OLDaily

Calbright College: There’s a reason so few survive the Essentials course
Phil Hill, Phil on EdTech, 2020/06/24

This article is a stunning example of how online course design can impact the survival of an institution. In California, Calbright College is being defunded. Why? This: "Fewer than 12% of students who are enrolled make it through the entry-level Essentials course." Arguably, it's not the students' fault. Phil Hill shows us in this article just how badly designed the course is, calling it "one of the most demotivating examples I have seen in higher education." It is truly awful. "The end result is a mess that serves as an obstacle course, preventing learners from getting to the academic program that they need. The content is overly extensive, disjoint, frustrating, and presented in a way that is utterly confusing to navigate.

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Famed choreographer offers free online dance classes that Vogue calls 'a revolution from his living room'
Jennifer Van Evra, CBC, 2020/06/24

I'm a bit behind on this, but it was mentioned again today on Q, and is definitely worth passing along. The story is in the headline, but underscoring the story is how important the classes have been to participants. And for us in the field of online learning, it demonstrates how learning and extend beyond the keyboard and into concrete participation (mind you, dance, arts, music and fitness instructors have understood this for some time now). See also this article from Vogue and this from the Cut. And you can follow the dance classes on Ryan Heffington's Instagram page.

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Pedagogies of Care
West Virginia University Press, 2020/06/24

This is a collection of resources of inconsistent quality and indifferent relation to the theme of 'pedagogies of care'. There are some videos (long and short), presentations, articles, and audio recordings. The topics include game mechanics, universal design for learning, 'infusing' experience in course design, deep reading, and ungrading. Sure, there were some titles that mentioned pedagogies of care, like this one that relied on adding 'emotion' to the types of presences in the CoI model. But it feels as though the editors put together the collection with no background research on what 'pedagogy of care' actually refers to in the literature, and just went with their intuitions as to what they felt the term must mean. Don't be fooled.

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CVPR 2020: A snapshot
Yassine Ouali, 2020/06/24

The first virtual Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference is in the books, with an overwhelming with 1467 papers accepted, 29 tutorials, 64 workshops, and 7.6k virtual attendees. In classic understatement, Yassine Ouali says "the huge number of papers and the new virtual version made navigating the conference overwhelming (and very slow) at times." This post is an attempt to summarize some aspects of the conference, with a look at recognition and classification, generative models, representation learning, and computational photography. These are the basic building blocks of cognition, and people working in education would do well to keep up with developments (recognizing of course that it is physically impossible to keep up with everything). All of the papers can be found here: CVPR2020 open access (a lesson for those of us working in other domains).

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