OLDaily

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

Preservice Teacher Training: Exploring the Potential of a Telepresence Robot
Marc Basque, et al., anadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2025/01/16

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We may all remember the digital Sheldon, but would it actually work in practice? This article studies whether a telepresence robot would be effective in a teaching setting. "The aim was to analyze students' perceptions of their teaching experience with a robot, to verify whether it would be possible to interact with students during the experience, and to determine the advantages and challenges of this teaching method." Published in French, but these days easily translated into English.

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View of Effects of Robotic Coding on Computational Thinking Skills of Secondary School Students
Serhat Altıok, Memet Üçgül, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2025/01/16

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Participants in this study used the Lego Mindstorms EV3 Education robots to develop skills in computational thinking. We already know educational robotics is recognized is "an effective tool for enhancing students' computational thinking skills... because students must consider the robot design and behaviour programming that will best interact with the physical world within the context of a given situation or problem." This study measured the students' own perceptions of their abilities.

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Improving Student Exam Results with ProfBot: An Individualized Approach to AI Tutoring
TeachOnline, 2025/01/16

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The demo just stalled when I tried it out (that can happen when you build on Vercel) but this app is what we'll be seeing more and more of over the next year, for better or worse. "ProfBot is an AI-powered chatbot that helps university students become better learners by providing personalized feedback in real-time." I'm not sure what the business model is - it's currently "available free of charge for all educators to use..." and "is designed to be aligned with college and university institutional policies on ethics, privacy and other GenAI concerns."

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Gamification: Enhancing Constructivist Skills through Line-Following Robots
Ridho Dedy Arief Budiman, et al., International Journal of Online and Biomedical Engineering, 2025/01/16

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When I was working at Texas Instruments in Austin some 45 years ago the company had 'line-following robots' deployed to deliver the mail. A similar technology is being employed her to study gamification in learning. It might not seem significant, but I link to it to point to what will probably be the growing importance of robotics in learning - not as 'robot teachers', but as tools that can be created and used by students to develop a more meaningful, and as the article (19 page PDF) suggests, constructivist form of learning. 

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Octopus is now delivering records via Publications Router
Steve Byford, JISC, 2025/01/16

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This is interesting, but only in the sense of watching rich people play with their expensive toys sort of way. "Full-text publications from Octopus, the innovative platform for scholarly research, are now being deposited automatically into UK repositories via a live feed into Jisc's Publications Router." Great, right? Even better, "everything from Octopus is made available under a CC BY licence with no embargo." The problem is with the Publications Router. Unless I've missed something important, people like me and you can't use it. "Publications Router gathers information from content providers such as publishers and passes it on to institutions to help them capture their research articles onto their systems, such as their repositories or CRISs. The service is open to Jisc member institutions with compatible systems." No soup for you! 

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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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