OLDaily

6 Elements of Thriving Learners
Randy Fielding, Nathan Strenge , Getting Smart, 2022/01/06

"Schools aren’t to blame for last year’s Insurrection," writes Randy Fielding, "but they can be part of the long-term solution." Perhaps. Of more significance is the proposal here describing a "library of design patterns for thriving learners at SchoolPatterns.com." Here are the elements: safety & wellness; purpose & joy; curiosity & mastery; love & belonging; autonomy & opportunity; and nature & beauty (call me a pedant, but I count 12 items, not 6). Now I'm sure these are all valuable at times; they resemble some of the points I put in my slides on agency yesterday. But care needs to be taken in how these are realized. "Curved wooden platforms at various heights" are not, for example, the same as autonomy & opportunity. "Low-glare general lighting, complimentary wall surface colors, and sparks of colorful accent lighting" are not the same as purpose & joy. Sure, building environment matters. But so does a whole lot else, and it's wrong to reduce them to wood and lighting fixtures.

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Students as reflective practitioners
Alexandra Mihai, The Educationalist, 2022/01/06

The challenge addressed by this article is that "skills development is often not (well) embedded in the overall curriculum." So it can be difficult to develop these skills when they're not explicitly defined as curricular outcomes. The response, writes Alexandra Mihai, is "to engage students in working on their professional competencies... by encouraging them to take ownership of their learning and create their own personal development story." This can be supported using some of the resources offered at the end of the article, such as the Reflective Practice Workshop developed by Claire Sewell or the University of Edinburgh Reflection Toolkit. Image: Gibbs (1998).

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Reclaim EdTech
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2022/01/06

Jim Groom and his colleagues at Reclaim are returning to their roots in educational technology, a development that makes me happy. Not that I don't love old arcade games and online radio and karaoke and all the rest, but ed tech is where I make my home, and all this fancy cloud stuff is where I see the future. Not all of it will be for me (including especially the WordPress stuff and the on-campus ed tech stuff) but a lot of it will be. Just to celebrate, I followed Groom's instructions on how to set up Ghost on Reclaim Cloud in one of my patented Stephen Follows Instructions videos.

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Productive ambiguity and learning resource discovery
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2022/01/06

Good post that was directly responsible for me ordering a new (gigantic) mousepad. "There two ways of finding relevant learning and teaching resources. The first is to know what you’re looking for, and to search directly for that thing. The second is more serendipitous, and involves discovering things that you didn’t even know you were looking for." Pretty much all of what appears in OLDaily falls into the second category, while resources used for something like my ethics course are a mixture of the two.

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Surfing on Three Waves of MOOCs: An Examination and Snapshot of Research in Massive Open Online Courses
Aras Bozkurt, Open Praxis, 2022/01/06

This is a literature review studying the evolution of MOOCs since 2008, and it's fine so far as it goes, and even interesting in some respects. But I have some comments. First, if you can't read the text on the diagram (even the full-sized version), don't put the text on the diagram. Clip and save. Second, I would like to see some argument or evidence that shows that a literature review relying (only) on Scopus is a sufficient, especially in a fast-moving and alternative discipline such as MOOCs. It seems to me that entirely incorrect data regarding citation and credit are obtained when limiting oneself to secondary literature such as that found in Scopus. Third, I would like to see some argumentation of evidence to show that 'hybrid MOOCs' are in any significant way different from 'cMOOCs'. Their main feature seems to be self-directed self-regulated learners, which was a hallmark of the cMOOC.

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OER Certification of Individuals and Organisations in Higher Education: Implementations Worldwide
Sandra Schön, Martin Ebner, et.al., Open Praxis, 2022/01/06

There isn't room here for a full response to this paper, but I would like to suggest that the OER certification described here is a disincentive to create OER. Why? Look at the recommendation for a 25 hour course. Or the requirement of certification to "receive the authorization to publish their materials as OER in the OER-repository." If I needed to do this before publishing an OER, I wouldn't be publishing an OER. Much better is the approach taken by BCcampus, also mentioned in this article, to offer an OpenEd Challenge consisting of a series of 10-minutes exercises people can try whenever they want. The authors' hearts are in the right place - they want to see people recognized for their expertise in OER. But forcing them to take a course or certification program isn't the way,

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