OLDaily

Universities are still the future of higher education
Tom Worthington, Higher Education Whisperer, 2022/03/28

Tom Worthington responds to an Ernst & Young report (34 page PDF) suggesting "that the sift to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic is just the start of change in post-school learning." In particular, he suggests, the report's assertion that we have reach "peak education" is "nonsense". And while the points E&Y makes are not especially new, neither is Worthington's response: "Each time there is a new communications technology developed, be it printing, gramophones, radio, audio cassettes, TV, or the Internet, it is pressed into service for education." The fact remains that some technologies (the automobile, nuclear weapons, the internet) do change everything. And moreover seems odd for Worthington to depict universities, our most conservative institutions, as "run by small academic teams (that) can, and do, take bolder, quicker moves."

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Defining quality and online learning
2022/03/28

I could quibble in this commentary about what criteria ought to count as measuring course 'quality'. Suffice to say there is, as Tony bates notes, a wide variety of quality assurance standards. But that would miss the main point of the post, which is this: before the pandemic, there were widely-applied quality standards for online learning, but these were mostly ignored when everything went online. Why? Because offline learning was not subject to the same quality standards, and so standards weren't applied when the programs were moved online. That was fine for 2020, says Bates, but that is not sufficient for 2022. And more to the point, why aren't quality standards applied to offline learning? Just because they aren't recorded?

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Anticipating Market Demand
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2022/03/28

I liked this article on how educational institutes (and their funders) can (or can't) predict market demand for learning programs. The most salient observation, to my mind, was this: "when companies talk about a skills gap, they aren't talking about problems with recent graduates, they are saying that the talent pipeline of ten years ago was not wide enough." So yeah, changing college and university program offerings is probably not addressing the problem. Image: Holon / ICEF.

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Reach newsletter strategy: 'Real battle is between publishers and tech giants'
Bron Maher, PressGazette, 2022/03/28

It's funny to read about the lessons about email newsletters being newly discovered by new commercial services, for example, ""moving the newsletter away from driving traffic to the website," thinking of it as "a self-contained experience you read within your email," and realizing "what we're breaking a little bit is this perception that every interaction with the reader has to lead to a click." That has always been the design philosophy of OLDaily; I don't care if you never visit my website, and the links to stories (on other websites) are there as a convenience, not a requirement. The other side of this email newsletter renaissance is the ongoing war against spam and how smaller distributors (like me) are caught in the crossfire.

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Chinese folk music: Study and dissemination through online learning courses
Renli Li, Education and Information Technologies, Paperity, 2022/03/28

The key point made by this paper is that "it demonstrates the effectiveness of the impact of distance learning courses in the context of studying Chinese folk music." The study involved "involved second-year students from four educational institutions of the People's Republic of China: Zhengzhou Sias College, China Conservatory of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and Fujian Normal University."

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Live learning, AI and Web3 are coming for ed tech
Amber Burton, Protocol, 2022/03/28

This is a bit of a grab-bag of an article as author Amber Burton makes her debut on the EdTech beat for Protocol. Three companies are featured: 101, "playfully termed the 'metaversity,'", which "aims to solve the problem of credentialing skills"; Fusemachines, which offers live training in AI for its corporate clients; and Copilot, an AI code-completion tool for developers which Burton says "signals a future in which more tools are tailored to the specific needs of workers."

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