Colin Simpson’s ed tech reads of the week

University Administrators Views on the Outsourcing of Online Learning from Evan Silberman (Thesis)

Adding to the excellent CMM feature story from Gilmore and Nguyen about On-line Programme Managers (OPMs), businesses that partner with universities to deliver online courses, comes this doctoral thesis from a doctoral student at NYU. Silberman explores these partnerships through a lens rarely used in HE research, that of institutional management.  He explores the rationales behind these partnership, the impact on innovation and the trust relationships between the organisations in these partnerships. The growth of OPMs is one of the most significant trends in learning and teaching in Higher Ed today.

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What do we mean when we talk about scale? Towards a definition of ‘at scale’ in higher education – Uni of Sydney Co-Design Research Group

Most research into learning and teaching in Higher Ed tends to focus on the micro-level, centred around examining the impact of local interventions in technology and teaching practice. Most of the significant change however needs to occur at the macro-level to be sustainable – what is generally referred to in institutions as “at scale”. This post from Peter Bryant at Uni Sydney describes how this works and why thinking at scale is important, regardless of how it may be seen.

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Are We in the Upside Down? Course Hero, Lumen Learning, and All Kinds of Strange Things are Afoot in Ed-Tech from Edu Geek Journal

Open Educational Resources (OER) have long been considered of the bright spots of the education internet – rich, free, learning and teaching resources shared for the common good. Lumen Learning has been one organisation of many providing a rich catalogue of OERs. Hosting material on-line costs money and recently users have noticed that many Lumen Learning OERS are now being hosted on the controversial commercial service Course Hero. This article explains why this is happening and what the larger implications are for open resources.

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The tricky questions for assessment to answer from The Ed Techie

The shift to on-line exams at scale in recent years has led to much discussion about the nature of high stakes summative assessment in Higher Ed. Are they authentic enough, how do we deal with cheating as AI writing tools and resource “sharing” services become more prevalent and how do we ensure that learners are really demonstrating and applying what they know? This thoughtful piece from Martin Weller takes us through these thorny questions and offers some ideas for ways forward.

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Learning, testing and developing Adaptive Expertise: our learning design – Webinar Thurs 30/6 12pm AEST

Drs Lis Conde and Sheryl Maher of the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Learning present their fascinating recent work in using Adaptive Expertise to develop new capabilities in online learning for educational leaders.

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Colin Simpson has worked in education technology, teaching, learning design and academic development in the tertiary sector since 2003 and is employed by Monash University’s Education Innovation team. He is also one of the leaders of the TELedvisors Network. For more from Colin, follow him on Twitter @gamerlearner