OLDaily

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

Dig a little bit
Andrew Jacobs, Lost and Desperate, 2024/11/04

---

Andrew Jacobs looks into the research behind an article claiming "most people want Instructor Led Training (ILT) at work" and finds shoddy and ill-considered research. In one case, "the source was easy enough to find but it was a single source which looked at the preferences of 336 Greek university students during the COVID-19 pandemic." In another case, a stat quoted in a Forbes article came from "a professional body made up of people with instructor led training (ILT) as part of their core offer." As he says, "we must be better in L&D." It's super-easy to find small scale studies or thinly veiled opinion pieces that support a certain point of view. But it's not exactly ethical.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Five Guiding Principles of Successful Immersive Learning
Hannah McNaughton-Hussain, Discovery Education Blog, 2024/11/04

---

A lot of this may be old news for long-time readers, but it's useful to revisit occasionally the basic elements of immersive learning. This article identifies five dimensions: sensory range, compelling gameplay, narrative, producton quality, and agency. Why do these factors matter? Well, it varies, depending on what you're doing. But in general, "when students feel immersed in an experience, they are more receptive to the content, which enhances retention, fosters deeper understanding, and creates a lasting connection with the subject."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

When AI Meets Education: The Power of Diffusion Over Replication
Culture of Yes, 2024/11/04

---

"A decade ago," writes Chris Kennedy, "I wrote about how meaningful change in education spreads through diffusion rather than replication." He credits David Albury for the idea. This post adapts the idea to the spread of AI. "Just as we learned with previous innovations, the most impactful changes come when we allow ideas to diffuse naturally, adapting to each teacher's unique talents and each school's and district's unique context." This makes sense, since the odds of finding the killer AI application everyone in education should use are nearly zero. Not that there won't be a thousand PowerPoints suggesting otherwise.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

HTML link, or button, that is the question
Marijke Luttekes, 2024/11/04

---

I'm not sure there are many people creating learning technology applications by hand any more, but for those who are, this discussion of links versus buttons is useful (as an aside, I'm not sure any learning technology is being developed these days, beyond wrappers for AI interfaces). Anyhow, to make a long story short: use a link to open a web page or resource, and use a button to perform an action. Doing it the other way around will create usability problems. Image: Eric Eggert.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

mCaptcha: Replacing Captchas with Rate Limiters to Improve Security and Accessibility
Aravinth Manivannan, Sibi Chakkaravarthy Sethuraman, Devi Priya Vimala Sudhakaran, 2024/11/04

---

If you're like me, computers have long since become better at solving captchas than you are. I mean, how much of a motorcycle counts as being 'a motorcycle in the square'? I sure don't know. No, the battle to test whether a web user is a human or a computer is over, and computers have won. So now what? Enter mCaptcha. "Our broader goal," write the authors, "is to stop attempting to distinguish between humans and robots and return to captcha's original intent: providing denial of service (DoS) protection." They do this by requiring a 'proof of work' from the web browser. It's a single-use computation that can be performed pretty quickly by your web browser, but would bog down an AI or web scraper trying to make as many requests as possible. If it were me, I would want to see this 'proof of work' be some actually useful computation (which could then be thought of as the 'price' to access a website). But this is a good place to start.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

TikTok Muting
Stephen Downes, Mastodon, 2024/11/04

---

I'm not usually the source for a weird copyright story, but this time I am: The sound on my TikTok videos is being muted because it contains too long a selection from a copyright work - John Cage's 4'33". Here's the link to my TikTok page where you can watch (but not hear) my travel videos from Croatia and Slovenia. And here's a link where you can listen to (but not hear) John Cage's 4'33".

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

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