OLDaily

Science education community should withdraw from international tests
Jonathan Kantrowitz, Education Research Report, 2020/07/09

It's a criticism of PISA that has been made before but which may have a new resonance in the pandemic age.  "During the pandemic science and scientists find themselves in the spotlight as both potential saviours or as untrustworthy puppets in ways that would have been unthinkable a year ago. Yet science education and science educators are invisible." The researchers argue "science lessons currently emphase facts, while the processes of science is more similar to a 'black box'. They say students are rarely taught about the key processes of scientific research which go on to save lives."

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Seeing past the pandemic
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed, 2020/07/09

The higher ed story of 2020 is not the pandemic, writes Joshua Kim. It's "the development of online degrees at scale." he explains, "The innovation of online degrees at scale is their costs. By going to scale, schools can dramatically drive down tuition prices and fees." The first to move will be the high-priced MBA programs that could easily be offered online and offered at a much lower cost. "Over the next few years, what will happen is that very quickly, most residential and high-priced master's degrees will disappear. They will be replaced by fewer schools offering low-cost online degrees." Well... maybe. Lowering cost and making learning more widely accessible is why I'm interested in online learning to begin with. It would be nice to see that promise realized in my lifetime.

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UCT Remote Teaching Course Design Checklist 2020
University of Cape Town, 2020/07/09

This is a tool being used by the University of Cape Town to prepare classes for remote learning. I think it still needs refinement (for example, perhaps chunk the content before adapting materials). And I think it's tied into a linear content-presentation mode mode than it should be. But it's still pretty detailed, and a lot of people will find it useful.

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9 Ways Online Teaching Should be Different from Face-to-Face
Jennifer Gonzalez, Melanie Kitchen, Cult of Pedagogy, 2020/07/09

All in all, good advice (quoted):

1. The first weeks of school should be devoted to community building and digital competency.
2. Communication with parents needs to be more thorough, streamlined, and predictable.
3. Community and connection need to be a priority for teachers, too.
4. Teacher collaboration is even more important.
5. “Face-to-face” time should be used for active learning.
6. Content needs to be simplified and slowed down.
7. Instructions should be easy to find, explicit, and multimodal.
8. Traditional grading practices should take a backseat to feedback.
9. Summative assessment should focus on creation.

I think people may be thinking that these measures will tide us over until everyone can go back into the classroom. What we'll find is that approaches like this make learning better in general.

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Microsoft Teams’ new Together Mode is designed for pandemic-era meetings
Tom Warren, The Verge, 2020/07/09

The idea of 'Together Mode' is that instead of displaying each person in their own box, the system extracts a head-and-shoulders video and places it as an avatar on a scene, for example (pictured) in an audience. It's an interesting idea. One reviewer says, "Once you get over the fun or gimmicky parts of it, it actually feels like a far better way to remove visual distractions that you normally see in large gallery views in meetings." Maybe. I personally think that 'Zoom fatigue' is being overplayed - yes, anyone is going to tire after back-to-back meetings; having done it in the office I can attest to that. Maybe alternative displays like this will help, but I think we're more likely to want to use the Zoom conference as a second screen to allow us to focus on something in addition to just each other - an interactive document, a livestreamed event, or - yes - a crowd shot. More from Microsoft's education blog.

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The rise and fall of Adobe Flash
Richard C. Moss, Ars Technica, 2020/07/09

Browse through OER repositories as I have and you'll find hundreds of dead resources. These are interactives built using Flash. The long-reviled format is finally being put to an end, and as a coda, Adobe will actually remove Flash players from computers. Where Flash really came into its own, though, was as a video player. This liberated an entire new class of creative talent - those who couldn't write software, those who couldn't afford animation studios, could run and upload a little video. This article is one perspective of the history of Flash, and worth a look before the technology sunsets completely.

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Champions in Higher Education of XR (CHEX)
Immersive Learning Research Network, 2020/07/09

This is a new consortium set up under the auspices of the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN) that "that brings together both administrators as well as faculty/staff grassroots leaders who are championing the adoption and use of XR and immersive technologies at colleges (and) universities" (XR, or eXtended Reality, is the combination of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality). The consortium advocates for XR growth, fosters collaborations, represents higher education in XR industry partnerships and collaborations, and identifies best practices. Image: Gourmet Sleuth, rice chex.

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