OLDaily

Shadow Courses and Their Impact on Academic Integrity
Sarah Elaine Eaton, Learning, Teaching and Leadership, 2020/11/05

Worth noting. "Shadow courses, also called parallel courses, are offered by commercial third-parties... a clone of an official university or college course offered in a language other than English... Students submit their assignments and take tests and exams on campus, but instead of actually attending classes at the university or college, they instead they turn to the shadow course." Sarah Elaine Eaton stresses several times that these courses are "unauthorized" and that "such companies may also offer additional (and sometimes illegal) services, such as hiring an individual to sit an exam in a student’s place." It feels to me like an over-reaction (as do the concerns that they might be mistaken for real university courses, or that they might violate copyright). The real danger to academic institutions is that the commercial operators are doing such a good job students pay extra to attend both, one for the degree, the other for the actual learning.

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Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of Hope. Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. My Notes
Jenny Mackness, Jenny Connected, 2020/11/05

Pedagogy of Hope was actually the first of Paulo Freire's works I read (it was 20 years ago and I wasn't sure what the name of his famous book was at the time...). So this summary speaks to me in a way a dozen summaries of Pedagogy of the Oppressed would not. Some things that to me are important:

• kids growing up in rural areas have a lot more freedom than their urban counterpart - and I grew up in (and still live in) a rural area
• "a more critical understanding of the situation of oppression alone does not liberate the oppressed" - anyone who has been poor knows that
• Freire "writes at length about metaphor and beautiful writing" - something I try to bring to all my work
• "beginning with the educands’ ‘here and now’ and ‘knowledge of living experience’." There is no other place where teaching can occur.
• "The oppressor is dehumanised in dehumanising the oppressed. The oppressor can neither liberate nor be liberated." - this comes straight from Foucault
• "It is impossible to transfer knowledge, but a teacher can make a presentation and then analyse that presentation with students."
• Freire "focussing on unity in diversity, but also on cultural pluralism and multiculturality"
• Universities "should be critically engaged in the service of the popular classes, without loss of seriousness and rigor"

Great stuff. It reached me at the relatively mature age of 40ish, so it wasn't foundational to my thinking, but I definitely found myself in alignment with what I read.

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Why school boards need to listen to online learning professionals
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2020/11/05

I actually live within the map area used to illustrate this post (I'm in the purple area) so this story is hitting close to home. In a nutshell, "In addition to teaching in-person and online students simultaneously, UCDSB teachers are also responsible for preparing and marking materials for children doing asynchronous independent learning, both online and paper-based." I echo Tony Bates's sentiment that this is a really really bad idea. I can speak from experience - for fifteen years while in New Brunswick I was party to 'blended' staff meetings, mostly online in Ottawa with a few of us struggling with poor sound and video and missing out on all the side discussion. So when a kid complains that "everyone else is going to PhysEd and I can't..." I feel it. Bates links to a Globe and Mail article, which has a spamwall, but there's a CBC article about the same story.

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OER and Online Learning: Faculty Quick-Start Guide
Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, 2020/11/05

As summarized by OER Commons, "the Faculty Quick Start Guide (22 page PDF) is an outcome of a project by ISKME, supported by a grant from the Michelson 20MM Foundation, to conduct a study and develop a set of resources to accelerate OER use for distance education, especially the urgent shift to remote learning during the pandemic in 2020." As the big picture on the front cover makes clear, it's addressed specifically to California community colleges, but it will be useful for everyone. The guide includes advice on using OER to build courses, accessible learning experiences, and socially just learning experiences. It points to resources like OpenStax course shells, free OER authoring tools, and places to find OER.

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