OLDaily

America Will Sacrifice Anything for the College Experience
Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, 2020/10/20

I think this makes it clear why online learning (and skills programs generally) have always seemed like such a pale substitute for the real thing. "Quietly, higher education was always an excuse to justify the college lifestyle." The college experience, at least in the United States, as always about "access to opportunity, camaraderie, and even matrimony. Partying, drinking, sex, clubs, fraternities." Ian Bogost writes, "These rites of passage became an American birthright." But no, for most, they didn't. They - at best - entrenched the privilege of the privileged. The system won't change itself - not even in the middle of a pandemic. But at least now it is laid bare, the proverbial emperor with no ethics. "The pandemic has revealed that higher education was never about education." The internet might not overthrow U.S. colleges - but the people might.

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Learning To Reach Out: Embracing New Ways of Connecting
Rukmini Banerji, WISE, 2020/10/20

This article describes briefly the response of an educational NGO, Pratham, to the onset of Covid in India. It didn't help that the lockdown happened during Holi, leaving many staff stranded far away from their work locations. "Village headmen or 'Pradhans' were called. Once the Pradhan understood what was needed, he or she sent phone numbers to the Pratham teams. Outreach to the representative of the village local government brought in awareness about the effort too." Once connection was established, the educational outreach was adapted to the circumstances. "We selected fun activities and learning tasks from this collection and started sending them via phones. The campaign came to be called ‘Karona: Thodi Masti, Thodi Padhai’. (The word Karona is a play on 'Corona but it means 'do it' in several Indian languages. Thodi = a little. Masti= Fun. Padhai = Learning)."

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Study of a COVID-19 induced transition from Face-to-Face to Online Team-Based Learning in Undergraduate Family Medicine
Lisa Jackson, Farah Otaki, Leigh Powell, Ernie Ghiglione, Nabil Zary, MedEdPublish, 2020/10/20

From the well-structured abstract to the declarations of conflicts of interest and ethics at the end this paper is a model of clarity and openness. It's set in a context of online team-based learning (TBL) and the community of inquiry (CoI) framework. It describes the launch of a TBL pilot as a response to the Covid pandemic. The study size is unfortunately small, but the article does what it can to capture their experience, and to present it along the lines of the types of presence described in CoI. The authors conclude "TBL enables rapid transition to distance learning; it promotes analytical and self-directed learning even in extreme circumstances." This is too broad: they should say, "In this case, and viewed from this theoretical perspective, TBL enabled rapid transition...". But I guess if they had said that, it would never have been published. And so the paper models both the best and worst of education research.

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Lecture: recorded, zoomed, or what?
Lisa M. Lane, 2020/10/20

"With this year’s quick and unexpected transition to online teaching," writes Lisa Lane, "many professors assumed that online lecture meant reproducing what they do in class." From my perspective it felt as though we were suddenly back in the 1990s. Anyhow, Lane continues, "For two decades, I’ve been pushing the idea that the technology should follow the pedagogy. Your preferred teaching method should dominate. In the rush, there had been no connection between a professor’s pedagogy and their choice of format." Well, true, but there's more to it than that. What worked in the classroom might not work online, at least, not for this particular group of students. And there might be new things you could do that were just impossible in the classroom. As I said in a seminar yesterday, what you need to look at is what you're trying to accomplish. Then choose your pedagogy and your technology accordingly.

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Learning for Life: Funding a world-class adult education system
Ed Richardson, Confederation of British Industry, 2020/10/20

The Confederation of British Industry (CBI), a U.K. advocacy group, has released a report (38 page PDF) calling for  investing in reskilling for workers. "The UK needs to spend an additional £130 billion over ten years (£13 billion a year) on adult education," they argue. Of course, the key question here is, as they say, in the execution. They recommend changing the Apprenticeship Levy, supporting small-to-medium enterprises (SME), and incentives for individuals to invest in learning. For my own part, I would flip the script: instead of credits for business and loans for individuals, I would provide credits for individuals (coupled with free learning opportunities) and loans for business. This provides for learning that does more than protect the interests of incumbent industry, helps people who are not currently working, and allows individuals to explore new fields in emerging industries.

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Is Artificial Intelligence Closer to Common Sense?
Michael Stiefel, InfoQ, 2020/10/20

Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be closer to common sense, but that doesn't make it close. Part of the problem is figuring our how we as humans learn common sense. As Leora Morgenstern says, “What you learn when you’re two or four years old, you don’t really ever put down in a book.” This article provides some background about previous attempts to solve the problem and them looks at Commonsense Transformers (COMET). "The idea is to teach intelligent agents to interact with the world the way a child does. Instead of associating the idea of eating with a textual description, an intelligent agent would be told, 'We are now going to eat,' and then it would see the associated actions such as, gathering food from the refrigerator, preparing the meal, and then see its consumption." Even if you don't think COMET is plausible, the background summary is quite informative and worth reading in its own right.

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Designing A Home Video Studio For Online Synchronous Teaching
Sean P. Willems, 2020/10/20

This is good stuff. Described as one person's "attempt  to create a home video studio to more closely approximate the on-campus experience, and provides recommendations for a minimally-sufficient studio" it offers some examples of tools and approaches to providing video instruction from home (and maybe, one day in the future, schools can use this sort of set-up instead of paying for expensive video studios). Paralleling my own experience, Sean Willems uses Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) as the virtual camera, thus making format changes quick and effective. He also does a lot more than I have ever done, including a lightboard station and a document camera. The document (24 page PDF) provides an equipment list and reflections after eight weeks of teaching using the set-up. The best bit of advice: having a teaching assistant (TA) who can handle issues on the fly. Via Tom Woodward.

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