OLDaily

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

Hack this course: Digital pedagogy rewilded
Eamon Costello, 2025/01/10

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I do like the idea of rewilding. "We're introduced to the concept of rewilding through ecology and conservation. As a term, rewilding feels something like a classic proverb - simple to grasp, yet simultaneously rich enough to sustain reflection and lengthy conversation." This course (if it can be called that, really) wants you to "incorporate rewilding practices into your daily mode of existence." I'm less a fan of 'digital education on paper' - to me, rewilding isn't the same as regression. Using paper isn't conservation. The same with 'storytelling' To rewild - to me - isn't the same as reverting to some previous order. It's about moving beyond order. But hey, enjoy this course for what it is. Via Graham Attwell.

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A First Introduction to Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Christopher Amato, arXiv, 2025/01/10

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This is another one of those 'introductions' that is pretty technical for the average reader (including myself) but will reward the effort taken. Decentralized Training and Execution (DTE) is an AI approach where "there is no centralized controller, so the agent must choose actions on its own. In this case, agents only ever observe their own information (actions and observations) and don't observe other agent actions or observations.... DTE is used in scenarios where centralized information is unavailable or scalability is critical." We can see the practical applications almost instantly. For example, David Wiley points to this article in which decentralized agents are used to reduce bias; "each agent provides responses that reflect its assigned cultural persona and task requirements, which are then synthesized by the Multiplex Agent."

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Transfer Learning 101
Himanshu Dubey, Notion, 2025/01/10

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This article gets a bit technical for a 101 but readers may appreciate the way it progresses from the architectural description to mathematical description to that involving Baysean probabilities. Transfer learning "is a machine learning method where a model developed for a first task is reused as the starting point for a model on a second task. It's worth noting that this concept goes against the view prevalent in some educational theories based on 'content knowledge' that each knowledge is a separate free-standing domain and there are aren't concepts (like, say, critical thinking) that can 'transfer' from one domain to the other.

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Agents
Chip Huyen, 2025/01/10

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Good comprehensive overview of agents. An agent is "anything that can perceive its environment and act upon that environment." These are the next big thing to hit the world of artificial intelligence. The article is chock-full of interest nuggests. Like this: "Planning, at its core, is a search problem. You search among different paths towards the goal, predict the outcome (reward) of each path, and pick the path with the most promising outcome." 

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States Should Drop Accreditation Requirements for New Colleges
Preston Cooper, American Enterprise Institute, 2025/01/10

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Accreditation is a big deal to American Universities (and at least one Canadian one). An unaccredited university does not have access to the same federal funding opportunities. This is viewed in some circles as unfair, and in this report the American Enterprise Institute recommends that "states should drop accreditation requirements for new and existing colleges that otherwise satisfy the conditions for state authorization." The thing is, whether other entities - including those around the world - aren't really concerned about state requirements. The accreditation board rulings are legitimate not simply because the says they are, but because they properly assess whether a school's degrees are worth the paper they're printed on. Remove the accreditation and the degree will not be recognized beyond the state where it was issued. Still, if implemented nationally, such a measure would undercut the value proposition of most American educational institutions, and create a crisis in the sector overnight. Via HESA's Friday Fifteen.

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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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