OLDaily

Quality Assurance Rubric for Blended Learning
Kirk Perris, Romeela Mohee, Commonwealth of Learning, 2020/07/13

This document (32 page PDF) contains both an overview of how to use the rubric and the rubric itself. It was designed for a network of institutions located in East Africa (Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda) who are moving toward broader use of blended learning (defined here as "the purposeful fusion of face-to-face and online environments to conduct teaching and learning"). It's analogous to what people have just recently started calling 'hybrid learning'. The rubric itself covers such areas as navigation, content, instructional design, course structure, student support, technology and media. It's a basic rubric that won't apply to non-standard course design, but will probably service its intended purpose quite well.

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A primer on practice evaluation:How to participate in the process of evidence-based practice
Elspeth Slayter, PressBooks, 2020/07/13

Although "designed for students who have already had an introductory research methods course who are now engaged in an evaluation project or course" it is still definitely a primer and you do not have to have taken a course either to understand it or benefit from it. This relatively short book is an accessible and sometimes breezy introduction to evidence-based research. It gently describes much of the jargon in the field and takes readers through a step-by-step process of research design. Though it is addressed mostly to social work and clinical interventions, it is more widely applicable; a lot of education research follows much the same methodology and terminology, and readers will even find a lot of overlap with the design and construction of business cases and program assessment. Recommended.

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The State of Social Media in Canada 2020
Anatoliy Gruzd, Philip Mai, Ryerson University Social Media Lab, 2020/07/13

This report (21 page PDF) is a basic presentation of usage patterns in comparison with a similar report from 2017. It should really be titled 'Social Media Platforms' because it is focused exclusively on single-url hosted services (the sole exception being 'blockchain platforms', coming in at three percent, and including sites like Gab). I would like to have seen a broader interpretation of 'social media', including minimally things like blogs, podcasts and email, and maximally including such things as federated social networks and communities ranging from Slack, Mattermost and Teams through to ActivityPub services like Mastodon. Without such a wider reading this sort of survey will miss important trends in social media.

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The Shifting Terrain of Scientific Inquiry
David Kaiser, Edge, 2020/07/13

Most of the hard work in  this article is done in the first half; the second half, though still interesting, is autobiographical. In the first half David Kaiser considers the science of quantum mechanics - "our most successful theory" that can "make predictions for their properties out to eleven, twelve, or thirteen decimal places." Yet, scientists still struggle about what it means. And all that precision still leaves us no better off in the case of probabilistic events like, say, Covid. "We have this paradox where everyone agrees that quantum theory is this crowning achievement, but what do we do with it? What kinds of questions is it legitimate to even pose about it? Those have not always been so uniformly pursued, welcomed, or even acknowledged." Such questions, says Kaiser, are forced by social change, "in a world of specific institutions and shifting geopolitics, lots of things about the broader framing within which we try to learn about nature."

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