OLDaily

Professional Development for Online Teaching: A Literature Review
Heather Leary, et.al., online learning, 2020/12/02

According to this review (22 page PDF) of selected, filtered and codified research papers, "the highest areas of focus within the research questions related to the PD program itself, implementation, instructors, and helping  the instructor design a quality course." Meanwhile another major thread "examined instructor perceptions, outcomes, and characteristics." Interestingly, "the PD program itself should be the largest focus of universities seeking to improve professional development at their institutions." This actually makes sense; if you can't get professional development right, you probably shouldn't be advising people on how to do professional development. Additionally, "the type of professional development and  the content within it should rely heavily on the needs of the participants at a given institution." I say this about learning generally, but somehow get a lot of pushback.

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How to Create the Best Assessments
Janet Taylor, The Art of Education, 2020/12/02

I think that we can learn about assessment generally when we think about how education is done in art. Here, you can't just give students a multiple choice test, or even a specific problem to solve, because that's not what art is. Some things: you want to assess what they know, not what they've just learned. You need to leave room for them to take risks. You can't assess them on a single piece of work, but rather on a wider portfolio. And you're assessing what they put forward as worth assessing.

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@bluesky Identity
Tim Bray, Ongoing, 2020/12/02

The original @bluesky proposal, from Twitter last December, envisions allowing online conversations to span providers. So "from inside Twitter I could follow not only other Twitter accounts, but posts on my boat-owners’ forum." Tim Bray (researcher and noted boat owner) adds the following: "it would be of value to @bluesky to have a global notion of identity that is not tied to any provider."  What follows is a relatively complex, but still reasonable, way this could be accomplished essentially involving a federation of identity providers. Though as Kevin Marks comments, "this isn't the simplest thing that could work, as we already have that and it's called URLs." Which is what the original OpenID proposed (and if I may say, my own mIDm also).

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Pedagogy Can’t Solve Everything: Student Debt and Educational Development
Sarah E. Silverman, 2020/12/02

I think there's a persistent unwillingness on the part of people talking about open learning to talk about issues of access and student debt (ironic, I know, but it seems if you're not already a student, you're out of scope for these discussions). So I appreciate posts like this that address the high cost of education. Sarah E. Silverman expresses surprise "that the issues of the high cost of college tuition and student debt are rarely mentioned1 in the pages of To Improve the Academy, the journal of record for educational developers in the US, or other similar journals." I'm not. Image: Inside Higher Ed.

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Improving Education the New Mexico Way: An Evidence-Based Approach
Jeannie Oakes, et.al., Learning Policy Institute, 2020/12/02

I think that overall this is a pretty good report (130 page pdf). It is a response to a 2018 court decision in New Mexico saying the state had to educate its children - all of them. The report notes that New Mexico is on one hand a high-poverty state, and also a very diverse state. "A 'one size fts all' approach simply will not work." It begins with the premise that "states and nations that have improved education efectively have strengthened fve common and fundamental elements of their systems:

1. Meaningful learning goals, supported by
2. Knowledgeable and skillful educators,
3. Integrated student supports, and
4. High-quality early learning opportunities, all made possible with
5. Adequate and equitably distributed school funding."

I think this is good so far as it goes, and the report is especially strong on the first two points. It falters a bit with the last three, however, which is unfortunate, as these three are most important for equity. To achieve equity across a state you need a single payer system allocating funding and support where it is most needed, and the report falls far short of recommending that. There's also a summary report (29 page PDF).

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