OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

A New Generation Of Mastery-Based Learning Platforms Has Arrived
Josh Bersin, 2023/01/09

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Josh Bersin (and colleagues) identify "a new breed of platforms" called Capability Academy systems. "They are designed to build skills-based capability academies; they group large audiences into small cohorts; and they integrate with content with live events, assignments, collaboration, mentors, and experts. And they can deliver all this at scale." I'm not seeing exactly how all this (except the name) is new. Still, the article explains, "We offer dozens of 4-6 hour courses (each consumed in cohorts), we host thousands of supporting videos and articles, we have more than 30 Senior Faculty, and our social community is a 'place' to learn." All this seems to me to resemble learning communities. Still, this article expands on the concept and runs through a list of companies providing these platforms. Far more interesting to me, though, are distributed networks that provide access to all these contents and services.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Seattle public schools sue social media platforms for youth 'mental health crisis'
Maya Yang, The Guardian, 2023/01/09

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I was in a discussion this week on the same sort of issue in other areas. In the current case, the Seattle lawsuit "accuses companies behind TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube of harming young people€™s mental health." Perhaps these companies are liable (though certainly a similar case can be made about television in the case of previous generations; look at the damage wrought by an inescapable addition to things like Fox News). But more to the point - why should schools and educators be the ones to have to take legal action here? They have neither the experience nor the background to manage for these issues. Isn't it the proper role of government to protect people, including especially young people, from harm? That's what we see in Ireland, as Facebook was assessed a fine of 265 million Euros for publishing personal details of users online.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The decline of disruptiveness
Olga Ioannou, connecting data to information to knowledge, 2023/01/09

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At my institution researchers are evaluated, in part, by the number of papers they produce. So they look at someone like me and conclude I'm not very productive. But it's a silly metric, and one made all the more so by the revelation in a Nature article (more) that some scientists publish a paper every five days. No wonder the authors are finding that there's less disruption and innovation in these works! "The growth in publishing and patenting may lead scientists and inventors to focus on narrower slices of previous work," write the authors. "We are at crossroads," says Olga Ioannou in this post. "We are at that awkward moment in time that we've lost sight of the others. So, how do we move forward? The paper's authors ask for broader research and more time."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

EdTechs Funding Problems Are Going to Get Worse
Michael Feldstein, e-Literate, 2023/01/09

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Michael Feldstein is worried that ed tech venture capital (VC) funding is slowing to a trickle, and "If I am right," he says, "this is bad news not only for investors and start-ups but for EdTech companies of all sizes and, ultimately, for their academic customers." Essentially, there's a downward push on the valuation of ed tech companies, which means raising capital becomes more expensive, which means they have to make more money to pay for capital instead of developing new features or services. "Big companies that customers depend on will be squeezed, spending less, and laying off employees." Small companies are less likely to emerge as challengers. Try as I might, though, I can't really imagine a world in which VCs are the saviours of our sectors, especially when their business model is one of extracting value for themselves out of other people's work.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

ChatGPT for Educators
Jessica Adams, Google Slides, 2023/01/09

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Over the last week there has been a second wave of articles about chatGPT, these all focused on chatGPT for educators. I'll summarize them in this post, starting with this slide show by Jessica Adams, et al. Or you could start with this slide show by Torrey Trust. chatGPT "may be the best thing for education since the ballpoint pen," says Doug Peterson. By contrast, the all out rejection of this tech is appealing to Autumn Caines "as it seems tied to dark ideologies." Minimally, there should be ground rules for the robot wars, says Brenna Gray.

Still, "You know it's time to start re-thinking our kids' future!" says Marc Prensky. "Prepare for many of your old ideas about learning to die." Andrew Herft, meanwhile, shares a teachers' prompt guide to chaGPT. People creating content might want to review Tamilore Oladipo's "six ways AI already supports content creation and which tools are leading the charge." Lindsey Downs previews WCET's upcoming work looking at the impact of AI on education (and yes, I did read Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine as a child). Kasey Short on Middleweb discusses how to introduce chatGPT to your classroom. Final warning, though: "We're about to drown in a sea of pedestrian takes. An explosion of noise that will drown out any signal."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Is face-to-face teaching killing the art of conversation?
Mark Brown, Decoding Digital Education, 2023/01/09

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Mark Brown takes apart this sloppy opinion piece in the Times higher education supplement. "In sum, short opinion pieces that imply face-to-face teaching is the 'Gold Standard' for promoting good learning and the 'art of conversation' might go unchallenged in the real time debates. However, the good news is that such critiques do not stand up as well to wider public scrutiny when published online and subject to further analysis." (The debate reminds me of the same sloppy and superficially reasoned arguments we employees have been given to force us back into 'real' offices). Via Marcus Green.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The Benefits of Using Pear Deck in the Classroom
Jeannie Hipp, TechNotes Blog, 2023/01/09

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I followed a prompt from Miguel Guhlin to this article. The article was unclear and didn't directly link to the Pear Deck home page, but I found it and tried it out. I think it's quite a good idea - it's an add-on to Google Slides that creates versions of the slides students can access to interact by typing messages, drawing faces, answering polls, and more. The teacher can see and optionally share the results. But the marketing feels, well, skeevy, and does not fill me with confidence. You can't really learn about it from the website; you need to watch this video. I tried to set up an account and got Google's famous 'something went wrong' error message. Same when I tried to add it as an add-on in Slides. So it doesn't work in Firefox; it did, however, work in Chrome. So I went to set it up, but before it would allow me access to the free account I had to enter my school name and postal code to 'get started' on the premium account. I tried it, and found it added an unasked-for 'How do you feel' question at the start of the presentation. All of this feels wrong to me. So while it seems like a great product, my own experience is unsettling.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

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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