OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics. We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Twitter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed

Professional Development Opportunities in Educational Technology and Education
Clayton R. Wright, Stephen's Web, 2022/11/10

---

Once again here is the list of conferences and other development opportunities from Clayton R. Wright. He writes, "The 48th edition of the events list provides a potpourri of webinars, online courses and programs, hybrid conferences, and in-person events. Most organizations have returned to their normal ways by offering in-person events. Those who currently provide an online presence may only offer a limited version of their conference online as opposed to the full version that they offered during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sincerely, I hope readers of the list explore it as they may find events that may be more congruent with their current professional interests than the ones they always attend. Also, they are likely to gain ideas that might enable them to establish a similar event closer to home. One does not have to attend an event in order to benefit from the list. If you want to know what may be the most current concerns of educators, take a look at the conference or event themes and examine the abstracts provided by the keynote speakers." 157 page MS-Word document.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Ethical guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and data in teaching and learning for educators
European Commission, 2022/11/10

---

These guidelines "are designed to help educators understand the potential that the applications of AI and data usage can have in education and to raise awareness of the possible risks so that they are able to engage positively, critically and ethically with AI systems and exploit their full potential." The document (40 page PDF) dispels some misconceptions and explores some use cases before (p. 18) outlining core ethical considerations: human agency, fairness, humanity and justified choice. Key requirements include oversight, transparency, diversity, non-discrimination, fairness, etc. Overall, the presentation is framed in terms of reducing risk and poses questions that educators should ask when using AI. 

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

CORE to become an independent Open Access service from August 2023
CORE, 2022/11/10

---

The first indication that something was going on at the Connecting Repositories (CORE) project was this blog post seeking CORE 'memberships'. Fees aren't cheap (but they're already discounted). The other shoe dropped this week with the carefully worded announcement that CORE "will become an independent Open Access service." In other words, Jisc is cutting its funding. Researchers are not happy. As the United Kingdom Council of Open Research and Repositories (UKCORR) wrote in an open letter, "a membership model would threaten the viability of CORE and only seek to compromise the efficacy of the UK's open research infrastructure," and adds, "the Jisc decision, and its underlying rationale, is one that UKCORR and its members find bewildering."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Criticisms of academic freedom miss the mark and risk the integrity of scholarship
Marc Spooner, Academic Matters, 2022/11/10

---

The interesting part of this article is the analogy: "workers in many fields are granted special access or consideration to otherwise publicly restricted tools, working conditions or rights.Take occupations like sport, law enforcement, farming, journalism and more. In sport, hockey players are permitted to hit each other, and even fight within the game without fear of being arrested. Similarly, boxers may punch each other." Now on this account, what seems to distinguish academic freedom from (say) freedom of speech is (a) who determines whether the speech is allowed (for academics, it's "professional competency as determined by disciplinary communities"), and (b) what the consequences for infractions are. But the analogy misses an important point: if farmers, hockey players, jorunalists, etc., abuse their privilege, the law will step in. Academic freedom may be a prima facie sort of immunity from wider constraints, but there are limits, especially in an era of weaponized speech.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Full article: Highly cited educational technology journal articles: a descriptive and critical analysis
Pekka Mertala, Eleni Moens, Marko Teräs, Learning, Media & Technology, 2022/11/10

---

"To summarize the key findings, a 'typical' edtech HCA is a Western-based review article or quantitative research paper reporting positive findings from higher education, published in a high-impact factor general edtech journal by a major publisher." Not a surprise, but there's more than a little circularity evident in this research. It begins with a presumption that "the vast majority of articles are published in peer-reviewed academic journals," which is probably not true (consider the alternatives: magazines and newspapers, consultant reports, trade journals, corporate white papers, blogs, discussion boards, etc). The article does not include "the 200 absolutely most cited papers" and instead "identified 10 major journals... and selected the 20 most cited articles from each of them." The analysis "was guided by an abductive approach," that is, 'inference to the best explanation'. And that's how you get the 'findings' above.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Shifting online during COVID-19: A systematic review of teaching and learning strategies and their outcomes
Joyce Hwee Ling Koh, Ben Kei Daniel, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2022/11/10

---

This is a review (26 page PDF) of 36 articles outlining "eight strategies used by higher education lecturers and students to maintain educational continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic." This includes five teaching and three learning strategies (view image). It notes, "The eight teaching and learning strategies effectively maintained test scores and attendance/completion rates, but many challenges surfaced during teaching, learning, and assessment." According to the authors, "Lecturers designed classroom replication, online practical skills training, online assessment integrity, and student engagement strategies to boost online learning quality, but students who used ineffective online participation strategies had poor engagement." Overall, "students may not successfully learn asynchronously unless they can effectively self-direct learning." Which, I think, we knew, but it's a finding worth replicating.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]