OLDaily

Making the Massive Intimate: Building a Lasting Learning Community
Molly Monet-Viera, Hybrid Pedagogy, 2021/04/07

I find it interesting how people tend to have the same sort of experiences with MOOCs over and over. This article reflects my own experience and I'm sure many people have learned the same lessons before and since. Molly Monet-Viera describes breaking out of the LMS-like limitations of the EdX platform and opening things up with live sessions, open-ended discussions, and similar community-based approaches to learning, as well what she calls "repositioning the role of the instructor" and "authentic education, which is not carried on by ‘A’ for ‘B’, but rather by ‘A’ with ‘B’." The idea is (again, as she says) to let go of control, to view a course as an invitation, not a mandate, and to allow "the freedom to come and go as they pleased." All this, she suggests, points to the reasons why the MOOC still has potential - and I agree.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Online Teaching with the most basic of tools – email
Tannis Morgan, explorations in the ed tech world, 2021/04/07

I took not of this article even though it's more than a year old (it was recommended this week by Aaron Davis) because I want to add it to the relevant section of my Quick Tech Guide. It describes "how to teach online using only email and a phone and maybe one other tool." It reminds me about some of the basic of distance education I learned back in the 80s, that it's about three things: content, instructor-student interaction, and student-student interaction (Michael G. Moore, anyone?). That advice, based as it is in transactional information theory, is a bit dated, but it's still useful as a starting point and foundation for what we do today.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

How we teach and learn is fluid, so why isn't our language?
Richard Fullylove, JISC, 2021/04/07

I'm sympathetic with the objectives of this post though I am a bit critical of the execution. Richard Fullylove takes not of something I'm sure many other people in the field observed: how we suddenly adopted new terms (like 'remote learning') at the onset of the pandemic. His suggestion is that the word choice is influenced by the connotation, with 'remote' being defined, for example, as "having very little connection with or relationship to... unlikely to occur. aloof and unfriendly in manner." But he pushes it a bit, using a definition more reflective of 'distant' ("the condition of being far off; remoteness, a far-off point, the more remote part of what is visible or discernible") than 'distance'. My explanation for the new terms is more straightforward. It has nothing to do with connotation, and everything to do with point of view. Learning, from the point of view of the teacher, is now remote, and not local or immediate. And it has to do with who is defining the terms - and, in the case of the pandemic, teachers who really had no real experience with things like 'distance education' or 'online learning'. My advice: don't read too much into the words. Language is fluid, and the words change all the time.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

15 Mistakes Instructors Have Made Teaching with Technology in the Pandemic
Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology, 2021/04/07

Technically this article should be titled "15 types of mistakes..." because a list like this is always about generalization. But hey, precision is a lost art. Anyway, the list provided here is based on a "survey of 8,392 undergraduate students from 54 institutions across the United States," and I would classify the items more as "unpopular choices" rather than "mistakes". For example, the first one mentioned is "the use of unofficial platforms and too many external applications or sites." That's actually two things (again - precision, right?) and while I can understand the problem with "too many" applications, who cares whether the platform chosen is 'unofficial'? Other 'mistakes' aren't original to the pandemic, such as "use of long lectures with massive slide decks." And "belittling students with disabilities" isn't merely a mistake, it's a much more serious problem.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Blackboard’s commitment to Open Educational Standards
Blackboard, 2021/04/07

I post this here more in the spirit of "we'll hold them to it" than "here's the big news". They write, "open standards provide a mechanism to allow diversity and flexibility" and announce their support for the IMS Standards First initiative. The IMS website has a pledge for companies and institutions to sign. I don't know why they need all these affirmations of faith or whatever. The way to support open standards is to do open standards (without equivocation of 'special cases'). It's to publish APIs that allow students to extract their data and content with some other application. That sort of thing.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]