OLDaily

Three questions with Turing Lecturer Rose Luckin
Rose Luckin, The Alan Turing Institute, 2020/08/24

"A well-designed AI can be helpful in assisting humans to make complex decisions about exam grades," says Rose Luckin, "but it must be well-designed." The recently revised AI-predicted A-Level grades in Britain are a good example of where such an algorithm can go wrong. This is just one respect in which AI can be a double-edged tool in education. Another is the disadvantage it creates for students who do not have the computer power they need to run the algorithms. And with a lack of diversity in the AI workforce there is a continuing of bias and misrepresentative training data. Luckin sees AI playing a role in content selection in 2030; "the intelligent backbone would enable the best learning resources to be made available to all learners in the most appropriate way for each learner." I think, though, we should focus more on supporting AI as a tool to be used by learners rather than teachers and institutions.

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Google Has a Plan to Disrupt the College Degree
Justin Bariso, Inc., 2020/08/24

"Nowadays," writes Justin Bariso, "it's all about skills. Not degrees." Thus when an organization like Google begins offering its own courses it offers the promise (at least according to this article) of 'transforming' education. Companies will ask themselves, "do we have the resources to design our own online training, to help increase our pool of qualified candidates and simultaneously provide an additional source of revenue for our business?" (causing George Siemens to quip, "So instead of a paid internship, it’s a 'you pay' internship"). I think education is about more than skills, so the six-month program can't exactly replace a university education. But it should be concerning to universities who are promoting skills and jobs as their primary value proposition. As Dave Truss comments, "job specific skills training and certification programs are sprouting up and challenging the need for many to go to university."

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Building a Taxonomy for Digital Learning
Quality Assurance Agency, 2020/08/24

This document (19 page PDF) is divided into three parts: a discussion of related terms like 'online learning', 'digital learning', etc.; a taxonomy of five major delivery types, each defined with values for program design, resources, pedagogy, etc; and a glossary of online learning terms. The first part isn't especially informative. The second part is, to my mind, over-engineered; there are just too many cases that won't fit any of the five provided (there are 2^6 possibilities, not 5). The third part is useful, but a bit dated (for example, today we say 'webcast', not 'vodcast'). Via Sue Beckingham.

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Reflections on digital learning environments, part one
Gardner Campbell, Gardner Writes, 2020/08/24

Gardner Campbell reflects on his use of phpBB for class discussions instead of the more-commonly used discussion fora in learning management systems. Now phpBB is 20-year old software, which makes me think again that during this pandemic we're re-learning all the lessons from two decades ago. But there's benefit in hindsight as well; Campbell writes that his use is intended to avoid the LMS's "transactional design for everything." He writes that the "'transactional' rules out the real vulnerability and communal efforts and conspicuous commitment required for authentic learning communities." Perhaps, but I wonder how non-transactional his students' use of phpBB is when (a) they're students, and (b) he requires that student posts be “interesting, substantive, and relevant.”

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