OLDaily

How To Write Great Microcopy
Anthony Diké, The Product Person, 2020/06/26

'Microcopy' is the little bits of text you read when you're working with an application. Things like 'click here', 'enter your password' or 'file not found'. This article is a great collection of suggestions and best practices for creating microcopy. My favourite bit? "When to use 'Your': Use it for what the product creates for the user. 'Your account'. When to use 'My': Use it for what the user creates in the product. 'My tax returns'."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

There is no content.
nick shackleton-jones, aconventional, 2020/06/26

This is a lesson we learned back in the days when we werte first offering MOOCs, and it has (to my estimation) taken quite a while for the wider community to catch up. As Nick Shackleton-Jones writes, "There really are only two things you can do: you can present a challenge (which will drive learning), or you can provide resources that people can pull on when they are challenged. A resource can be a map, a person, Google, a checklist, a video, a guide…" Exactly. "You might want to call it ‘content’; and that’s ok so long as you understand that they or may not memorise it (depending on the circumstance) and that they will only access it when they need it."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Is your elearning broken?
Mark Berthelemy, LinkedIn, 2020/06/26

This is from last March but I just found it in Mike Taylor's newsletter today. It is remarkable not only because of the problem it describes, but because of the way the problem is just now being discovered in some circles. Essentially, the issue is that if you design your elearning in a traditional manner, putting content and activities into SCORM packages, then it's impossible to search and find resources on an as-needed basis. This problem, of course, was supposed to be solved by metadata, but metadata has never been adequate to the task. You need to be able to search deep into the content and to be able to retrieve specific pages. If you can't, your elearning is broken.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Scaling up behavioral science interventions in online education
René F. Kizilcec, Justin Reich, Michael Yeomans, et.al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020/06/26

As Jonathan Kantrowitz summarizes, "Researchers tracked 250,000 students from nearly every country in 250 massive open online courses (MOOCs) over 2 1/2 years in the study." What they found was that interventions that appeared to work in the short term were much less effective in the long term. The researchers also "found minimal evidence that state-of-the-art machine learning methods can forecast the occurrence of a global gap or learn effective individualized intervention policies." None of this especially surprises me (and I would venture that a similarly-sized study in traditional classrooms would yield a similar result). As the authors say, "The kind of large-scale research that is needed to advance this work is not well-represented in the dominant paradigm of experimental educational research." As the authors suggest, "Context matters... In a new paradigm, the question of 'what works?' would be replaced with 'what works, for whom, right here?'"

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]