OLDaily

Whats Going On At SkillSoft?
Josh Bersin, 2021/06/15

This is an interesting look at SkillSoft, in part because it describes the trajectory other EdTech companies that were acquired and taken private may be looking it in the near future, and in part because it describes the market companies like Coursera and Udacity are now playing in. "The company now boasts the largest library of content in the world (more than 10,000 titles, 40,000 books, and thousands of certification programs), a highly refined and modern learning platform (Percipio), and a very deep expertise in technical and professional training, compliance training, industry training, and many forms of credential, certification, badging, and compliance."

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Caring for Students Playbook
Susan Adams, et.al., Online Learning Consortium, 2021/06/15

Daniel Christian links to this document (60 page PDF) from the Online Learning Consortium offering "six recommendations for caring for students". The resource draws on a background and set of concepts based around the concept of care as a practice. Included in the recommendations are things like: developing an inclusive syllabus, chunking course content to manage cognitive load, authentic assessment, building presence and a learning community, integrating institutional supports into course curricula, and developing a personal learning network. As such, I would say that it presents care not so much as something new (readers will recognize all of those topics) but rather presenting existing and generally useful ideas from a new perspective.

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Just How Niche is Headless WordPress?
Chris Coyier, CSS-Tricks, 2021/06/15

A lot of the work I've been doing with gRSShopper over the last few months is very similar in nature to what's being discussed here - "building out the user-facing site through the WordPress REST API rather than the traditional WordPress theme structure." For me, it has meant a lot of painstaking conversion of old CGI page-rendering functions to functions that produce JSON and are rendered locally using Javascript, and I'm doing it to enable cloud-based functionality I can access with a light interface wherever I want. But nothing is so simple as that, as I've been learning lesson by lesson. Now this article approaches the issue from the perspective of spin - will it become popular, will be be widely demanded, etc? It's not, so it's a 'niche thing'. Maybe in the world it is, but I'm thinking that in the wider world, and in the longer term, we'll build sites that serve data, and let the end-user decide how they want to work with that data. Image: Torque.

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Khan Academy Expanding To Littles
Peter Greene, Curmudgucation, 2021/06/15

I encountered this post just last week on NEPC and it responds to an interview with Salman Khan published in EdSurge in late April (these sites all refer to him as 'Sal Khan' and I'm not really sure where or why the name changed over time). The article is about Duck Duck Moose, a company founded in 2008 to create learning apps for children and that joined Khan Academy in 2018. The purpose of the post is to undermine the effort. The links are useful and there are some good bits, for example, "'learning minutes' is a clever rebranding of 'screen hours.'" But it's also an attack on schoolhouse.world as "peer-to-peer tutoring, micro-credentials, and a batch of shady characters including Arne Duncan" and "more of the stuff built on a foundation of well-connected, well-heeled amateurs who figure they can easily create an educational revolution." Well I get the argument but when I look at Peter Greene's writing for Forbes the criticisms seem more opportunistic than progressive. Building trust on low-hanging fruit.

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New for educators: Seamlessly migrate content from your LMS to Coursera
Jyoti Motwani, Coursera Blog, 2021/06/15

It says something about the state of interoperability of learning resources that, despite decades of standards efforts, there is a company that specializes in transferring content from one LMS to another. That company is K16 Solutions, and they are the ones supporting 'content ingestion' from your LMS to Coursera. Anyhow, that's all there is in this short PR post, but I wanted to take note.

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