OLDaily

Tunisia pushing to become intl study destination
Viggo Stacey, The PIE News, 2021/07/16

I think attracting international students creates a pretty clear benefit for a nation, especially one like Tunisia, which has been developing its educational capacity in recent years. Tuition revenue is a small part of it - so small, in fact, that it makes more sense just to offer the education for free. According to Malek Kochlef, the country has a strategy to "reinforce the position of Tunisia as a destination for international students... We are developing a new program to attract international students, including paying their fees at public sector [universities]." This is smart - and much more likely to support the development of a modern technological economy than tax breaks and corporate giveaways.

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OXREF: Open Extended Reality for Education Framework
Ishan Sudeera Abeywardena, University of Waterloo, ResearchGate, 2021/07/16

This resource is a set of slides from a conference presentation and would really have benefited from more description. Readers can find more at Ishan Sudeera Abeywardena's web site. What caught my eye was not simply the discussion of extended reality (XR) but also the positioning of it within an open learning and open educational resource framework. We're probably going to be challenged by closed and proprietary XR in the future, and if we want to extend open learning to this domain, we should be thinking about it now.

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Your Company Needs a Digital Nomad Policy
Miles Everson, Steve King, Carolyn Ockels, Harvard Business Review, 2021/07/16

This article is mostly concerned about 'geoarbitrage' - living in low-cost areas while earning the wages prevailing in the high-cost areas where their companies are located (as though companies would never produce goods in low wage areas and transport them to sell in high-wage areas).  And pulling up stakes and living on the road isn't for everyone, and much less so for students and children. But I wonder whether it won't be a lot more common in the future. And it won't always be voiluntary; consider the case of people in western Canada being forced to flee massive forest fires or those in sourthern Germany displaced by flooding, to name only a few. We know now that we can continue to support people who can't come into the school or office, but how will we manage this going forward? It would be short-sighted to pretend these issues will disappear with the end of Covid. Probably, they're just getting started.

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Sorry publishers, but your digital products suck
Frederic Filloux, Monday Note, 2021/07/16

These are complaints that afflict both educational and media web services, and though I haven't purchased $1500 of content services each year, I've still seen a lot of this for myself (and no doubt, so have you): login and authentication issues, poor site search, zero personalization, apps that don't work offline, and jittering pages. I would add slow page loads caused by tracking mechanisms, opaque site navigation, non-responsive design, and broken links. Yes, there's a lot of legacy out there, but there's a lot that could be done to fix the sorry state of the institutional web.

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The power of radio in Sierra Leone: ensuring no child is left behind
David Sengeh, World Education Blog, 2021/07/16

This post by Sierra Leone's education minister describes the use of radio as a tool to support distance learning during the pandemic. They were able to draw on lessons learned and infrastructure deployed during the Ebola outbreak between 2014 and 2016. "Very few households have access to internet technology in Sierra Leone," writes Sengeh. "Radio programming was chosen to deliver lessons, as it was cost-effective and could be adapted to local languages. Distance learning through radio is also engaging and has been shown to improve learning outcomes."

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Keeping Kenya Learning: The importance of caregiver engagement in supporting learning beyond the classroom
Deborah Kimathi, Yomna El-Serafy, Daniel Plaut, Tom Kaye, 2021/07/16

This article describes the Keep Kenya Learning (KKL) initiative as "helping parents and caregivers build their capacity and confidence to support learning at ho me." It is one of many responses to Covid and is really an important part of making online learning effective. According to the article, parents "can support their children by engaging in one-to-one interactions with them... (and) by being supportive, building their confidence, and encouraging them to focus on the importance of education." I think the need for these sorts of supports is clear, but that they need not only come from parents, but rather, the whole community. This is especially the case for children without parents, but also for children of less privileged socio-economic backgrounds whose parents, for whatever reason, cannot provide this support. And this project demonstrates how to offer support to caregivers and community to enable this.

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