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

An Open Design System for Learning
Tim Klapdor, Heart Soul Machine, 2024/11/19

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I've referenced Tim Klapdor's discussion of learning types a couple times over the last few months. This post is the most complete description to date, framed within an open design system for learning. A design system, he writes, has three parts: principles (the motivations & drivers); language (words & visuals); and components (patterns & styles). The learning types typography is a part of the language being used. Klapdor "then built a library of common patterns related to each of the Learning Types" and applies them in a sample lesson. He and his colleagues have deployed them in "two fully online undergraduate programs consisting of 36 courses" with "3000 pages of content and 6084 hours of learning." There are videos and links to the learning types  and learning patterns website available. What would be cool would then be tools for each pattern, maybe even a standard way to launch them.

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Edtech winners and losers
Philip J. Kerr, Adaptive Learning in ELT, 2024/11/19

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Philip Kerr writes on the struggles of the Indian learening company Byju's. "Byju's is effectively 'worth zero', according to the founder, Byju Raveendran. Even before the World Cup, the company was on a losing streak, as financing dried up, and the bubble it had built was no longer sustainable. Key investors pulled out, and it was accused of ''toxic' targeting of low-income families, high-pressure sales, misleading advertising, and exacerbating existing educational inequalities'." Of course, the company's absurb valuation couldn't have helped. "It is a figure significantly greater than the entire Indian national budget for school and higher education." I'm sure Cory Doctorow would have a word for it, but to me it's just another example of the toxic influence of VC financing.

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Jason Gulya on Substack
Jason Gulya, Substack, The AI Edventure, 2024/11/19

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Jason Gulya launches a four-line post on Substack, but it's the wide-ranging discussion that follows that's of interest. Hulya describes what he considers a "paradox": "To use AI as an effective learning tool, learners need to check the outputs. To check the outputs, learners need to already have some expertise on the topic." But of course, it's not zero-sum. It's an iteration back and forth that gradually grows your knowledge. The comments that follow capture the wide span of opinions instructors have on the topic. Of course, to evaluate the comments, you need to check them. But to check them...

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Twitter is dead. Long live BlueSky.
Ian Dunt, Striking 13, 2024/11/19

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More on the mass migration to Bluesky. This note hits right for me: "The entire notion of paying for prominence, which Musk unleashed with his blue tick policy, is obviously antithetical to the experience of being on a social media site.... It means the content you see is based not on how interesting, funny or informative it is, but on how much someone is willing to pay to force it on you. It replaces editorial with advertising." 

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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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