OLDaily

TooShare, the first African educational social network on its way to revolutionise EdTech
eLearning Africa, 2022/02/23

This feels more like a press release than a news article, but the existence of TooShare should be noted. According to the article, "TooShare is a new concept that is 100% African and that combines an e-learning platform and a social network. Its objective is to share knowledge by connecting learners, trainers and training institutes through a technological environment that uses the codes and features of social networks, coupled with a Learning Management System." I'm not sure that this is new, exactly, but if it earns some success, all the better.

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A Tech Talent University?
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2022/02/23

Alex Usher responds to an op-ed in the Globe and Mail where Sheldon Levy, interim president of University Canada West (UCW), discusses a UCW white paper (28 page PDF) proposing (in Usher's words) "there should be a university entirely devoted to the techsector, which involves a lot of work-integrated learning and the participation of firm representatives on committees that design and modify curriculum." Usher's four questions boil down to two good ones: why focus on the tech sector, rather than tech skills? And why not a polytechnic, instead of a university? But more, to me, this illustrates the issue that arises when industry designs education: it serves its own interests, rather than the students'. And that's why the education sector needs to be arms-length from industry, in my view.

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Rethinking student transcripts to include skill development
Loleen Berdalh, University Affairs, 2022/02/23

I think this is a pretty challenging concept, not in the sense that it's hard to understand, but in the sense that it may be hard to accept. This article looks at the UBC political science rich transcript, which does a few things over and above providing a list of the course grades. First, it presents an overview of the course contents in a word cloud. Second, and more significantly, it "captures a student’s skills training across 23 areas by tallying the number of political science courses a student completed in which a specific skill was one of the course learning outcomes." It also describes the type of assignments completed and the student's participation in group work. It's problematic, at least to me, because the measures are outside the student's control. For example, the score of '6' in 'work effectively with others' isn't a grade, but merely the number of courses where this is identified as an outcome.

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Where’s the audience for student publications? Most of them aren’t reading print newspapers
Taylor Blatchford, Poynter, 2022/02/23

The University of Calgary Gauntlet - where I was an editor in the 1980s - printed its last weekly newspaper on paper in 2017. But it updates daily online. That pretty clearly is the future of news media generally, though it still comes as a surprise to many. That's why I find it so odd that student newspapers in the U.S. are still pondering their future. Where should they put their efforts? Well, not TikTok or Twitter, though that's part of the picture. It's POSSE - Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Anything else puts you at the mercy of the platform. Though newspapers, which are experimenting with Facebook and Google's AMP, haven't really learned that lesson either.

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Exploring Teachers’ Cognitive Processes and Web-Based Actions During a Series of Self-Directed Online Learning Sessions
Pamela Beach, Elena Favret, Alexandra Minuk, International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education, 2022/02/23

To be clear, this paper studies teachers as learners. Specifically, "Three elementary teachers were involved in a series of in-depth, one-on-one self-directed online learning (SDOL) sessions where they informally used the Internet for their professional learning." Specifically, the study employs " Thinking aloud (as) a method for generating direct data about the ongoing cognitive processes that occur during learning." I think this is a useful mode of study and have provided examples of my own in my 'Stephen Follows Instructions' video series. I think we learn more in this paper about how to study this kind of data than from the data itself. And I think we see a bit of a Heisenberg effect here, where the fact that their experiences are being voiced aloud actually shapes their experience, and leads to different forms of learning (for example, "teachers in our study also critically evaluated the content and architecture of the online environments"). Note that there's an image missing (from Beach, 2020). Also, I'd have preferred to see a table listing what they said rather than what buttons they clicked. Related: Beach & Willows, Understanding Teachers’ Cognitive Processes during Online Professional Learning: A Methodological Comparison.

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Video Surveillance of Online Exam Proctoring: Exam Anxiety and Student Performance
Daniel Woldeab, Thomas Brothen, 2022/02/23

I will credit the authors for their honesty, because as I read this study, pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The study was a decent size but of course not representative of students (consisting of the oft-studied students at a midwestern U.S. university), and involved only one proctoring system (Proctorio). They wanted to ask whether online proctoring made students anxious, and whether this effect was more pronounced for minority or low-income students. They couldn't get Pell grant status information because it was deemed too sensitive, so they relied on a proxy measure of whether students were first generation. On one question, only 22 (6.6%) said they felt anxious about the exam. The authors argue that "being remotely monitored by webcam appears to be a source of anxiety for some students" but we don't have any basis for comparison with (say) being monitored in person. In the conclusion, the authors talk more about the effect on the instructors than the students. Image: Erik Johnson.

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