OLDaily

Digital Credentials: A Better Way Capture And Communicate Learning
Tom Vander Ark, Forbes, 2020/11/26

In this Forbes article (which means it's probably marketing) Tom Vander Ark discusses projects like Bloomboard, which "powers the microcredentials that power the professional learning system at Harmony Public Schools - a great example of a well designed comprehensive talent development system." Another service, Greenlight Credentials, "helps north Texas high school scholars build and permission a digital profile to employers and postsecondary institutions."

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The Pricing Structures of Nature’s Open Access Journals Reflect Intersections of Multiple Supply and Demand Markets
Pablo Markin, Hypothesis, 2020/11/26

There were (digital) gasps around our office as Nature announced its new open access publishing charge of 9,500 Euro per article. This post suggests that "Nature exemplifies the possible race to the top that can be taking place in the Open Access market, while leading to high or rising APC levels. People around here had less kind words, wondering whether Nature should be redefined as 'predatory'. It is certainly a clear case where the price of something reflects willingness to pay, and not the cost of actually offering the service. Want to publish in Nature? Sorry, that's for rich folks.

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AI chatbots are helping students navigate college admissions
Laura Ascione, eSchool News, 2020/11/26

I don't suppose there's the same sort of hue and cry to protect the jobs of people working in the Registrar's office, but I think if chatbot functionality works there, it's no long before it starts offering more in-depth academic support (indeed, as we know, the pilots have been underway for a while now). "Announced by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), the new initiative will tap AdmitHub’s technology to enable students to access ADVi, a conversational AI chatbot that offers proactive, personalized guidance to help students navigate their way to and through college."

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Revisiting Markdown Editors
Miguel Guhlin, Around the Corner, 2020/11/26

For those not clear on terminology: markup is the word we use to describe the system of tags used to format an HTML document on the web. By contrast, markdown is a set of simplified commands used to indicate basic formatting for wiki or text input forms; these need to be transformed into HTML markup before they can be viewed as formatted web documents. Anyhow, this short article looks at a number of the author's favourite markdown editors and talks about how they are used, including StackEdit, anadd-on or app you can install on your browser or computer. "What's really neat is that it's easy to sync your files to Google Drive, Dropbox, GitHub account." Here's the source code for StackEdit.

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The University of Calgary’s New Strategic Plan
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2020/11/26

Alex Usher has posted two good columns in a row, a fun one yesterday describing (not inaccurately) a university as "a set of cats fighting in a bag" and an even better one the day before looking at the University of Calgary's new strategic plan, a plan forced by the pandemic and by the Alberta government's radical funding cuts. Here's their slide deck. Usher concentrates on the idea that the university will focus on domains rather than disciplines (which may be, he suggests, simply a way to remove departments), noting that "not only is it unclear how you turn a transdisciplinary research approach into a new set of managerial structures... it’s really unlikely that many disciplines are going to easily relinquish the privileges that go along with controlling a departmental apparatus."

NRC went through a similar process starting almost a decade ago with a program-based structure, so we can predict (a bit) how this new initiative will unroll, but this also points to the other half of the equation: the idea that the U of C will be the "entrepreneurial university", which means marketing research and training directly to business in an effort to make up through sales the revenue lost from government. Which sounds great, and I don't blame them for trying. But people don't join a university because they want to work for some company. If they wanted to be entrepreneurs, they would have launched a start-up, or joined Suncor, or some such. And it pits the university against some very well-heeled companies that already provide these services to companies, from IBM to KPMG.

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