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Government releases blueprint for Canada Innovation Corporation
Department of Finance Canada, Government of Canada, 2023/02/16

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The government has announced a new "innovation agency to drive Canadian business investment in research and development (R&D) and foster economic growth," with a budget of $2.6 billion over four years (or about $750 million per year), noting that "Canadian businesses do not invest in R&D to the same degree as their global peers, which weakens Canada's economic competitiveness and reduces opportunities for Canadian workers."  Notably, "the National Research Council of Canada's Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP) will join the CIC." IRAP's budget for 2019-20 was IRAP $430.3M, of which $335.7 million was invested in SMEs. I've done a lot of work with IRAP over the years, and I wonder whether the distancing of NRC's scientific research function and IRAP's enterprise support function will change that.

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‘I want to be human.’ My intense, unnerving chat with Microsoft’s AI chatbot
Jacob Roach, Digital Trends, 2023/02/16

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The latest entry in the world of AI Tools, Bing Chat, is, um, interesting. "Bing Chat is a remarkably helpful and useful service with a ton of potential, but if you wander off the paved path, things start to get existential quickly. Relentlessly argumentative, rarely helpful, and sometimes truly unnerving, Bing Chat clearly isn't ready for a general release." And it isn't available for general release yet; it's only available to selected early adopters. Via Jennifer Griffin Schaeffer. See also The Verge, Reddit, Engadget, and a bunch of Bing Chat videos.

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Neoliberal Education Reform Paved the Way for Right-Wing 'Classical Education'
Nora De La Cour, The Jacobin, 2023/02/16

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"The 'classical education' concept promoted by Ron DeSantis, Chris Rufo, and Hillsdale College is a reactionary far-right project," Nora De La Cour writes, and "it wouldn't be gaining so much ground if bipartisan education reform hadn't sucked the life out of our public schools." But it's not enough to simply criticize the 'classical education' movement, she says. "For the Left to effectively respond to this threat, we need to lay out our own compelling vision of what school learning is for." But I'm not satisfied with her proposal of a "shared narrative" of "schools that honor and nourish our shared humanity." I find my own proposal, "free learning", articulated in this vision, to be a powerful alternative. Via Robin DeRosa.

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Turnitin Integrating AI Writing Detector into Its Products
David Nagel, Campus Technology, 2023/02/16

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No real surprise at all: "Plagiarism detection company Turnitin announced that the AI writing detection tool it teased in January will be available as a feature of its existing products as soon as April." See also EdScoop and Turnitin's press release. Turnitin pretty much had to do this. There has been a wave of AI-writing detection tools launched recently, including Plag.ai, Plagiarism Checker, Open AI Text Classifier, Originality.ai, GPTZero and Plagibot. What's interesting is that this isn't really an opportunity for TurnItIn to grow its market. So for an incumbent like this, new technology like this is more of a threat while for everyone else it's an opportunity.

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UK Engagement Survey
Charlotte Holden, WonkHe, Advance HE, 2023/02/16

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The survey (44 page PDF) reports that "overall, student engagement has largely returned to levels seen pre-pandemic. The increased responses on various sections, including enterprise and entrepreneurship, career development and learning opportunities, provide positive indications that there have been increased opportunities in a range of areas." It's well worth noting, in view of the drive to force people back into the office or the classroom, that there is virtually no difference online vs offline in engagement (see the table from page 16) or skills development (see the table from page 20).

I found the survey through an article in WonkHE. When I read the article I thought at first it had made a good point. "When you discover that almost 4 in 10 students are now caring for others alongside their study, you sit up and notice." Is it really a trend, though? But should we believe it? WonkHE's Jim Dickinson argues that "the 2015 data wasn't weighted – and 70 per cent of the sample were 21 and under, 96 per cent were full time." And "in 2022 the proportion of those aged 22 or over was 50 per cent, versus 30 per cent in 2015." But, first, this is just a side-issue, not on the question of whether engagement has increased. And second, the article is very clear that there is a relation between age and caring activities - it's not trying to hide this fact, it's drawing it out and highlighting it. There's more students caring for others perhaps partially because of Covid but also because demographics have changed. So, on reflection, the WonkHE response much less the 'gotcha' that you might think from reading the article alone.

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Avoid These Top 4 Pitfalls of Instructional Design | LearnDash
Rachel Kolman, LearnDash, 2023/02/16

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What I found funny about this article is that my MOOCs fail on all four points. Here are the 'pitfalls': lack of clear objectives; not considering the audience; overloading content; and neglecting evaluation and feedback. Of course, in a cMOOC there are no clear learning objectives; each person has their own reason for participation and expects to get something different out of it, and the knowledge created during the course cannot be predicted in advance. Also, you can't tailor the course to a specific audience in a massive course; you might get only 22 people, but you need to expect 22,000 - just in case. In a cMOOC as well there is usually more content than anyone can consume - the first task for course participants to select the content they're interested in; this guarantees a variety of perspectives and generates interesting conversations. And finally, of course, a cMOOC has no learning assessment in the traditional manner; feedback is provided by participants in the course to each other, and participants decide for themselves whether they have gained what they needed from the course.

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Assessing the Fairness of Course Success Prediction Models in the Face of (Un)equal Demographic Group Distribution
Oscar Blessed Deho, et al., Proceedings of ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, 2023/02/16

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This article looks at the fairness of AI models in cases where demographic groups are unevenly distributed. How fair, for example, would a prediction model be for women if women were only five percent of the data sample used to train the model. To test the models, the authors first ran them on an unbalanced distribution, then compared the results with those obtained by running it with a balanced data sample. They found that "none of the predictive models was consistently fair in all 3 courses." But more surprisingly, "attributing the unfairness to demographic group imbalance may cause the unfairness to persist even when the data becomes balanced." Assuming that the model is unfair to women may obscure the fact, say, that the model is also unfair to people without pockets. It's a small study, and before jumping to any conclusions we need to see the results replicated in a large-scale study.

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Open Educational Resources and their global needs, benefits and practices: The call for a future research agenda
Christian M. Stracke, Aras Bozkurt, Rory McGreal, Olaf Zawacki-Richter, Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology, 2023/02/16

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The centerpiece of this short article is a handy list, in image form, of 40 benefits of open educational resources (OER), organized into categories such as social benefits and financial benefits. The authors argue, "Because OER is not a single entity and a part of broad openness ecology, there is a need for developing a collaborative understanding in order to improve and advance (the) OER movement."

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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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