OLDaily

MOOC platforms shut off access to Russian content
Natalie Schwartz, Higher Ed Dive, 2022/03/10

As a result of Russia's ongoing and increasingly destructive invasion of Ukraine MOOC providers Coursera and edX are each suspending content from Russia. I would ask whether they are taking the more significant step of suspending Russian access to their content. The article also describes some pushback from Phil Hill. "We have to think, 'How does the rest of the world look at these moves in U.S. companies?," Hill said. "And the rest of the world might not be comfortable if U.S. companies get to make these decisions unilaterally." While I appreciate his concerns (I truly do) we should recall that people consider the invasion and destruction of a sovereign democratic nation to be particularly egregious, and that the sanctions against Russia have been worldwide in origin, and are not a unilateral U.S. action.

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Coding in Ontario
Doug Peterson, doug — off the record, 2022/03/10

The Ontario government has produced a new curriculum overview document for mathematics, science and technology for grades 1-8. Probably the most significant change is the addition of 'coding and emerging technologies' to the science curriculum, including important concepts like defining algorithms, data input and use, and project management. Overall these are positive changes, in my view, though as always the question is how to make time for the new material. I also note that in the STEM curriculum there are significant references to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples as students will learn about their role in developing these sciences as well as the impact of science and technology on their communities.

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Alternative Assessment Toolkit: Reframing Academic Integrity Protection
Elle Ting, BCcampus, 2022/03/10

This post offers an introduction and background to an alternative assessment toolkit, which as of this writing is yet to be released (watch here). The work is in response to the challenges of assessment created by the pandemic as well as questions surrounding methods requiring surveillance technology. It is framed around Donald Cressey's fraud triangle model, which defines three major factors influencing ethical risk: opportunity, pressure and rationalization. These are significant as we see student say things like "I have to cheat on this paper—if I don't, I'll fail my program, and my life will be ruined!" Elle Ting writes, "instructors' experimentation with alternative assessments in the pivot proved to be an effective and, most important, more humane, equitable, 'people-centred' approach to preventing academic misconduct." Image: ACFE.

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What is unschooling? Meet the families who have shunned the formal education system
Resmi Jaimon, The National, 2022/03/10

This article offers an interesting perspective on schooling. Intended to promote 'unschooling', interpreted here as meaning some type of home schooling, the article features a family that lives nomadically in a red school bus. My concerns about home schooling are well known, I think, as it presupposes parents who have the time, ability and disposable income to manage a child's education. Many (if not most) children are not privileged in this way. But by the same token, traditional schooling roots students in place, tied to a particular school in a particular town. It does little to support nomadic children. How do we support learning in such an environment, which children for whatever reason can't commit to a school? It takes more than a village to raise a child if the child is a nomad, a refugee, or simply on the move. Via Daniel Christian.

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Does the rising tide of OER lift all boats?
Candice Vander Weerdt, First Monday, 2022/03/10

This article is based on a survey of 145 students "at a large, urban, public university" in an unnamed country (the United States, to judge by the racial classifications) and their associated instructors. A number of hypotheses were tested related to the benefits of OER for various stakeholder groups. The most significant finding, I think, was that OER did not produce benefits for the instructors: OER was not positively related to either student perceptions of the instructor or to instructor student evaluation of instruction (SEI) scores. Obviously the results from such a small sample cannot be generalized, but it is encouraging that the author used standardized questions from the OER Research Toolkit so these results may be rolled up with others over time to provide a more global picture.

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