OLDaily

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

Can technology help schools prevent AI-based cheating?
Dennis Pierce, eSchool News, 2023/04/14

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I guess the embargo much be over because all the news outlets that depend on company press releases for content have run the TurnItIn article. Not only students, but also professors are now being accused by AI systems of cheating. But it's not so simply as using an AI to detect AI-based plagiarism and punishing the student. What if the AI is wrong? It can be shown to be, but it's hard. Consider the case in which " shared a Google document history of his exam writing that showed proof he didn't use AI and a slew of research on the fallibility of GPTZero and other AI detection tools." The plagiarism detection companies, of course, say they don't want educators to make judgements based on the tool. "We really don't want anyone making definitive academic decisions out of our detector," said Edward Tian, creator of AI detection tool GPTZero. "The nature of AI-generated content is changing constantly." But what exactly are instructors supposed to do with this information? The fact is, the algorithm renders a judgement which th student must now disprove in order to be found innocent - the exact opposite of what we would consider fair and just.

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OPM Market Landscape And Dynamics: Spring 2023 Updates
Phil Hill, Phil Hill & Associates, 2023/04/14

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Phil Hill revisits his 'Mad Max' diagram of online program management (OPM) companies and concludes that the wheels have fallen off the truck. "We still get a picture of a chaotic market that is not for the faint of heart, and one that is seeing consolidations and category changes, and these changes will continue."

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LLMs, Embeddings, Context Injection, and Next Generation OER
David Wiley, improving learning, 2023/04/14

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David Wiley describes (with a link to a video) how courses (including open courses) will be created by embedding domain-specific information into a large language model (LLM). " The next generation of OER will be the embeddings (from a 5R perspective, these are revised versions of an OER) that are part of the process of feeding domain knowledge into LLMs so that they can answer questions correctly and give you accurate explanations and examples." This is both easier and harder. "Creating embeddings and injecting this additional context into an LLM just-in-time as part of a prompt engineering strategy requires significantly more technical skill than typing words into Pressbooks does. But it will also give us OER that are far more feature-rich and functional than their open ancestors of 25 years ago."

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Edubot
GitHub, 2023/04/14

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Worth a look. Edubot is "a self-improving AI-based chatbot library that is completely platform-agnostic. Edubot intuitively jumps into conversations to give advice, make jokes, and add to the discussion. Its personality can be completely customised to suit the tone of different rooms." This is code you can download and install. But if you just want to try it on Matrix, here's a link to the Element client interface (because it's a discussion board you may need to log in). "Edubot is still under active development and is the first project from Open EdTech."

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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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