OLDaily

Use of Microblogging, Social Networking, and Short Messages in E-learning for Information Culture Building
Marina Kolmykova, Nadezhda Gavrilovskaya, Mariya Barsukova, Daria Kozlovskaya, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 2021/07/28

From the abstract: "Students were asked to briefly express their thoughts, attitudes, and views toward the given topic on Instagram by creating blog posts and leave motivational and constructive comments under the blogs of other group members." Not surprisingly, they found this beneficial. Students sad things like "running a blog makes a great learning experience" and "learning through blogs is exciting; it is engaging to post and comment." Students surveyed were from Al-Farabi Kazakh National University and Timiryazev Moscow Agricultural Academy.

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Online Learning at a Tipping Point?
TeachOnline.ca, 2021/07/28

The real challenge for the post-secondary system is happening not during the pandemic, but in its aftermath. "The key question for colleges and universities will not be the balance of online versus face-to-face or other teaching methods, but survival. As one September 2020 review of university and college finances in Canada concluded, 'the system will no doubt survive, but it’s not yet guaranteed that all individual institutions will do so in their current form.'" 7 page PDF.

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Examining the Value of Nondegree Credentials
Andrew Hanson, 2021/07/28

I view this survey as representing a society-wide transition from a single set of certifications (ie., university degrees) to a much wider set of possibilities. "Unlike degrees, which are exclusively awarded by colleges and universities, nondegree credentials are awarded by a diverse array of education and training providers. No single type of institution awards more than 20 percent of nondegree credentials."

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Open to MOOCs? Evidence of their impact on labour market outcomes
Jonatan Castaño-Muñoz, Margarida Rodrigues, 2021/07/28

Does participation in MOOCs improve employment outcomes? This is exactly the sort of thing that should be studied, rather than meaningless indicators like grades. Anyhow, the authors find "we find that participation in MOOCs can improve workers’ employment retaining." I think that's about what would be expected. As usual in education research, the sample size is too small and unrepresentative to be able to generalize; "the estimates of the effect of MOOCs may be driven by particular groups of individuals in our sample, in which case we would be erroneously generalizing the benefits of MOOCs." Still, this sort of work points in the right direction. Meanwhile, if employees want better wages, their best bet is still a union.

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Wordcraft: a Human-AI Collaborative Editor for Story Writing
Andy Coenen, Luke Davis, Daphne Ippolito, Emily Reif, Ann Yuan, arXiv, 2021/07/28

Here's the summary: "A Google Research team proposes Wordcraft, a text editor with a built-in AI-powered creative writing assistant. Wordcraft uses few-shot learning and the natural affordances of conversation to support a variety of user interactions; and can help with story planning, writing and editing." The full paper (7 page PDF) is on arXiv. This is additional evidence for a long-standing prediction of mine that in the future learning resources will be created on the fly by an AI as needed (this making OER redundant in an important sense, but allowing us an opportunity to redefine OER in important ways). As an aside, as students use such system applications like TurnItIn will become increasingly helpless to detect AI-assisted content. Via Reddit.

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