OLDaily

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

Philosophy Department Survival Strategies: The Ontarian Approach
Justin Weinberg, Eric Wilkinson, Daily Nous, 2025/03/11

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"The percentage of college graduates who are majors in philosophy is about five and half times higher in Canada than in the United States," writes Justin Weinberg. One factor, he writes, "might be the success philosophers have had in implementing philosophy courses in Ontario high schools." In this article, Eric Wilkinson describes the program and its possible effect. I went through the Ontario system long before any such course and only learned of the existence of philosophy when it was offered as a humanities course instead of English, which was full. But even if I wasn't aware of philosophy, I was certainly ready for it. And so I'm thinking wider factors may be at work here. I grew up in an atmosphere where questioning is encouraged, creativity is expected, and reason is the norm. That plus a healthy dose of science fiction prepared me to face the big questions of our time.

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J, Just-in-Time Teaching: A practical guide for college faculty
B. Jean Mandernach, eLearn Magazine, 2025/03/11

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I like the idea of just-in-time teaching but I don't think that's really what's being described here. In this more formal model what we have is a student taking a pre-test on the day's content and then being taught what they don't know. Almost as an afterthought, part of the plan encourages active learning. But I'm not really seeing how it counts as just-in-time when the topic has been decided well ahead of time. P.S. I don't know what the stand-along 'J' in the headline means; I'm just following my long-standing practice of using the article headline for my headline.

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'Uber for nurses' exposes 86k+ medical records, PII in open S3 bucket for months
Jessica Lyons, The Register, 2025/03/11

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A couple of weeks ago I linked to a story about an 'uber for nurses'. Today we have the inevitable result of putting essential public services into an unregulated app marketplace: "More than 86,000 records containing nurses' medical records, facial images, ID documents and more sensitive info linked to health tech company ESHYFT was left sitting in a wide-open S3 bucket for months."

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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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