OLDaily

Feature Article
E-Learning Response to Covid19
2020/03/12

Are you creating an online course, event or conference? If you’re not a programmer, and if you don’t have a lot of money to spend, this guide will get you started.

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Resources For Teaching Online Due To School Closures
Kathleen Morris, The Edublogger, 2020/03/12

A lot of people have been offering guides and more to help people teaching online. This is one of the better ones. It has been interesting to watch their evolution. Bryan Alexander was on the story early, and now has (as he says) a "tiger by the tail" as his spreadsheet of U.S. college and event closures has become a major phenomenon. My own guide has been popular as well, as it focuses on the technology (most guides don't). But as I say, there's always someone who does the wrong thing. In this case, as it is so frequently, it's the Chronicle of Higher Education, which is using the crisis to collect marketing data instead of just giving people the information they need now.

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Canada’s New National Digital Research Infrastructure Organization Launches, Names Inaugural Board
Canadian Journal of Education, 2020/03/12

The organization was established to create "a way to help academic researchers access, manage and protect vast amounts of research data." It is a membership-based organization, "with founding members comprising more than 135 leading post-secondary institutions, research hospitals, institutes and established digital research infrastructure (DRI) organizations across Canada." The new NDRIO website is here.

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Don’t Ruin College by Making It Free
Beth Akers, EducationNext, 2020/03/12

One way you can tell that the rich are lobbying against government providing free *anything* is that they complain that the benefit will be given to rich people as well as poor people. They also complain that the quality will in some way be reduced, often by the recipients themselves. They complain public funding will "stifle innovation" and "distort the market". And, of course, it will always cost too much (there's usually a zero-sum argument about how the money could be used to fund some other subsidy for the people). All of these argument tropes are found in this article. And you can tell the article comes from a rich-person perspective because poor people who don't have access to these services raise none of these objections. Generally other people don't get a platform to make their case at all, ever. But when they do get a platform, their concerns are about access, removing barriers, support systems, and how the service can help them get ahead.

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When One Affects Many: The Case For Collective Consent
Anouk Ruhaak, Mozilla, 2020/03/12

Anouk Ruhaak argues that the principle of 'informed consent' is dead. If one person gives consent, many people are affected. Also, it's unlikely anyone is truly 'informed' when they give consent. Finally, as we in the field of education should know well, "consent is meaningless without the ability to opt out." Instead, Ruhaak argues for an alternative, collective consent, in which our rights are managed by "a fiduciary, someone with a legal responsibility to look out for your interest, rather than their own." This would not, of course, eliminate the problem of breach of trust. But it could at least make it illegal, and we could imagine a new helping profession emerge, a 'data manager', with obligations similar to those of a lawyer, accountant, or doctor.

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