlations that would explain student success or failure related to different learning designs." This runs contrary to previous work on the topic. And Bates has questions about the range of learning designs used in the study; "It seems that it is as difficult at the OU as elsewhere to get away from the traditional focus on content delivery assimilation." I'm not sure whether I'm ready to call learning design a 'myth' yet, but it could be that the writing is on the wall.

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A MOOC as an immediate strategy to trainhealth personnel in the cholera outbreak inMexico
BMC Medical Education, 2019/10/22

In many ways this article (7 page PDF) leaves me with more questions than answers (the authors at one point observe "the terminal efficiency of the course is far above from what the evidence suggests") but the case is made, I think, that launching a MOOC is an effective strategy in the case of an urgent need such as a cholera epidemic. It's more (and better) than just an information dump. The authors also note that completion rates (which were quite high) were supported not only by the urgency of the epidemic, but also by "peer support and workplace facilities, particularly in healthcare  centers, hospitals, and teaching  areas of health jurisdictions, where a type of companionship and mutual support was generated, which ultimately favored the submission of evaluations." The authors reported an 85% completion rate, and more importantly, an effective response to the epidemic, one that is now being replicated elsewhere. Via Paperity.

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Maturity Levels of Student Support E-Services Within an Open Distance E-learning University
Asteria Nsamba, International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 2019/10/22

This article (19 page PDF) employs Neuhauser's (2004) online course design maturity model (OCDMM) (17 page PDF) in an assessment of the University of South Africa (UNISA) as it transitions from an open distance learning (ODL) to open distance e-learning (ODeL). Now 15 years old, the model needed to be updated to reflect current conditions. The original five Key Process Areas (KPA) were replaced with three: use of LMS; use of learning technological tools and applications; and online assessment via LMS. Responses using the new KPAs were gathered across each of the new model's five levels. Obviously this revision seems to me to be far too focused on the LMS, even if it does include the use of other technologies. And lost are elements of the original model, such as personalization, socialization, and interactivity (which maybe they could have addressed through a fourth KPA headed 'presence'). Image Pretoria News.

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Digital Wellbeing
BBC, 2019/10/22

In an initiative to "focus on impact directly rather than the proxy of time spent with BBC content," the BBC launched an initiative to find out what exactly people value. Think of it as an updated Maslow's hierarchy, backed by research (note that I would imagine results might vary in different countries). The findings (76 page PDF) have been encapsulated in a series of flashcards and each value given its own icon.Each of the set of 14 values is broken down into a subset of listed in categories of "need, having, doing and being". The research feels overall to me to be pretty good, especially when we recognize that people emphasize different values differently from each other and at different times in their lives. My only criticism at the moment would be the emphasis on 'drivers' instead of what I would call 'attractors', because values to me seems to be more aspirational than motivational.

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