OLDaily

A Little Less Conversation and a Lot More Negativity
Liz Gross, Campus Sonar, 2020/04/14

This was the trend in online conversations on education recently (we're focusing mostly on the U.S. market here) as students expressed a mix of anger and disappointment about the sudden conversion to online, loss of summer internships, and uncertainty about what will happen in the fall. Meanwhile, “Remote learning” is our new catchphrase for the pandemic. It is "mostly used by educators, edtech, and journalists." I guess they didn't want to use the terms e-learning or online learning. Anyhow, "the phrase appears most often in helpful blog posts from educators, resource and sales pitches from edtech companies, and headlines of news articles focused on K12 remote learning. It does not appear often in student conversation."

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Access Canvas LMS content and Moodle courses within Microsoft Teams
Steven Abrahams, Microsoft Education, 2020/04/14

Microsoft has been playing catch-up with Teams but this announcement marks the continuation of a smart strategy. "You can now access your Canvas LMS content and coming soon your Moodle courses from within Teams, giving you a single space for collaborative learning no matter your physical location." Of course what this also does is shift the locus of learning from these LMS platforms and into the Teams environment. But this is probably not a bad thing - relegating them to a secondary role also helps push learning content into a secondary role, elevating interaction and community to the foreground. But we're not where we want to be yet - where things get interesting is when the plugin applications - GO1 for Canvas and Skooler for Moodle - connect to other videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom or WebEx. Or - maybe - we'll one day get an interoperable videoconeferencing network, so it doesn't matter what video platform you're using. Ah, wishes...

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Understanding the Impact of Coronavirus on K-12 Education
Betsy Corcoran, YouTube, EdSurge, 2020/04/14

Here's the summary for this one-hour video: "In this special bonus webinar, Chinese educators who have made the switch to online learning share their lessons learned.... guests share what they have learned by transitioning to remote education so quickly and the new options for learning they now have for their students." Discussions include the need for shorter videoconference sessions (like 10-15 minutes) and addressing social isolation.

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Apple and Google partner on COVID-19 contact tracing technology
Apple, Google, 2020/04/14

Thisa isn't a ed tech story, but when you create a tracking system that involves some 3 billion users, you have to know it's going to be used for more than its intended purpose. And education is one purpose that springs to mind immediately, if only for (say) tracking attendance at school. Even while preserving privacy, we could also imagine it being used to (say) trace the origin of ideas, enforce intellectual property, ferret out citation and cheating networks, etc. There will be arguments against this sort of surveillance, but they get harder to make as the stakes get higher.

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7 things ease the switch to remote-only workplaces
Edmund L. Andrews-Stanford, Futurity, 2020/04/14

I actually want to highlight only one thing here: point number 5, "single source of truth." Now this is at once a technical term for database management and also critical advice for working in a distributed environment. "Workers need access to the big picture about an organization’s strategy and priorities, and perhaps even about work in progress that may not be directly relevant to them. It’s a repository of information that is clear, uncontested, and accepted as true at that time, and then maintained so that it is always current." Maybe one good result from all this will be that organizations and institutions and even societies will realize that they have always been distributed in the ways that count, and will begin to think of 'single source of truth' (beginning with the technical sense) as an organizational and even a social imperative.

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Supporting actionable intelligence: Reframing the analysis of observed study strategies
Jelena Jovanović, Shane Dawson, Srećko Joksimović, George Siemens, ACM Proceedings, LAK '20, 2020/04/14

This paper (10 page PDF) examines "the observed strategies of high and low performers throughout the course" and identifies "prototypical pathways associated with course success and failure." The objective here is to "translate analytic findings to practice" by "establishing a model of learner behaviour that is both predictive of student course performance, and easily interpreted by instructors." I think it's only partially successful, first, because as the authors themselves note, "awareness that a particular tactic or strategy is generally beneficial is often insufficient motivation for a student to adopt it," and second, the labeling of these practices is itself a challenge. The labels used (assessment, learning content access, social interaction, etc.) when used to describe successful learning patterns amount mostly to (what I would characterize as) "students that did more generally succeeded." Which may be true, but is unhelpful. A useful analysis would have to dig into, say, types of learning content analysis.

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