OLDaily

Engaging students through inclusive teaching: conversations with Dr Samantha McMahon
Samantha Elizabeth McMahon, Dashiell Moore, Mick Warren, Samantha Clarke, University of Sydney, 2020/09/29

There's a lot of really good advice in this article that focuses on how teachers and instructors can promote more inclusive classrooms (and in the process, be better teachers and instructors). Samantha McMahon begins by pushing back against the recent tendency to blame online learning for inequity in teaching. The core principles of engagement, trust, participation and assessment matter offline and online. Student engagement, she says, is both an act of trust and an act of bravery. So let students know what's coming - ask them questions directly (to keep everyone involved) but give them enough lead time to prepare their thoughts. Share materials ahead of time. Be responsive to and supportive of different cultural practices. Don't always insist on looking at them eyeball-to-eyeball. And much more.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Educational Designers: A sure hope and anchor amid a global pandemic
Amanda Bellaby, Michael Sankey, ASCILITE TELall Blog, 2020/09/29

This post reports on a survey of educational designers, which probably explains the over-the-top title. More seriously, the survey also captures some of the pressures designers have been under over the last six months. "It was apparent that the process of rushing to convert teaching to online had led a few to feel professionally and personally abused by unreasonable demands and perceived deficient institutional processes." It's not a large survey and not especially authoritative, but it gives you a quick flavour of the discipline.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The Social Network Is the Computer
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2020/09/29

This post looks at Sinan Aral's recently published book The Hype Machine. It offers a perspective you've probably seen before, "a view of the world in which society is essentially a gigantic information processor, moving ideas, concepts, and opinions from person to person, like neurons in the brain or nodes in a neural network, firing synapses at each node in the form of decisions and behaviors." Arai describes the mechanisms of this social neural network as 'the hype machine': "digital social network is the substrate at the core of the machine," machine intelligence is "the process that controls what information flows over the network," and "smartphones are the medium, the key input/output devices." I think this is too narrow a perspective; the whole interactive network is the substrate, machine and human intelligence send signals (not information) to each other, and all of human society is the medium. Why would it be anything else?

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Dashboard for Evaluating the Quality of Open Learning Courses
Gina Mejía-Madrid, Faraón Llorens-Largo, Rafael Molina-Carmona, Sustainability, 2020/09/29

As a whole the article is a textbook example of how to set up an evaluation dashboard. While acknowledging "is not possible to find a consensus on the concept of quality of education in a university" the authors suggest that "current research seems to focus on five aspects: technology, instructional design, learning resources, training, and services and support," which serves to frame the main objective of this paper, the creation of a course quality dashboard. Now "the information in a dashboard is a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI)," which are usually based on a model; the authors refer to a number of models in the literature and draws on a variation of the Kirkpatrick model: "reaction, learning, knowledge transfer and impact." From there, the article describes the data collection instruments and the actual design of the dashboard. From a special issue of Sustainability on the future of open education.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Domo Arigato EdTech Roboto
Clint Lalonde, Ed Tech Factotum, 2020/09/29

The Ed Tech Bot on Mastodon has been around for a few months and has proven to be useful to me because it captures some posts I might miss in my feed. It helps that it's pretty selective; it focuses on blogs that are updated once in a while rather than feeds (like this one) that will pump out five or so items a day. In this post Clint Lalonde describes the creation of Ed Tech Bot, from the installation of a private Mastodon server to the setting of of the Inoreader RSS reader, to the use of IFTTT to push the aggregated contents into the Mastodon account. He laments not being able to write code for what IFTTT does, but for other people wanting to do the same thing, being able to do it without writing code is a huge plus.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]