OLDaily

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment is gaining ground in Canada
Maxime Bilodeau, University Affairs, 2021/04/21

The 2012 San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) calls for a reconsideration of traditional factors, and expecially journal impact factors. Canada's funding agencies signed on in 2019, and Quebec's in 2020. Universities have lagged; as the article notes the only Canadian institutions to sign on have done so in the last few months. “Our goal is to reinstate the importance of often-neglected aspects of research, such as social impacts. We are currently revising our evaluation grids for hiring, tenure and allocation of research chairs,” says Ghyslain Gagnon, École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS) dean of research. My advice to academia? Move faster.

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AI in education: Features already adopted by companies, universities, and schools
Dmitry Baraishuk, Belitsoft, 2021/04/21

This article is a bit listy, and it's easy to lose focus (stay grounded by referring back to the table at the top). There are four section: talent management, AI in higher education, AI in K-12 education, and safety monitoring. Each category is subdivided with example products and illustrations. There's not a lot of text, just a short description in front of each category. Deconstructed, the article would make a pretty good slide presentation. Via Daniel Christian.

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Perspectives of Canadian Distance Educators on the Move to Online Learning
Cindy Ives, Pamela Walsh, Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 2021/04/21

The authors of this study spoke to leaders from Canadian educational institutions that launched distance and online learning initiatives over fifteen years (2002-2017) in an effort to find common experiences. Not surprisingly, the leaders said visionary leadership was critically important. "While  traditional  models  of  teaching  and  learning have  endured," they write, "the  continued  growth  of  online  learning  is  inevitable." What's not clear to me is whether this growth will continue inside, or outside, academic institutions. This paper is a preprint and was discussed at a CNIE session today; I'm not sure whether ti will be permanently open so grab a copy while you can. Image: Inside Higher Ed, Will shift to remote teaching be boon or bane for online learning?

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Feasibility, Sustainability, and the Subscribe-to-Open Model
Rick Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2021/04/21

This post discusses the subscribe-to-open (S2O) model "whereby a journal shifts from subscription access to OA, but the libraries who were subscribers under the old model continue paying in order to keep the journal financially viable."" The obvious risk is that libraries might not feel a willingness or inclination to keep paying for a journal they could get for free. The core question, says Rick Anderson, is "if the S2O model fails for the journal or journals in question, would the library and its institution be worse off than it was before S2O was adopted?"

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What does the premium on “presence” actually cost?
Lawrie Phipps, lawrie : converged, 2021/04/21

This is a good point: "Because of this premium on presence from pre-pandemic practice, practices in online places have also put a premium on synchronous presence. This manifests in many ways; online lectures is the most obvious, where a lecture that was on campus is directly transferred to a Zoom or Teams room." And Lawrie Phipps asks, "Where is the evidence that this kind of never-unplugged presence is better? What if accessing learning and teaching asynchronously led to better outcomes for some students?"

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What ever happened to that $5-million prize for a student-success app?
Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2021/04/21

Goldie Blumenstyk follows up on a competition launched five years ago by the Robin Hood Foundation. The upshot is that there were no winners and that Robin Hood never did release the analysis of the results (indeed, they hardly even mentioned the outcome of the competition). And that's the sort of problem you get from a lot of foundation-backed efforts. "Maybe the contest wasn’t designed so thoughtfully to begin with. Maybe it was too steeped in silver-bullet thinking."

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