OLDaily

Successful competency-based learning in a California school system
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2022/01/05

Tony Bates summarizes this article from the Hechinger Report on competency-based learning in a California school district. There's some discussion about the planning and personalization, and then this: "Almost 90 percent of the district’s students and their families have access to free internet at home, as a result of the city providing free community Wi-fi." Bates comments, "I was also interested to learn that this model worked best for younger and more disadvantaged students during the pandemic, compared with comparable school systems who moved more traditional classes online." A lesson, maybe, for Ontario?

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Playtesting a university simulation game in a graduate seminar
Bryan Alexander, 2022/01/05

The first thing I'll do here is praise Bryan Alexander first for trying this game out with students and second for describing it so well. It clearly engaged students and provided some valuable experience. Now to turn to the inevitable criticisms, I'm going to accuse him of rigging the game. Of the eight roles defined, five were management. The 'random' events were arbitrary. The game felt to me designed to push the participants into a decision-making orthodoxy.

And as an aside, I wonder what 'emergency remote learning' would look like if, instead if emulating lessons and tests, students spent the two week closure playing a similar sort of a role-playing game. If it had been me running the system, online learning would have looked very different from in-class relarning. And would be the better for it, in my view.

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Emergency remote instruction in Ontario continues to fail our students, teachers and families
Michelle Schira Hagerman, 2022/01/05

With the return of emergency remote learning here in Ontario we are once again hearing from people about how bad it is. In this post, Michelle Schira Hagerman presents herself as someone who was in favour of online learning two years ago (while at the same time writing "physical schools and teaching are essential for the vast majority of students and communities"). Today, she recants, citing an open letter from 500 Ontario doctors (out of a total of about 30,000) arguing "the harms of school closures are extensive and have impacted academic, social and emotional, and physical and mental health domains."

My own take is that I don't understand how Covid can be transmissive everywhere else (stores, restaurants, fitness centres, sports arenas) and magically not transmissive in and around schools. I do understand how 'emergency remote learning' can lead to terrible learning experiences. And that crappy internet leads to crappy internet experiences. But in the two years we've been dealing with this, nobody has fixed this because they just assume we're all going back to the way it was before, and that it was OK before. We aren't. It wasn't. The pandemic has laid bare major social problems that won't simply disappear even after schools open.

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The perfomative demonstration of education
Ben Werdmüller, 2022/01/05

I referred to this in my course (I'm still adding the last few videos) so I may as well reference it here. Ben Werdmüller writes that he "only began to appreciate more recently is how important enterprise education is: particularly when it comes to the certifications required to do business in well-regulated industries." And the problem, he writes, is that "informal learning doesn’t really fit into this model." I won't say this is nothing I've heard before. From the point of view of providers, "we don’t care so much about actually educating people. We care about showing that we have educated people." Would understanding this have helped him put better tools into the hands of educators, as he suggests? Or would it have just produced yet another LMS? Image: Faculty Focus.

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