OLDaily

A Guide To Learning Styles And The Best Teaching Strategies To Use
Kris Taylor, TaughtUp, 2021/12/17

Because I can't resist poking the bear, here's an article on learning styles. Kris Taylor suggests that there are seven major learning styles, and offers advice on popular teaching strategies that account for them, such as visualization, differentiation, social learning, and more. Of more interest is his discussion on whether learning styles are a myth. I like the way he describes the stereotypical presentation of learning styles by critics, and offers a more nuanced version. "Everybody’s mind is different," he writes, "and has their own way of thinking, it is likely that they will prefer different conditions in which they can pay attention and engage in a presentation." Pointing this out to people, making them more reflective in their own learning, and being aware of this as instructors, is probably a good thing.

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The playful academic
Maarten Koeners, BERA Blog, 2021/12/17

The BERA Blog has published a series of posts on playfulness in academia. As with any such series, the results are a mixed bag. I resisted the tendency on the part of some academics to try to measure or evaluate the impact of play on learning, or to analyze it as a mechanism to promote cooperation over competition. It doesn't matter whether play is utilitarian. Academic work begins as play, and the rest is the framework that makes the play possible; remove the play and I think you'd find you aren't getting any of the benefit you're paying for, even if you can't (and shouldn't) measure the benefit of play directly.

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Revising ‘Teaching in a Digital Age’: the Impact of Covid-19
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2021/12/17

Tony Bates gives us the first draft of an introductory section to a revision he's writing for the third edition of his text Teaching in a Digital Age. I love the way he does this work so openly. The new material summarizes and reflects on the impact of the pandemic on our understanding of teaching online. "Some of the educational changes resulting from emergency remote learning were positive," he writes. "Instructors and teachers gained a better understanding of online learning, in particular the advantages and limitations of synchronous and asynchronous learning. Many instructors and teachers received extensive support and training." It's not a long addition, but certainly relevant.

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Examining the OPM: Form, Function, and Policy Implications
John J. Cheslock, Kevin Kinser, Sarah T. Zipf, Eunjong Ra, EdArXiv, 2021/12/17

Universities typically outsource services peripheral to their main mission, such as bookstores and cafeterias, and online program management (OPM) was one of them. But in recent years, as online programs became much more central to the university mandate, the role of the OPM was called into question, for example, as a means for the 'conversion' of non-profit institutions to for-profit enterprises. This report (52 page PDF) is a level-headed analysis from researchers at Penn State. It begins with a working definition of OPM as "as the outsourcing of a suite of services that leads the external provider to participate in the management of the online program" (you may want to look at this report by Margaret Mattes which links to analyzes more than 100 outsourcing contracts). The report describes OPM companies, identifies reasons people have put forward to regulate the industry, and looks at policy gaps and possible regulatory avenues. Via Phil Hill.

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Don’t read! Or how to start writing
Martin Lenz, Handling Ideas, 2021/12/17

I have to say I'm of the same mind on this article about beginning to write by 'doing the reading'. "More often than not it crushes good ideas and leaves you with a half-alien set of positions that you’ll have difficulty to form an opinion about." Instead, "employ a number of strategies to spread out your proposal. Only when you have done so, should you begin to dip into the literature. The upside is that now you will have concrete questions that you want answered. At the same time, the fact that you have written out your ideas will (hopefully) prevent you from feeling delegitimised by the discussions you are going to encounter." I would also add that now you have a much more precise sense of what to search for. That is pretty much how I actually do it, and I feel it allows me to have a voice while at the same time becoming well versed in what others have said.

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Mental Imagery
Bence Nanay, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021/12/17

I spent a lot of time working on the topic of mental imagery in my PhD studies. Despite references to people like Shepard and Kosslyn, I find the author tends toward a more representationalist understanding of mental imagery (as when he says, "Mental imagery is a form of representation") and mental content (the rock upon which my PhD foundered, because I don't think mental content exists, and I wouldn't allow them to make me say it exists). "The format of a representation is different from its content," says Bence Nanay, which to me is the exactly opposite of the (much more correct) "The medium is the message." But hey - I'm not the one writing the encyclopedia article, he is.

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One provocative question: what on earth does evidence-based really mean?
Paul Gardner, EduResearch Matters, 2021/12/17

This is a question I've posed in these pages on a regular basis over the years. When 'evidence' involves test scores for a dozen students in a psych class at a mid-western U.S. university, it seems to be stretching the meaning of 'research' pretty thin. Moreover, "the outcomes of an investigation may be influenced by a number of factors, including: ontological perspective; the framing of the research questions; methodological approaches; analytical methods; researcher interpretation and the degree to which any funding body remains impartial." Indeed, the call for 'evidence-based' practices on the part of politicians seems pretty thin. On what basis do they assert such practices are not being used? "What universities need is a knowledge-rich government, not political polemic that does not even reach the baseline of the ‘hierarchy of evidence’."

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