OLDaily

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

A Spotify model of personalised higher education
Michael Rosemann, Martin Betts, Times Higher Education, 2023/03/28

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The authors argue, "Spotify, the successful music-streaming service, is a benchmark for personalisation, and the similarities between entertainment and educational content make it a good point of reference for personalised learning." This is an incredibly bad argument. It reduces the idea of personalization to content recommendation, and even there, the comparison fails, because you want to revisit your favourite music over and over (which is why playlists are so effective) but ideally you'd want to visit learning content only a few times. Additionally, there's no real sense to be made of context, pre-requisites, mastery, or assessment in music streaming. And Spotify (at least to my knowledge) doesn't incorporate music-listening activities, community, or tutorial support. One wonders why the editors would approve this article; surely readers are right to expect better.

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Is Online Education Dead? Or Just Dying? Part 2
Barry Dahl, Barry Dahl dot com, 2023/03/28

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This is a fun two-part article (part 1, part 2) about the death of online learning. Or maybe we should say: the alleged death. Because there's this: "The students aren't writing those clickbait articles about how horrible online ed is. They are providing valuable information with their course registration clicks and their survey responses about course format preferences... This is important. Comparing pre-pandemic survey results to 2022 survey results indicate a huge shift in modality preferences from face-to-face to online."

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Stakeholder Perspectives on the Ethics of AI in Distance-Based Higher Education
Wayne Holmes, Francisco Iniesto, Stamatina Anastopoulou, Jesus G. Boticario, The Open University, 2023/03/28

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I like the way this paper breaks down the topic area before engaging in a longer discussion (the list isn't new, but the organization of stakeholder input does appear to be new, though it may need to be extended to account for the full range of applications and issues). Here it is, organized and paraphrased for clarity:
 (a) using AI to support teaching and learning (AIED)
    (i) institutional-facing AI
    (ii) teacher-facing AI
    (iii) student-facing AI
 (b) learning how AI works and how it can be created
 (c) preparing for AI; learning what it means to live in an AI world

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Practical and Ethical Challenges of Large Language Models in Education: A Systematic Literature Review
Lixiang Yan, et al., arXiv, 2023/03/28

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Though it did review 118 studies using Large Language Models (LLM) to automate educational tasks, it's probably somewhat early for a literature review on this subject, and this would explain the paucity of the "comprehensive list of different educational tasks that could potentially benefit from LLMs-based innovations" in this paper (23 page PDF). I don't mean to keep referring back to my ethics course, but none of these papers match my own list of applications or ethical issues (I'd publish both, but they're too long for journals to accept). Still, it's good to have something like this in the literature, and I agree with the observations that "LLMs-based innovations are subject to data privacy issues but were rarely mentioned or investigated in the literature" and that "the reporting standards of empirical research that aims to develop educational technologies using large language models need to be improved."

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Share, follow, embed with Mastodon
2023/03/28

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These are some tools to help you add the Mastodon share button to your website, a follow button, or embedded timeline. With the first two, a popup asks you to enter your Mastodon instance (like, for example, 'mastodon.social'). It would be nice if we could just load a default instance into our browser, which is detected and used by a plugin like this. It's been almost twenty years since mIDm, I don't know why browsers haven't figured out this simple thing.

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Jimmy Methods
Hannah Pearson-Coats, 2023/03/28

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I found this site via a LinkedIn post by the author. The site redesign takes me back to the days of Netscape 2 and frames! Beyond that, though, there's a lot to like about the design and especially the presentation of the 'Jimmy Methods'. To be clear, none of these originate with the author; they are very well-known analytical tools widely used in the consulting industry. They're things like concept models, process models, ER diagrams, etc. They're beautifully illustrated and explained, though, so if you're new to processes and systems analysis, this is an interesting place to start.

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MICROBOL framework published
MicroBol, 2023/03/28

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This short post links to two outputs from the MICROBOL project: the MICROBOL Common Framework for Micro-credentials in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), and the MICROBOL Framework one-pager. According to the document, "Micro-credentials are designed to provide the learner with specific knowledge, skills, and competences that respond to societal, personal, cultural or labour market needs." Related: Doug Belshaw describes how microcredentials can be realigned with Mozilla's original Open Badges vision. "It's essential to emphasise the importance of informal and non-formal learning," he writes. They're not just intended for a commercialized qualifications framework. "Interoperability and decentralisation are crucial," he writes. "The original vision for Open Badges was to widen participation and recognise different kinds of learning."

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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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