OLDaily

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

Post-pandemic, let's develop true education-to-workforce pathways to secure a better future
Matt Gandal, The Hechinger Report, 2023/04/06

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This is the vision expressed by Matt Gandal, president and CEO of Education Strategy Group: "every student deserves a clear pathway to a bright future, with preparation for education and training after high school. Students deserve to reach their potential in fulfilling careers that can support themselves and their families." According to Gandal, "If we want to address the challenges and inequities faced by students and the ongoing needs of employers and communities, we must deliver on a concept that has gained substantial momentum in recent years: education-to-workforce pathways." My question is: will streaming students into the workforce address the equity issues that face people today? Probably not: it sets them up for failure later on when the job they trained for specifically fades out of existence, while not addressing at all the real causes of inequity in society.

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Fostering the Development of Interoperable, Open Source Digital Wallets
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2023/04/06

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Last fall the Linux foundation "announced its intent to launch the Open Wallet Foundation (OWF) - a new collaborative effort to develop open source software that anyone can use to build interoperable wallets supporting a wide range of wallet use cases... Digital wallets are generally defined as an app in our mobile devices where we store the digital versions of the items that we carry in our physical wallets. The basic idea of a digital wallet is pretty simple: 'a thing where we put our stuff.'" I know a lot of educators are sceptical of what appears to be yet another tech solution. But commercial versions - Google Wallet, Apple Pay, and more - already exist and are being widely used. I won free World Curling tickets this week from CAA (wow!) and they're in my digital wallet. We need something for everyone, not just for our digital money, but for our identity documents, and for certificates and credentials.

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First Public Working Draft: Badging API
W3C, 2023/04/06

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From the W3C: "The Web Applications Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Badging API. This specification defines an API that allows installed web applications to set an application badge, which is usually shown alongside the application's icon on the device's home screen or application dock." More. Related: Job candidates struggle to add microcredentials to hiring platforms.

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SDG Toolkit
University College Cork, 2023/04/06

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I was involved in a useful discussion recently about the idea of replacing the traditional 'liberal arts' curriculum with the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). This website at The University College Cork offers tools on how to do that, including mapping your course, program or research to the SDG. It was launched back in 2021, and there's also a mapping project that takes things further, including a comparison of ten types of expertise across all SDG. Here's a U.N. mapping of even more types of skills. Here's the tool as a spreadsheet, from the University of Saskatchewan. Or use this spreadsheet to map to specific indicators. Here's York University's course mapping. The University of Auckland has provided a keyword mapping (see also this .xslx spreadsheet). Here's an example from Kwantlen Polytechnic University for SDG week earlier in March. To get started, maybe consult this guide to getting started with the SDG in universities, including the case for university engagement, practical tools, and case studies.

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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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