OLDaily

Decentralising the description of skills with OSMT
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2022/02/03

There has been an increasing movement to centralize skills recognition over the last few months. Microsoft's LinkedIn has long focused on quantifying skills. Last summer saw a proposal for an IMS badge merger with the wider W3C Verifiable Credentials standard in what critics say is a commercial hijacking of the standard. Most recently, educational publishing company Pearson purchased Credly, a badge management company. Here, Doug Belshaw pushes back with advocacy for an Open Skills Management Tool (OSMT), providing "an example given by (Badgr's) Nate Otto during a meeting of the Open Recognition workgroup as part of the Open Skills Network yesterday." Argues Belshaw, "The next step is to get many, many OSMTs in existence so that we can decentralise the means of skill description!"

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LEAP from the Era of Accountability to the Age of Personalization
Chip Pettit, Eric J Ban, Getting Smart, 2022/02/03

This article promotes a concept called Leadership for Educational Acceleration through Personalization (LEAP). This is the mantra: "As we enter into this new age of personalization, we will continue to leverage the lessons we learned in the era of accountability (skill-based instruction, mastery learning and leveraging student achievement on end-of-course assessments for post-secondary gain)." But I don't really see sufficient evidence that lessons were learned in the 'era of accountability', known more broadly as the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). And my broad preference - which I've described at length elsewhere - is in favour of personal, rather than personalized, learning.

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Is Momentum Shifting Toward a Ban on Behavioral Advertising?
Harrison Jacobs, The Markup, 2022/02/03

The answer is 'yes', at least in Europe, but there's much more to the story. 'Behavioral advertising' basically targets people based on their behaviour, and is used not only for personalization but also to learn how design choices can influence behaviour through methods called 'dark patterns'. The focus on advertising means that marketers need to find both new ways to collect data and also new ways to influence behaviour. I don't want to draw too dark a line connecting A and B here, but it's hard not to see a renewed focus on 'personalized' learning by industry as an effort to address that problem. I'm not saying industry should not be involved in education, but my preference would be to see industry paying for it (preferably through taxation) rather than controlling and using it for their own purposes, and I would in general urge that learning software and resources be open and community based.

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Nancy Bailey's Education Website: Charters and Vouchers to Destroy Virginia’s Public Schools Will Involve Questionable Data Collected on Children
Nancy Bailey, National Education Policy Center, 2022/02/03

I continue to be puzzled by the very evident desire of some to replace public education with private schooling. This article looks at the case of Virginia, where a newly elected governor is, according to the author, intent on dismantling the "fourth-best public school system in the country." Interestingly, a motivation is presented in this article: the collection of student data to be used in marketing and other programs. Nancy Bailey reminds readers of inBloom, a data-collection program that promised (but never delivered) personalized learning and that was eventually shut down precisely because of concerns about data privacy. Image: The Next Web. 'This private equity firm is amassing companies that collect data on America’s children.'

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The new homeschoolers: More diverse, very committed
Rebecca Klein, Lillian Mongeau, Neal Morton, Javeria Salman, Hechinger Report, 2022/02/03

We don't really know how diverse homeschooling in the U.S. has become because as the article notes, "the recent Census data only tracked five racial groups, without exploring home-school participation by religion." The author tries very hard to convince readers that more Muslim and Indigenous families are practising homeschooling. But this is really a straw man. The main question I would pose of the statisticians is this: how many homeschoolers are in homes where both parents work? I venture to say it's very few. I would also ask about the relative cost per student (including unpaid parental labour) of homeschooling compared to public schooling. And, of course, I'm wondering whether students are adequately prepared to thrive in a modern and diverse information-age society.

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DIY Economic Impact Studies
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2022/02/03

This is a great post. Alex Usher dissects the way college and university economic impact studies are constructed, and does so in a way that makes it clear that many of the calculations are how arbitrary. Not to mention that the whole exercise is flawed because, as he states, the studies don't compare the result with the opportunity cost of similar investments elsewhere. While the context is firmly Canadian, no small number of similar economic calculations are conducted in very similar fashion. This article just works on so many levels: it makes Usher's expertise clear to his readers, it helps institutions create their own studies (if they still want to), it describes the basis in literature for the construction of the studies, and it offers an acerbic criticism. Image: Emsi, The rights and wrongs of economic impact studies for colleges and universities.

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Canadian universities are quietly being repurposed
Marc Spooner, University Affairs, 2022/02/03

"Provincial governments are surreptitiously reprogramming and repurposing our universities, trusting that the public is looking the other way," writes Marc Spooner. New metrics implemented and being considered by various governments can be seen as coercing universities "away from fostering critical, creative, and well-rounded citizens" and instead "toward drastically retooled, narrowly conceived 'outcomes' focused on serving the current labour market and performing corporate-styled research and development." However, argues Sponner, "the rationale for using current labour-market realities to direct future postsecondary education funding is dubious at best." The roles being filled now may be irrelevant in ten years.

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