OLDaily

Behavioral Patterns in Enterprise MOOCs at openSAP
Muhittin Şahin, et.al., EMOOCs 2021, ResearchGate, 2021/07/12

This short paper looks at activity patterns in corporate MOOCs, and in particular, patters in transitions from one type of activity to another among four activity types: learning, discussion, reviewing progress, and announcements. The most significant result is that while there are numerous transitions between the latter three, the first activity - learning - occurs in isolation. Now it seems to me that these categories are poorly defined - 'learning', for example, consists of "video playbacks, self-test submissions, visits to learning items". Why wouldn't these be considered as separate activity types? There's a lot of data (from13 MOOCs with n=72,668 learners) so obviously more detailed analysis could be done. In any event, the use of a transition analysis is interesting even if it's uninformative at this stage.

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How Monetary Incentives Improve Outcomes in MOOCs: Evidence from a Field Experiment
Jie Gong, Tracy Xiao Liu, Jie Tang, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2021/07/12

This is not the first look at the use of financial incentives for learners, and what's important is that previous studies have shown limited and short-term effects. This study (51 page PDF) of learners in the Chinese MOOC platform XuetangX shows a stronger and more persistent outcome. Why? The article doesn't speculate on this question specifically, but it finds several factors that are suggesting of an answer. First, the amount of money matters; 100 RMB produced a change in behaviour, 1 RMB not so much. Second, the effect size is greater in disadvantaged populations, such as women. And third, "our intervention appears to have helped them learn about the online learning process, or about disciplining themselves—which, in turn, shifts their learning behavior toward a more persistent and sustainable pattern." These factors are less present in, say, elite institutions and affluent populations. But in an environment where people really do need academic and financial support, the strategy can have an impact. Or so it seems to me.

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Evolution of research on Escape Room [Term Map 2010-2020]
Nabil Zary, 2021/07/12

If someone asked you, you would probably say that it's intuitively true that there's a connection between 'rat in a maze' experiments of yore and today's modern escape rooms. But how could you show that? I ran across this graph on LinkedIn that draws the connection through research publications over the years. The graph is interesting because it represents the progression through time, from older research (in purple, to the left) to more recent research (yellow, right). And it's interesting to see the concept develop from 'effect' and 'performance' to 'activity' and 'experience' over time. A large version of the image in PNG can be downloaded here.

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Open@RIT: The Birth of an Academic OSPO
Stephen Jacobs, Linux.com, 2021/07/12

An academic Open Source Program Offices (OSPO) can "lead or advise administrative efforts around policy, licensing compliance, and staff education" as well as be involved in other traditional academic functions. This article describes the creation of the  Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) OSPO. "Its goals are to discover and grow the footprint, of RIT’s impact on all things Open including, but not limited to, Open Source Software, Open Data, Open Science, Open Hardware, Open Educational Resources, and Creative Commons licensed efforts; what Open@RIT refers to in aggregate as 'Open Work.'" Readers may be interested in their Zotero collection on open work and open scholarship.

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The Flemish Scrollers, 2021
Dries Depoorter, 2021/07/12

It's not only students taking exams that are being proctored by AI. In this project a live video feed of the Flemish parliament is analyzed and an AI measures how much time politicians are spending on their devices instead of watching the person speaking live. The video is  posted to a Twitter and Instagram account with the politician tagged. As expected, some of them spend most of their time online. But I reject the framing here that these politicians are 'distracted' and should stay 'focused'. This misrepresents, or perhaps simply misunderstands, the role politicians play today. They are no longer debating each other in solemn deliberations in order to make wise decisions. By the time they meet, the decisions have mostly already been made, the result of millions of communications between interested parties. Those politicians who are online are involved in this process and working on the next set of deliberations. Those who are not online are not engaged, probably not part of the decision-making process at all, and are there for show or perhaps as proxies for entrenched (but unelectable) interests.

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