OLDaily

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

What If We Create a Culture of “Transparent Assessment” (AI & AI)
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2023/01/18

---

What is the role of AI in assessment? Maha Bali, for example, asks how we adapt when AI can write student assessments, about the role of AI in supporting a culture of transparent assessment and wonders how to design assessments that don't force students to run to AI. Researchers have considered how AI could address issues that plague traditional assessment (without in turn creating new issues). With recent labour shortages, writes Michael Feldstein, the catalysts for competency-based learning and prior learning assessment have arrived. So how could AI help "truly meet students where they are and get them to where they want to go?" I think we'll be looking at a lot more case studies like this one about AI-assisted assessment in Türkiye.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A Buyer's Guide To AI In Education For Our Current Artificial Intelligence Cambrian Explosion
Cristian T. Duque, eLearn Magazine, 2023/01/18

---

We're probably right at the cusp of the marketing hard sell to institutions on the benefits of this or that AI solution (and yes, I think commercial providers have applied only a light touch thus far, even if it doesn't feel like it). To weather the storm of come-ons and propositions, institutions will need to have their needs and priorities clear; this guide is a good resource to get you started thinking about the sorts of questions you'll need to answer before buying marking machines or teaching  robots or any other such thing.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Microsoft launched ChatGPT-3, but Google also have a great hand, in fact they have a bird in the hand...
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2023/01/18

---

"Sparrow, from (Google) Deepmind, is likely to launch soon," writes Donald Clark. "Their aim is to trump ChatGPT by having a chatbot that is more useful and reduces the risk of unsafe and inappropriate answers. In the released paper, they also indicate that it will have moral constraints." They also intend "to build on Google Tools such as Search and Scholar to deliver factually correct text." See also the Decoder, TechRadar, Reddit, gHacks.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Universities are failing to capture the value of their data, research finds
Laura Spitalniak, Higher Ed Dive, 2023/01/18

---

"Institutions have access to both academic administrative and research data sets but often lack a centralized repository for all that information," reports this article, suggesting that "with more data about things like faculty members' research focus areas, funding patterns and higher ed policy trends, they could make more strategic hiring decisions." Maybe they could, but I cannot begin to say how bad an idea this is. The airtight security required to manage budget, funding and personnel records would stifle any reasonable research infrastructure, while consolidating all data into a single repositories means greatly increasing the number of people who need to access it, and therefore, the sources of possible threats.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The life of an online tutor can resemble that of an assembly line worker
Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report, 2023/01/18

---

This article describes the experience of Leo Salvatore, one of 3,000 online tutors employed by Paper, an online tutoring company. "Dozens of tutors describe similar stories on a Reddit discussion board, complaining about time constraints and low pay (Starting wages were recently increased to $18 an hour.)."  Some tutors "describe a sweatshop-like atmosphere where tutors quickly burn out and are fired." They use a text chat interface and may be communicating with a number of students at once. "Students at schools that pay Paper between $40 and $80 (per month? per year?) per pupil are entitled to unlimited on-demand tutoring at any hour of the day."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Here’s how Microsoft could use ChatGPT
Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review, 2023/01/18

---

Melissa Heikkilä offers a number of ways Microsoft could use AI in its services, including as a Bing front-end, or as a summarizer or idea generator in Word, but there's always the risk of the '"regression to the meh,' where our personality is sucked out of our messages." That's fine for proprietary software, but what about open source applications? There's the BigCode Project's The Stack, "a 6.4TB dataset containing de-duplicated source code from permissively licensed GitHub repositories which can be used to train code generation AI models." And I think the difference between free and open AI applications and proprietary commercial applications like chatGPT Professional may be significant. What we see from Getty Images's lawsuit against Stable Diffusion is that commercial interests may (nay, will) collide. But how can we ensure free and open source applications are not caught in the crossfire?

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Saturation in Qualitative Educational Technology Research
Wajeeh Daher, Education Sciences, 2023/01/18

---

'Saturation' is "the point in data collection and analysis when no additional themes and categories emerge from data, which happens when all relevant categories and sub-categories have been identified and described." Or, it's "the point in coding when you find that no new codes occur in the data." It's an important concept in qualitative research, write the authors, but are studies taking it into account. All the studies (n=60) evaluated in this paper (14 page PDF) addressed the achievement of saturation, though a third to one half considered the definition of saturation. "The most-mentioned expression to indicate the achievement of saturation was the emergence of new information, themes, categories, and codes, where most of the participating studies used expressions related to this aspect."

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.

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