OLDaily

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

Links to Text Fragments
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2025/01/20

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I saw Matthias Melcher do this with one of my posts the other day and now we have Alan Levine writing a post about it. The idea is that you can make a link that highlights a bit of text in a post by using the strin g '#:~:text=' after the URL and before the text you want to highlight. "There is much much more you can do with Text Fragments as spelled out in the MDN docs," writes Levine.

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Sopala: An Innovative Model for K-12 Education
Dan McGuire, Robert Murphy, Sadik Shahadu, Peter K. Amoabil, Maxwell Beganim, Musah Fuseini, Stephane Coillet-Matillon, Steve Miley, The AI + Open Education Initiative, 2025/01/20

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I totally agree with this: "The question is not whether OER or Open Education is sustainable; the question is whether educational progress can be sustained. If the goal is to sustain education, digital OER makes that much more feasible because it is affordable and can be efficiently delivered and accessed." The context is this description of Sopala, a learning model teachers from the rural areas of Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa have joined. "Sopala focuses on three key areas: 1) increasing teacher skills and professionalism with AI-enhanced OER training courses; 2) real-time access to student learning data through the delivery of OER digital assessments; and 3) translating OER educational materials aligned to standards using AI." See more at the Sopala Moodlecloud site.

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AI Meets Academia: What Faculty Think
Digital Education Council, 2025/01/20

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This is a slide presentation reporting on results from a survey of 1,681 responses from faculty members of 52 participating institutions across 28 countries. That's a good number but we don't know how representative it is, as we don't know how respondents were selected. Still, the argument is offered here that, on balance, faculty see more advantages than disadvantages in the use of AI in higher education (and a suggestion that most of them are already using it, which frankly wouldn't actually surprise me).

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The Frustrating Quest to Define AGI
Charles Fadel, Center for Curriculum Redesign, 2025/01/20

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This is a fun paper surveying a number of recent attempts to define artificial general intelligence (AGI). I think it's worth keeping this in perspective. What would we ask of our students to conclude that they possess 'general intelligence'? Certainly not that they "write Pulitzer-caliber books, fiction and nonfiction... write Oscar-caliber screenplays (or) come up with paradigm-shifting, Nobel-caliber scientific discoveries," as one definition of AGI requires. In fact, I think we'd find our requirements are a lot lower than we think - and that the challenge today isn't one of deeper intelligence, but of different types of intelligence. Related: does present-day AI actually reason?

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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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