Saide Current Awareness
16 April 2024

 

Distance Education

  • A personal history: 18. Developing the first online programs at UBC – and in Mexico Source: Online Learning and Distance Education Resources .Tony Bates reflects on his experience at UBC from 1995 and 2003 and how he started developing individual online courses (see previous post) and in this post, his experience in developing a fully online degree program.
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  • Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns and distance education in Australia: Positive experiences of migrant/refugee parents and future directions Source: The Australian Educational Researcher This paper presents findings from a study investigating the engagement of migrant and refugee parents in supporting the distance education of their children amidst the Covid-19 lockdowns in Australia. While existing research has extensively addressed challenges within online education during the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a dearth of research examining the opportunities afforded to migrant and refugee parents. In pursuit of this, 20 migrant and refugee parents participated in individual interviews as part of the data collection process. The transcribed data underwent thematic analysis, drawing on the frameworks proposed by, to scrutinise how the imposed structure of lockdowns has informed parents’ educational and social opportunities. 
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  • A Proposal for Policy Framework and Emergency Action Plan after Covid-19 for Distance Education Practices in Higher Education Source: Asian Journal Of Education This study aimed to investigate distance education practices in higher education during the pandemic, focusingon lived experiences, and proposinga policy decision framework for future distance education  in  similar  conditions.  Additionally,  the  study  aimed  to  establish  a  design  framework  for  an Emergency  Action  Plan  for  similar  crisis  periods. 

 

 Education: South Africa

 

Language, Literacies and Research Writing

  • Large Language Models are as persuasive as humans, but why? About the cognitive effort and moral-emotional  language of LLM arguments. Source: Arvix  Large Language Models (LLMs) are already as persuasive as humans. However, we know very little about why. This paper investigates the persuasion strategies of LLMs, comparing them with human-generated arguments. Using a dataset of 1,251 participants in an experiment, we analyze the persuasion strategies of LLM-generated and human-generated arguments using measures of cognitive effort (lexical and grammatical complexity) and moral-emotional language (sentiment and moral analysis). The study reveals that LLMs produce arguments that require higher cognitive effort, exhibiting more complex grammatical and lexical structures than human counterparts. Additionally, LLMs demonstrate a significant propensity to engage more deeply with moral language, utilizing both positive and negative moral foundations more frequently than humans.
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  • In the battle of books vs videos, there is a clear winner for literacy Source:TES Magazine  New research compares the vocabulary in books and programmes aimed at young people – and we should heed its findings, says Alex Quigley
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  • Nine out of 10 kids are not developmentally on track in literacy and numeracy – study of 8 African countries Source: The Conversation "Children in sub-Saharan Africa have the highest risk globally of experiencing delays in their development. There are several reasons for this, among them a lack of stimulation. Too many parents and caregivers are not reading to, playing with or encouraging their young children to learn, or providing learning aids such as books and toys. This may explain why the region has the lowest proportion of children who are developmentally on track when it comes to literacy and numeracy." writes University ofGhana lecturer, Pearl S Kyei
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  • Morphology Instruction Source: Literacy through Language A compendium of resources on the Professional Learning around the Science of Reading, Morphology and Orthography instruction.
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  • Ekphrastic Poems: How to Use Language Arts to Hone Visual Literacy Skills Source: The Art of Education A great work of art can greatly impact the viewer. When this impact is challenging to put into words, poetry can be a powerful tool! Poetry is an organic way for all students to capture thoughts and feelings with a high level of success. One lesser-known form of poetry is ekphrasis, Greek for description. Ekphrasis is a literary tradition describing and commenting on a work of art and it most commonly comes in the form of poetry. The vivid detail in ekphrastic poems can help the reader “read” the artwork in a new way. 

 

Open Access, Open Education and Open Educational Resources

  • Khamseen: Islamic Art History Source: University of Edinburgh A free and open-access online platform of digital resources to aid the teaching of Islamic art, architecture, and visual culture. Khamseen has partnered with the Edinburgh University Library to produce a series of presentations on a selection of Islamic manuscripts and rare books held in its Heritage Collections. This collection of talks will grow over time, beginning first with presentations of Rashid al-Din’s famous Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh and a miniature Qur’an printed in Glasgow.
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  • Online Focus Group Demonstration Source: University of Edinburgh This video is an example of a focus group being run online. It shows the facilitator’s notes before and after the focus group, and a recording of the focus group itself. You can also download the focus group schedule and transcript from the attached files.
    The aim of this video is to help demystify the focus group process for those who haven’t conducted one before. This focus group, while a ‘mock’ focus group for teaching purposes, was run like a real abbreviated focus group. 

 

Post Schooling

  • Subject rankings: Africa performs in field of medicine Source: University World News Universities in South Africa and Egypt emerged as the best places to study in Africa in the five broad academic fields including arts and humanities, engineering and technology, life sciences and medicine, natural sciences, and social sciences and management, according to the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2024 that were released on April 10.
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  • What rankings ignore about African-based medical education Source: University World News A blog post by Amy Paterson, a South African medical doctor. Currently, she is a DPhil candidate at the Pandemic Sciences Institute, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. She is also an LSE HE Blog Fellow. This blog was first published in the LSE Higher Education Blog and has been re-published with permission from the blog’s editors.
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  • More effort needed to decolonise the exchange experience Source: University World News  In March, the University of Botswana posted on its website that it will be receiving 17 teacher students and three staff members from the University of Cincinnati in the United States. The student teachers and academic staff will be part of an exchange programme to learn about Botswana’s education system. This is one of many similar initiatives meant to spearhead the internationalisation agenda in Southern Africa. Other recent exchange programmes in the region include the Uukumwe Project, launched by the Pacific Lutheran University in the US last year, and various programmes that take place annually organised by organisations such as Council on International Educational Exchange, or CIEE. 
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  • University is first to offer Islamic studies as a major Source: University World News The University of the Western Cape (UWC) said on Wednesday it had become the first university in the country to offer Islamic studies as a major subject for undergraduate students, writes Kim Swartz for Times Live.
    Head of department Professor Ignatius Swart said Swart said though modules in Islamic studies are offered at several higher education institutions around the country, students could not take the subject as a major towards an undergraduate programme. UWC is the only university in south and Southern Africa to offer Islamic studies as a major in the BA degree.

 

Skills and Employment 

  • South Africa is short of academic statisticians: why and what can be done Source: The Conversation A group of academic statisticians from South African universities  have compiled a discussion paper to address the issue of academic statisticians needed to train the much-needed skilled analysts. 
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  • African governments urged to re-examine positions on migration Source: University World News African governments have been urged to re-examine their positions on the migration of highly skilled workers from the continent beyond the narrow focus on financial remittances. The call was made by the African Union (AU) and the International Organization for Migration (UN Migration) in the second edition of the African migration report, ‘Connecting the threads: Linking policy, practice and the welfare of the African migrant’, which was launched in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Geneva, Switzerland, recently.

 

Teaching and Learning: Local and Global

  • South African study shows the power of sharing daily experiences for teachers to learn how to include all learners Source: The Conversation Globally, more than 258 million children and young people between the ages of 6 and 17 are not in school. In South Africa, the figure stands at 232,000 for children aged between 7 and 17. The main reasons they’re not attending school are related to the quality of education, financial constraints, disability and child or teenage pregnancy.The notion of inclusive education focuses on ensuring that all children attend school and receive a good education. The first is a challenge for governments. The second is a challenge for teachers – but they don’t often get the support they need. Wacango Kimani, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Centre for Learning, Teaching and Development, explains how professional learning communities could hold the key to supporting teachers in their efforts to be inclusive educators.
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  • The Courage to Piece Back the Broken Paradox in Higher Education: Our Inner Work Can Change the Outer World Source: Faculty Focus  In my (re)reading of Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (1997) and its iterations, it becomes more obvious to me that Parker is a paradox savant.  “What makes a Rosa Parks?…What makes a Nelson Mandela? What makes these people is their capacity to take the inner life seriously, and to tap the sources of power that lie within, that are just as essential as external forces in transforming our institutions and society for the better” (Parker Palmer, 2015). In the work that educators do each day, how do we speak up and take action for what’s right in higher education? For Palmer, the answer lies in our interior and outer landscapes that are complementary opposite. That is, while there is an interplay between the two, it is the inner life, our identity, and integrity that propels us to find our voice, elevate good ideas, and call out organizational barriers that impede shared goals.   
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  • [http://Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Harnessing Assignment Menus for Student Choice in Learning]Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Harnessing Assignment Menus for Student Choice in Learning Source: Faculty Focus Imagine if you went into a shoe store and every pair of shoes were the same color, the same style, the same price, and same brand. It would be uncomfortable to see everyone walking around wearing the same shoes. It would also be frustrating for the individuals wearing the shoes because not all shoes fit the same. Our multitude of choices when it comes to shoe-shopping allows everyone to differentiate based on their foot type, which in turn, allows them to purchase shoes that fit their budget and needs. This same analogy applies to the learning which takes place in the classroom. Each learner brings unique learning characteristics to the classroom with a preference on how they learn the content. Just like having a choice when buying shoes, educators can provide choices in learning course content with assignment menus (Danley & Williams, 2020). 
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  • The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence Source: First Monday  The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can and should be built, researchers are working to create “safe AGI” that is “beneficial for all of humanity.” We argue that, unlike systems with specific applications which can be evaluated following standard engineering principles, undefined systems like “AGI” cannot be appropriately tested for safety. Why, then, is building AGI often framed as an unquestioned goal in the field of AI? In this paper, we argue that the normative framework that motivates much of this goal is rooted in the Anglo-American eugenics tradition of the twentieth century. 

 

Technology-Enhanced Learning

  • AI and HE around the world – Evolution and revolution? Source: University World News It has been said that journalists write the first draft of history. This is the first draft of the history of generative AI as it intersects with higher education, according to the writers of University World News. Many of these writers are leading academics across the world, giving this ‘first draft’ greater depth.
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  • Systematic Reviews of Research on Online Learning: An Introductory Look and Review  Source: Online Learning In this introduction to the special issue on systematic reviews of research on online learning, we introduce the need for systematic reviews on online learning. Utilizing a three-tier lens focusing on systems, pedagogical, and people levels, we have selected nine articles for this issue. At the systems level, there are two articles that focus on research trends during COVID-19, and features of high-quality online learning.  
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  • Beyond Tinkering: Why Colleges Need to Start Strategizing for the Age of AI Source: Higher Education Digest  Jason Gulya, Professor of English and AI-Powered Communication at Berkeley College.  writes about the need to go beyond "focusing on single, isolated experiments with AI" and proposes two specific steps for colleges to move forward. "Step #1 is to create a pipeline for experimentation. Step #2 is to incorporate students deeply in the process."
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  • AI and higher education: scenes from ASU-GSV Source: Substack Bryan Alexander reflects on his recent attendance at the  Global Silicon Valley (GSV) and Arizona State University (ASU) summit
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  • Generative AI in Education: Another Mindless Mistake? Source: EducationNext Benjamin Riley, founder of Cognitive Resonance, a new venture dedicated to improving understanding of human cognition and generative AI makes an argument to foster a broader understanding of the science of how our minds work, 'and by comparing and contrasting this science with the technology underlying generative AI, we can make better decisions about how to use this new tool—or whether to use it all.'

 


Decolonising Digital Education: Lessons from Learners - joint event: LIDC/CODE/BLE Webinar Event: 17 April 2024