OLDaily

Students do not turn on their video cameras during online classes because learning is not synchronous
Tom Worthington, Higher Education Whisperer, 2022/03/07

So this is an interesting hypothesis. "Castelli and Sarvary (2021) have investigated why students do not turn on their video cameras during online classes and suggest ways to encourage them," writes Tom Worthington. "More useful they offer alternative ways for students to show their involvement in an online course. I suggest these support my assertion that 'synchronous' online learning is a myth." More specifically, "Just because students are hearing and seeing the same thing at approximately the same time, they are not necessarily learning that." perhaps. But surely if they are actually interacting with each other and, say, working through some problem, then some synchronous learning is happening. Maybe the problem is with how 'synchronous online learning' is being applied here.

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Scientists Watch a Memory Form in a Living Brain
Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine, 2022/03/07

The image in this article shows a Zebrafish brain in the process of forming a memory. "In the fish that learned, the synapses were pruned from some areas of the pallium — producing an effect "like cutting a bonsai tree," Fraser said — and replanted in others." In other, less important, memories, synapses aren't actually cut and created, but merely have their strength modified. This article is a summary of a study on "a paradigm for mapping changes in the distributions of synapses in the brains of living larval zebrafish over time using longitudinal imaging." The interesting finding is that "the total number of pallial synapses in all fish did not change significantly." Each synapse created replaced one that was cut.

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Co-designing MOOCs with CoDe-Graph
Allison L. G. Kolling, Armin Weinberger, Helmut Niegemann, Journal of Formative Design in Learning, 2022/03/07

Good detailed post (15 page PDF) that takes a lengthy look at a collaborative MOOC design process. The primary mechanism is a tool called the CoDe-Graph; there are illustrations and photos of the process being used in face-to-face meetings. CoDe-Graph is a graphical template "based largely on the ideas of orchestration graphs and scripts, which combine different learning arrangements with each other." A CoDe-Graph is essentially a use case diagram rotated -90 degrees, so instead of being read from the top down, it is read from left to right. So software designers will find the iterative development process very familiar. The article describes the process as applied to some specific cases: MOOCs for single mothers in Malaysia, a secluded community in Malaysia, fishers in Indonesia, business owners and university students, and rural health workers in the Philippines.

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