OLDaily

Concept note for the 2021 Global Education Monitoring Reporton non-state actors
UNESCO, 2020/01/20

While acknowledging that "The role of non-state actors in education is hotly debated" the authors of this report do a good job identifying the types of activities they undertake, the relative scale of their activities, governance, influence and innovation. The document provides a framework for analysing the role of non-state actors in education, which it should be noted includes not just companies but also foundations and charities, NGOs, and other social groups. This document prepares the ground for a 2021 report that will ask a key question: "What are the effects of non-state provision of education on access, equity, inclusion, quality,learning and efficiency?"

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Why Some AI Efforts Succeed While Many Fail
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2020/01/20

I remember when digital technology came into the institution in the 1980s and 1990s the oft-asserted (but less often heeded) advice was that the benefits of technology would only be realized by transforming operations to take advantage of it. Through the decades since this has proven to be true over and over again. And so it's not surprising to read a similar analysis of institutional AI. "Integrating AI and digital transformation initiatives is particularly important, since both typically require large-scale, enterprise-wide efforts to redesign work processes, systems and structures." How could anything else be true? See also: Winning with AI (27 page PDF).

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Do You Really Have a Right to be “Forgotten”?
Tim Stahmer, Assorted Stuff, 2020/01/20

Tim Stahmer answers the question in the headline with a somewhat unconvincing "no" based on the fact that it's hard to implement. "Implementation of the GDPR in Europe has been confusing at best," he writes. Maybe, but that's not why we won't be forgotten. There are too many reasons why society as a whole needs to remember that we exist: we might owe money, we might be a wanted criminal, we might have an infectuous disease, etc. It's not that implementation is confusing. It's that we don't actually want to implement it. As a society, I mean.

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Devolved Management of OER in Irish Higher Education?
Phil Barker, Sharing and learning, 2020/01/20

People should think twice before leaping to centralize national OER repositories, writes Phil Barker. OER are not the same as research papers or cultural heritage. "OER are difficult, complex beasts, the people who produce them and care for them should be looked after," he writes. The central repository tends to produce exactly the conditions that make people hesitant to share: loss of control, repository functionality, being judged, lack of reciprocity. Instead, he writes (and I enthusiastically agree), "Let’s think of creating services that foster the collaborative creation of OER, and let’s create conduits to the open web."

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Digital Learning Arena
Geir Sand Nilsen, BI Norwegian Business School, EdTech Foundry, 2020/01/20

This is a report from a reserach projected aimed at increasing engagement and reducing dropouts. According to its author, "to increase student engagement, you must first give the students a feeling of social and academic safety. This is in line with Tinto's model. Together with the research organisation Sintef, we have documented that the student’s feeling of safety needs to be created considerably earlier than first assumed." Recommendations include providing an online buddy before admission, providing an online learning assistant at the start of studies, giving all students help finding someone to work with, and identification and follow-up of risk students.

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In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education
American Association of University Professors, 2020/01/20

The Americal Asssociation of University Professors has published an interesting, if possibly controversial, statement in defense of knowledge (or, as I would cat it after reading it, in defense of experts). But as Dave Cormier says in a recent podcast, universities are not the exclusive domain of knowledge any more, and for (almost) any fact, you can find someone equally educated who will disagree with that fact. It's not 'anything goes' - but it's also not 'universities are the one true guardian of knowledge'.

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