OLDaily

State Funding for Open Educational Resources
Nina Owolabi, OCCRL Update, 2021/11/30

This article from the Office of Community College Research and Leadership (OCCRL) in Illinois provides a quick overview of considerations around state funding of OER for community colleges, including the benefit produced and the need to take into account wider social issues in their design. It offers two policy options, one a competitive grant process, and the other a statewide OER adoption process.

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Reasoning and Presuppositions
Carlotta Pavese, Philosophical Topics, 2021/11/30

I have said in my course that the call for an 'objective' perspective is in fact an endorsement of orthodoxy, that is, of prevailing systems of power and influences. Here's why. As this paper argues, using examples like Lewis Carroll’s (1895) argument between Achilles and the Tortoise, it is not possible to reason without presuppositions of some sort (you'd think this would be a truism, as the author suggests, but a lot of people, in fact and deed, express their belief in the opposite). This means that in any instance of reasoning, you are selecting presuppositions to begin your inference from, and those that appear the most 'objective' are those that cause the least debate and dispute (especially from those who manage and fund your work), which entails that 'objective' reasoning is based on an endorsement of orthodoxy.

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How to fend off 'educational numbness' with experiential learning
Nimah Gobir, KQED, 2021/11/30

This article summarizes work by Lorena Germán to address "what she calls 'educational numbness' in today’s students, which is a result of how testing-centered schooling calls for students to be completely compliant, sit still and do assignments." A lot of what she recommends involves taking students places or having them create scenarios that stimulate in them the experience being described in the book or lecture. What I especially liked about this article, and this approach, is the treatment of experiences that may cause trauma in the students, and thus the care taken to ensure that the experiences created do not cause harm.

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Why Is There More Physical Violence Than Usual in Schools This Year?
Michael B. Horn, Diane Tavenner, The 74, 2021/11/30

When I was in school I was on the wrong end of physical violence a lot, and it wasn't until Ralph James taught me to box that I was able to put an end to it (thanks Ralph, you really saved me). This article talks around the issue quite a bit, pointing not only to staff shortages, but also to desensitization that make have taken place during online learning, and a lack of what they call traditional discipline. But the article is honest enough to note that there are no easy answers and to recognize that there are "real struggles going on right now that, like so much during the pandemic, are fundamentally different from the experiences we in schools have had before."

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Large qualitative sample and thematic analysis to redefine student dropout and retention strategy in open online education
Steven J. Greenland, Catherine Moore, British Journal of Educational Technology, 2021/11/30

Interesting article that studies the reasons for persistently high dropout rates in online learning. It's a largish studies, with the authors arguing that the telephone survey size of 226 participants has a 99% chance of detecting any 'theme' that has a 5% incidence or greater in the general population. I would suggest, however, that the quantifications of those themes are less reliable. Still, the survey points to personal circumstances (moved, changed jobs, etc) and learner context (time management, resources) as being major factors, with institutional and teaching context (admin, design and delivery) being far down the list. Existing interventions (surveyed near the top of the article) order these in reverse sequence, which may explain why they have been ineffective.

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