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.

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Why ‘consent’ is going to become a big issue for publishers in 2023
Richard Jamieson, PressGazette, 2022/12/08

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The topic of consent is as relevant to education and research as it is to media. "What we need is a common ground for how consent is requested and communicated so that audiences can clearly understand how their data is used, what their consent enables, and how saying 'yes' can benefit their user experience," says Association of Online Publishers (AOP) director Richard Reeves in this useful interview. Not surprisingly, "conversations usually circle back to the need for standards, transparency, and leadership in the publishing industry and across the digital advertising supply chain." They also circle back to things like honesty and customer agency, but these are trickier for advertisers (and educators) to manage.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Future of Education
Shantanu Sinha, Google for Education, 2022/12/08

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This is the first part of a report (64 page PDF) that will see additional parts released in the coming months, according to Kristal Kuykendall (whose summary is better than the actual report). The three major themes predicted as the future of education are stunning in their banality: rising demand for global problem solvers, change in the skill sets required for work (problem solving, critical thinking, etc), and the idea of lifelong learning. There's a bit more detail in the pages that follow, but it's mostly nice pictures and gloss. Google is certainly capable of much better, so this report is revealing in that it shows what Google thinks of its intended audience. To wit: not much.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Why we need open-source science innovation - not patents and paywalls
Joshua M. Pearce, The Conversation, Phys.org, 2022/12/08

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Here are the results: " The results of a survey study of university professors in Canada found 81.1 percent of Canadian faculty would trade all IP for an open-source endowed chair and 34.4 percent of these faculty would require no additional compensation. Surprisingly, even more American faculty (86.7 percent) are willing to accept an open-source endowed professorship." This answers the question, how would you pay for open source research. Answer: with the professors you're already paying.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

MOOCs and the Upside Down
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2022/12/08

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The sale of FutureLearn can be explained by the "distorted economic model of MOOCs," says Martin Weller. "In this universities provide free content to another platform, for learners to study for free... with no firm business model (We're selling certificates! We're selling data! We're selling microcredentials! We're selling vocational pathways!) this becomes unsustainable." Yeah. If you think the purpose of MOOCs is to make money then the economics seems pretty silly. But I will note that this was never the original intent, at least on my side. The whole point was to offer free learning. The original cMOOC model was developed in a way to make this a cooperative and hence affordable enough approach to be funded as a public service. Of course it was distorted by universities and get-rich-quick charlatans. But the core economic model of MOOCs is free learning - and that makes the best economic sense for any society, if not for the people who wish to profit off it.

Oh, and as for MOOCs destroying universities: it has only been 14 years. Give it time. The idea of freely accessible learning based on open source platforms and cooperative learning communities is a much more powerful force than you might think.

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