career development

“For college students—and for higher ed itself—AI is a required course” [Merisotis] + other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems

On 08/03/2024, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, accessibility / UDL, adjunct faculty, apprenticeships, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), bots, career development, colleges, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, copyright/ownership/NFTs, education, education technology, emerging technologies, faculty, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, IT in HE, K-12 related, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, real-world assignments, reinvent, skills, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, teaching online, technologies for your home, technology (general), tools, trends, United States, universities, vendors, vision/possibilities, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

For college students—and for higher ed itself—AI is a required course — from forbes.com by Jamie Merisotis

Some of the nation’s biggest tech companies have announced efforts to reskill people to avoid job losses caused by artificial intelligence, even as they work to perfect the technology that could eliminate millions of those jobs.

It’s fair to ask, however: What should college students and prospective students, weighing their choices and possible time and financial expenses, think of this?

The news this spring was encouraging for people seeking to reinvent their careers to grab middle-class jobs and a shot at economic security.

Addressing Special Education Needs With Custom AI Solutions — from teachthought.com
AI can offer many opportunities to create more inclusive and effective learning experiences for students with diverse learning profiles.

For too long, students with learning disabilities have struggled to navigate a traditional education system that often fails to meet their unique needs. But what if technology could help bridge the gap, offering personalized support and unlocking the full potential of every learner?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a powerful ally in special education, offering many opportunities to create more inclusive and effective learning experiences for students with diverse learning profiles.

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11 Summer AI Developments Important to Educators — from stefanbauschard.substack.com by Stefan Bauschard
Equity demands that we help students prepare to thrive in an AI-World

*SearchGPT
*Smaller & on-device (phones, glasses) AI models
*AI TAs
*Access barriers decline, equity barriers grow
*Claude Artifacts and Projects
*Agents, and Agent Teams of a million+
*Humanoid robots & self-driving cars
*AI Curricular integration
*Huge video and video-segmentation gains
*Writing Detectors — The final blow
*AI Unemployment, Student AI anxiety, and forward-thinking approaches
*Alternative assessments

Academic Fracking: When Publishers Sell Scholars Work to AI — from aiedusimplified.substack.com by Lance Eaton
Further discussion of publisher practices selling scholars’ work to AI companies

Last week, I explored AI and academic publishing in response to an article that came out a few weeks ago about a deal Taylor & Francis made to sell their books to Microsoft and one other AI company (unnamed) for a boatload of money.

Since then, two more pieces have been widely shared including this piece from Inside Higher Ed by Kathryn Palmer (and to which I was interviewed and mentioned in) and this piece from Chronicle of Higher Ed by Christa Dutton. Both pieces try to cover the different sides talking to authors, scanning the commentary online, finding some experts to consult and talking to the publishers. It’s one of those things that can feel like really important and also probably only to a very small amount of folks that find themselves thinking about academic publishing, scholarly communication, and generative AI.

At the Crossroads of Innovation: Embracing AI to Foster Deep Learning in the College Classroom — from er.educause.edu by Dan Sarofian-Butin
AI is here to stay. How can we, as educators, accept this change and use it to help our students learn?

The Way Forward
So now what?

In one respect, we already have a partial answer. Over the last thirty years, there has been a dramatic shift from a teaching-centered to a learning-centered education model. High-impact practices, such as service learning, undergraduate research, and living-learning communities, are common and embraced because they help students see the real-world connections of what they are learning and make learning personal.11

Therefore, I believe we must double down on a learning-centered model in the age of AI.

The first step is to fully and enthusiastically embrace AI.
…
The second step is to find the “jagged technological frontier” of using AI in the college classroom.

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Futures Thinking in Education — from gettingsmart.com by Getting Smart Staff

Key Points

Educators should leverage these tools to prepare for rapid changes driven by technology, climate, and social dynamics.
Cultivating empathy for future generations can help educators design more impactful and forward-thinking educational practices.

Gig Work, College Skills [Fain]

On 08/01/2024, in apprenticeships, business, career development, collaboration, colleges, community colleges, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, higher education, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, liberal arts, skills, student-related, teaching & learning, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

Gig Work, College Skills — from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain
New partnership lets college students use classroom learning for freelance roles.

Bringing Freelancing to College Education
A new partnership between Podium Education, an experiential learning company, and the freelance platform Upwork aims to let more students use the skills they’ve learned in class—and to make money now for doing so.

The Big Idea: The partnership, announced today, is an extension of the work that Podium already does with more than 70 universities. Through their Global Career Accelerator, students learn marketing, data analytics, or coding skills for credit and get the chance to work on a specific project with companies like Intel and the nonprofit charity: water. With the new partnership, students who complete the coursework will get customized access to and onboarding with Upwork, as well as coaching on how to be successful in freelancing.

Building Durable Skills into Middle School Career Exploration — from edmentum.com

As the needs of the modern workforce evolve at an unprecedented rate, durable, or “soft,” skills are often eclipsing demand for sought-after technical skills in high-demand jobs across industry sectors, geography, and educational level.

Through research, collaboration, and feedback from more than 800 educators, workforce professionals, industry leaders, and policymakers, America Succeeds—a leading educational policy and advocacy group—has developed Durable Skills and the Durable Skills Advantage Framework to provide a common language for the most in-demand durable skills. With 85% of career success being dependent on durable skills, this framework bridges the gap between the skills students are taught in school and evolving workforce needs.

On a somewhat related note, also see:

Green Workforce Connect and Building Green Pathways with Cynthia Finley — from gettingsmart.com by Mason Pashia

Over the last few years, we’ve been covering New Pathways, which we think of as a framework for school leaders and community members to create supports and systems that set students up for success in what’s next. This might be career exploration, client-connected projects, internships, or entrepreneurial experiences.

But what it really comes down to is connecting learners to real-world experiences and people and helping them articulate the skills that they gain in the process. Along the way, we began to talk a lot about green jobs. Many of the pre-existing pathways in secondary schools point towards CTE programs and trades, which are more in demand than they’ve been in decades.

This coincides with a pivotal moment in the arc of infrastructure redesign and development, one that heavily emphasizes clean energy trajectories and transferable skills. Many of these jobs we refer to as green pathways or requiring some of these green skills.

One leading organization in this space is the Interstate Renewable Energy Council or IREC. I got to sit down with Cynthia Finley, the Vice President of Workforce Strategy at IREC to talk about green pathways and what IREC is doing to increase awareness and exposure of green jobs and skills.

More people with disabilities are joining the U.S. workforce. Here’s why — and where they’re working. [Borden]

On 07/26/2024, in Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), business, career development, change, corporate / business world, United States, workplace, by Daniel Christian

More people with disabilities are joining the U.S. workforce. Here’s why — and where they’re working. — from linkedin.com by Taylor Borden

“People with disabilities have been wanting to work, eager to work, capable of work,” he explained. “But it wasn’t until this huge change in the way we approached work that the opportunities presented themselves,” he continued.

People with disabilities have been entering the U.S. workforce at record levels over the past three years, the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows. A recent analysis from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team suggests an increase in more amenable company policies and working accommodations contributes to this trend.

In May 2024, more than half (54.3%) of LinkedIn members who self-identified as having a disability applied for remote positions. What’s more? Since March 2021, members with disabilities have consistently accounted for a higher share of job applications to remote positions than members who report no disabilities.

Despite the opportunities created by the ADA — and the rise of remote work — many people with disabilities still face barriers in the workforce. LinkedIn’s data scientists and editors parsed the data to identify the most common roles for workers with disabilities, how those with disabilities are progressing in their careers and how employers can continue to support more inclusive hiring.

A $100,000 sticker price at Vanderbilt U! + other items re: the higher education learning ecosystem

On 07/23/2024, in adult learning, business side of he, career development, colleges, community colleges, cost of getting a degree, dangers of the status quo, education reform, higher education, learning ecosystem, neurodivergent/special needs, parents/guardians, pathways, student-related, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

The Progressive Case for Reforming Higher Ed — from insidehighered.com by Michael D. Smith
Customized, digital education offers a path for progressive reform, Michael D. Smith writes.

That’s the bad news. But there’s good news, too. New digital technologies have arrived during the past decade for delivering instruction and evaluating individual student learning at scale. If we embrace them, they can make real reform possible and allow us to imagine a fairer, more accessible system of higher education—one that will enable us to better serve the many students who are left out of our existing scarcity-based model.
…
I think it should be to reform our educational system in ways that will benefit society. And with the advent of new digital technologies, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do just that. If we embrace those technologies now, we can democratize access to the knowledge that students from all socioeconomic backgrounds need to discover and develop their talents, and we can make it possible for them to earn the credentials they need to signal their knowledge to employers—all so that they can use their talents to make a difference in the world.

But in the years ahead, thanks to these new technologies, the broader ecosystem that these institutions exist in is going to expand and change dramatically. Gradually, elite residential colleges and universities will lose their dominant place in that ecosystem, and customized digital learning will first disrupt and then come to dominate a new system of higher education—one that reaches more people, and generates greater benefits for society, than ever before.

Enrollment woes hit both private and public colleges in 2023, S&P reports — from highereddive.com by Ben Unglesbee
Analysts with the ratings agency described a “tough year” in the higher ed world as revenue pressures ran into rising costs.

Dive Brief:

Fiscal 2023 was a “tough year” for private nonprofit colleges amid a “long trend of weakening demand,” S&P Global Ratings said in a Tuesday report.
Median full-time equivalent enrollment at private nonprofits fell 0.8% year over year in fiscal 2023, while retention rates hit a five-year low of 82.4%, according to S&P’s analysis. Given demand pressures and rising costs, institutions in the private nonprofit sector saw five times more credit downgrades than upgrades during the fiscal year.
In a separate report on public colleges, S&P analysts said the recently ended fiscal year also tested the financial resilience of those institutions, with median full-time equivalent enrollment falling 0.7% for the sector.

We have to remember all of this as we design more inclusive pathways to promising opportunities. A good job can often include flexible or hybrid working options, but a good job also includes some softer aspects connected to safety, wellbeing, creativity, growth, and the freedom to make choices and make decisions.

Dr. Michelle R. Weise in How Do You Define a Good Job?

President Joe Biden canceled an additional $1.2 billion in student debt for public servants on Thursday, the latest effort to provide loan relief and deliver on one of his signature initiatives. The assistance will affect 35,000 public service workers enrolled in the government’s loan forgiveness program, including nurses, firefighters and teachers. The Education Department has now forgiven $168.5 billion in student debt for 4.76 million Americans. Biden’s more ambitious plan to help Americans increasingly buried for decades under massive educational debt, a $400 billion plan for broad student debt relief, was blocked by the US Supreme Court.

— from Bloomberg.com’s Evening Briefing

Sticker shock: A look at the complicated world of tuition pricing — from highereddive.com by Ben Unglesbee
Despite attention to lofty sticker costs, the practice of discounting has reached new highs, confusing students and straining revenue for institutions.

This spring, the price of college rode the news cycle again as headlines featured an eye-popping $100,000 in attendance costs at Vanderbilt University.
…
The practice of marking down tuition sticker prices is decades old and comes with few benefits at this point, many experts say. It can mislead students and muddy the conversation around the value of a college education, while for institutions tuition discounting can wear on revenue and finances in a competitive environment.
…
At the same time, tuition discounting among private nonprofits hit a new high of 56.1% in 2023-24.

“The number that bothers me the most is the increasing costs for the low-income kids,” Levine said. “If you’re making $50,000 or under, you still have to come up with almost $20,000, which is essentially impossible.”

AI-assisted job fraud is spiking — from thedeepview.co by Ian Krietzberg

A recent report published by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) found that data from 2023 shows “an environment where bad actors are more effective, efficient and successful in launching attacks. The result is fewer victims (or at least fewer victim reports), but the impact on individuals and businesses is arguably more damaging.”

One of these attacks involves fake job postings.

The details: The ITRC said that victim reports of job and employment scams spiked some 118% in 2023. These scams were primarily carried out through LinkedIn and other job search platforms.

- The bad actors here would either create fake (but professional-looking) job postings, profiles and websites or impersonate legitimate companies, all with the hopes of landing victims to move onto the interview process.
- These actors would then move the conversation onto a third-party messaging platform, and ask for identity verification information (driver’s licenses, social security numbers, direct deposit information, etc.).

Hypernatural — AI videos you can actually use. — via Jeremy Caplan’s Wonder Tools

Hypernatural is an AI video platform that makes it easy to create beautiful, ready-to share videos from anything. Stop settling for glitchy 3s generated videos and boring stock footage. Turn your ideas, scripts, podcasts and more into incredible short-form videos in minutes.

GPT-4o mini: advancing cost-efficient intelligence — from openai.com
Introducing our most cost-efficient small model

OpenAI is committed to making intelligence as broadly accessible as possible. Today, we’re announcing GPT-4o mini, our most cost-efficient small model. We expect GPT-4o mini will significantly expand the range of applications built with AI by making intelligence much more affordable. GPT-4o mini scores 82% on MMLU and currently outperforms GPT-4¹ on chat preferences in LMSYS leaderboard(opens in a new window). It is priced at 15 cents per million input tokens and 60 cents per million output tokens, an order of magnitude more affordable than previous frontier models and more than 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo.

GPT-4o mini enables a broad range of tasks with its low cost and latency, such as applications that chain or parallelize multiple model calls (e.g., calling multiple APIs), pass a large volume of context to the model (e.g., full code base or conversation history), or interact with customers through fast, real-time text responses (e.g., customer support chatbots).

Also see what this means from Ben’s Bites, The Neuron, and as The Rundown AI asserts:

Why it matters: While it’s not GPT-5, the price and capabilities of this mini-release significantly lower the barrier to entry for AI integrations — and marks a massive leap over GPT 3.5 Turbo. With models getting cheaper, faster, and more intelligent with each release, the perfect storm for AI acceleration is forming.

Nvidia: More AI Waves Are Taking Shape — from seekingalpha.com by Eric Sprague

Summary

Nvidia Corporation is transitioning from a GPU designer to an AI factory builder.
AI spending will continue to grow in healthcare, government, and robotics.
CEO Jensen Huang says the AI robot industry could be bigger than the auto and consumer electronics industries combined.

Byte-Sized Courses: NVIDIA Offers Self-Paced Career Development in AI and Data Science — from blogs.nvidia.com by Andy Bui
Industry experts gather to share advice on starting a career in AI, highlighting technical training and certifications for career growth.

Students Speak Out: How to Make High Schools Places Where They Want to Learn — from the74million.org by Beth Fertig
Too many high school students complain that school is boring. Students share what makes school enjoyable.

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Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

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Solving chronic absenteeism involves tackling big structural problems like transportation and infrastructure. But we also have to make our schools places where young people want to learn. Too many teens, in particular, had negative feelings about school even before the pandemic. Yale researchers conducting a national survey of high school students found most teens spent their days “tired,” “stressed,” and “bored.” Fewer than 3 in 100 reported feeling interested while in school.

Decades of research prove that students learn more when they experience high levels of academic engagement and social belonging in school.

Students at all four schools experience internships, work-based learning and partnerships with community organizations, which they said make classwork feel more relevant.

Free Sites for Back to School [Restifo]

On 07/19/2024, in animation, art, career development, chemistry, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, collaboration, communications, content development, aggregation, repositories, creativity, data related items, design, digital audio, digital learning, digital video, education technology, educational games / serious games, Emotion, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, Google, graphics, history, ideas, K-12 related, languages and translation, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, legislatures / government / legal, mathematics, multimedia, music, new media literacies, online media, passions, pedagogy, platforms, play, productivity / tips and tricks, science, student teaching/teacher education, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, technologies for your home, tools, United States, vendors, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, web-based collaboration, writing, youth, by Daniel Christian

Free Sites for Back to School — from techlearning.com by Diana Restifo
Top free and freemium sites for learning

An internet search for free learning resources will likely return a long list that includes some useful sites amid a sea of not-really-free and not-very-useful sites.

To help teachers more easily find the best free and freemium sites they can use in their classrooms and curricula, I’ve curated a list that describes the top free/freemium sites for learning.

In some cases, Tech & Learning has reviewed the site in detail, and those links are included so readers can find out more about how to make the best use of the online materials. In all cases, the websites below provide valuable educational tools, lessons, and ideas, and are worth exploring further.

Two bonus postings here! 🙂

Where Is K-12 Enrollment Headed? Population Trends, by the Numbers — from edweek.org by Mark Lieberman
America is projected to have 3 million fewer K-12 students attending public school by 2031 than it did in 2013.
How to Kill Student Curiosity in 5 Steps (and What to Do Instead) — from edweek.org by Olivia Odileke
The unintentional missteps teachers and administrators are making
I’ve observed five major ways we’re unintentionally stifling curiosity and issue a call to action for educators, administrators, and policymakers to join the curiosity revolution:

How AI will change education [Woodbury], Introducing Eureka Labs [Karpathy] + numerous other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems

On 07/18/2024, in adjunct faculty, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, bots, career development, change, changing business models, colleges, community colleges, computer science, digital learning, education, education technology, emerging technologies, Europe, experimentation, faculty, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, generational differences, heutagogy, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, K-12 related, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, lifelong learning, Open AI, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, programming, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, tools, UK, United States, universities, vendors, writing, by Daniel Christian

Introducing Eureka Labs — “We are building a new kind of school that is AI native.” — by Andrej Karpathy, Previously Director of AI @ Tesla, founding team @ OpenAI

However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable. The teacher still designs the course materials, but they are supported, leveraged and scaled with an AI Teaching Assistant who is optimized to help guide the students through them. This Teacher + AI symbiosis could run an entire curriculum of courses on a common platform. If we are successful, it will be easy for anyone to learn anything, expanding education in both reach (a large number of people learning something) and extent (any one person learning a large amount of subjects, beyond what may be possible today unassisted).

?? Excited to share that I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs.
The announcement:

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We are Eureka Labs and we are building a new kind of school that is AI native.

How can we approach an ideal experience for learning something new? For example, in the case… pic.twitter.com/RHPkqdjB8R

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) July 16, 2024

After Tesla and OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy’s startup aims to apply AI assistants to education — from techcrunch.com by Rebecca Bellan

Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, is launching Eureka Labs, an “AI native” education platform. In tech speak, that usually means built from the ground up with AI at its core. And while Eureka Labs’ AI ambitions are lofty, the company is starting with a more traditional approach to teaching.

San Francisco-based Eureka Labs, which Karpathy registered as an LLC in Delaware on June 21, aims to leverage recent progress in generative AI to create AI teaching assistants that can guide students through course materials.

What does it mean for students to be AI-ready? — from timeshighereducation.com by David Joyner
Not everyone wants to be a computer scientist, a software engineer or a machine learning developer. We owe it to our students to prepare them with a full range of AI skills for the world they will graduate into, writes David Joyner

We owe it to our students to prepare them for this full range of AI skills, not merely the end points. The best way to fulfil this responsibility is to acknowledge and examine this new category of tools. More and more tools that students use daily – word processors, email, presentation software, development environments and more – have AI-based features. Practising with these tools is a valuable exercise for students, so we should not prohibit that behaviour. But at the same time, we do not have to just shrug our shoulders and accept however much AI assistance students feel like using.

Teachers say AI usage has surged since the school year started — from eschoolnews.com by Laura Ascione
Half of teachers report an increase in the use of AI and continue to seek professional learning

Fifty percent of educators reported an increase in AI usage, by both students and teachers, over the 2023–24 school year, according to The 2024 Educator AI Report: Perceptions, Practices, and Potential, from Imagine Learning, a digital curriculum solutions provider.

The report offers insight into how teachers’ perceptions of AI use in the classroom have evolved since the start of the 2023–24 school year.

OPINION: What teachers call AI cheating, leaders in the workforce might call progress — from hechingerreport.org by C. Edward Waston and Jose Antonio Bowen
Authors of a new guide explore what AI literacy might look like in a new era

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

But this very ease has teachers wondering how we can keep our students motivated to do the hard work when there are so many new shortcuts. Learning goals, curriculums, courses and the way we grade assignments will all need to be reevaluated.

The new realities of work also must be considered. A shift in employers’ job postings rewards those with AI skills. Many companies report already adopting generative AI tools or anticipate incorporating them into their workflow in the near future.

A core tension has emerged: Many teachers want to keep AI out of our classrooms, but also know that future workplaces may demand AI literacy.

What we call cheating, business could see as efficiency and progress.

It is increasingly likely that using AI will emerge as an essential skill for students, regardless of their career ambitions, and that action is required of educational institutions as a result.

Teaching Writing With AI Without Replacing Thinking: 4 Tips — from by Erik Ofgang
AI has a lot of potential for writing students, but we can’t let it replace the thinking parts of writing, says writing professor Steve Graham

Reconciling these two goals — having AI help students learn to write more efficiently without hijacking the cognitive benefits of writing — should be a key goal of educators. Finding the ideal balance will require more work from both researchers and classroom educators, but Graham shares some initial tips for doing this currently.

Why I ban AI use for writing assignments — from timeshighereducation.com by James Stacey Taylor
Students may see handwriting essays in class as a needlessly time-consuming approach to assignments, but I want them to learn how to engage with arguments, develop their own views and convey them effectively, writes James Stacey Taylor

Could they use AI to generate objections to the arguments they read? Of course. AI does a good job of summarising objections to Singer’s view. But I don’t want students to parrot others’ objections. I want them to think of objections themselves.

Could AI be useful for them in organising their exegesis of others’ views and their criticisms of them? Yes. But, again, part of what I want my students to learn is precisely what this outsources to the AI: how to organise their thoughts and communicate them effectively.

How AI Will Change Education — from digitalnative.tech by Rex Woodbury
Predicting Innovation in Education, from Personalized Learning to the Downfall of College

This week explores how AI will bleed into education, looking at three segments of education worth watching, then examining which business models will prevail.

Personalized Learning and Tutoring
Teacher Tools
Alternatives to College
Final Thoughts: Business Models and Why Education Matters

New Guidance from TeachAI and CSTA Emphasizes Computer Science Education More Important than Ever in an Age of AI — from csteachers.org by CSTA
The guidance features new survey data and insights from teachers and experts in computer science (CS) and AI, informing the future of CS education.

SEATTLE, WA – July 16, 2024 – Today, TeachAI, led by Code.org, ETS, the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE), Khan Academy, and the World Economic Forum, launches a new initiative in partnership with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) to support and empower educators as they grapple with the growing opportunities and risks of AI in computer science (CS) education.
…

The briefs draw on early research and insights from CSTA members, organizations in the TeachAI advisory committee, and expert focus groups to address common misconceptions about AI and offer a balanced perspective on critical issues in CS education, including:

Why is it Still Important for Students to Learn to Program?
How Are Computer Science Educators Teaching With and About AI?
How Can Students Become Critical Consumers and Responsible Creators of AI?

Will we throw @sama in jail when self-represented litigants use @ChatGPTapp to navigate the American judicial system?

Generative #AI has great potential to help self-represented litigants trying to enforce their rights. But: when consumers use these tools for assistance, will… pic.twitter.com/aT8ooX3DZL

— Ed Walters (@EJWalters) July 8, 2024

The race against time to reinvent lawyers — from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong
Our legal education and licensing systems produce one kind of lawyer. The legal market of the near future will need another kind. If we can’t close this gap fast, we’ll have a very serious problem.

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Lawyers will still need competencies like legal reasoning and analysis, statutory and contractual interpretation, and a range of basic legal knowledge. But it’s unhelpful to develop these skills through activities that lawyers won’t be performing much longer, while neglecting to provide them with other skills and prepare them for other situations that they will face. Our legal education and licensing systems are turning out lawyers whose competence profiles simply won’t match up with what people will need lawyers to do.

A good illustration of what I mean can be found in an excellent recent podcast from the Practising Law Institute, “Shaping the Law Firm Associate of the Future.” Over the course of the episode, moderator Jennifer Leonard of Creative Lawyers asked Professors Alice Armitage of UC Law San Francisco and Heidi K. Brown of New York Law School to identify some of the competencies that newly called lawyers and law firm associates are going to need in future. Here’s some of what they came up with:

Agile, nimble, extrapolative thinking
Collaborative, cross-disciplinary learning
Entrepreneurial, end-user-focused mindsets
Generative AI knowledge (“Their careers will be shaped by it”)
Identifying your optimal individual workflow
Iteration, learning by doing, and openness to failure
Leadership and interpersonal communication skills
Legal business know-how, including client standards and partner expectations
Receiving and giving feedback to enhance effectiveness

Legal Tech for Legal Departments – What In-House Lawyers Need to Know — from legal.thomsonreuters.com by Sterling Miller

Whatever the reason, you must understand the problem inside and out. Here are the key points to understanding your use case:

Identify the problem.
What is the current manual process to solve the problem?
Is there technology that will replace this manual process and solve the problem?
What will it cost and do you have (or can you get) the budget?
Will the benefits of the technology outweigh the cost? And how soon will those benefits pay off the cost? In other words, what is the return on investment?
Do you have the support of the organization to buy it (inside the legal department and elsewhere, e.g., CFO, CTO)?

2024-05-13: Of Legal AI — from emergentbehavior.co

Long discussion with a senior partner at a major Bay Area law firm:

Takeaways

A) They expect legal AI to decimate the profession…
B) Unimpressed by most specific legal AI offerings…
C) Generative AI error rates are acceptable even at 10–20%…
D) The future of corporate law is in-house…
E) The future of law in general?…
F) Of one large legal AI player…

2024 Legal Technology Survey Results — from lexology.com

Additional findings of the annual survey include:

77 percent of firms have a formal technology strategy in place
Interest and intentions regarding generative A.I. remain high, with almost 80 percent of participating firms expecting to leverage it within the next five years. Many have either already begun or are planning to undertake data hygiene projects as a precursor to using generative A.I. and other automation solutions. Although legal market analysts have hypothesized that proprietary building of generative A.I. solutions remain out of reach for mid-sized firms, several Meritas survey respondents are making traction. Many other firms are also licensing third-party generative A.I. solutions.
The survey showed strong technology progression among several Meritas member firms, with most adopting a tech stack of core, foundational systems of infrastructure technology and adding cloud-based practice management, document management, time, billing, and document drafting applications.
Most firms reported increased adoption and utilization of options already available within their current core systems, such as Microsoft Office 365 Teams, SharePoint, document automation, and other native functionalities for increasing efficiencies; these functions were used more often in place of dedicated purpose-built solutions such as comparison and proofreading tools.
The legal technology market serving Meritas’ member firms continues to be fractured, with very few providers emerging as market leaders.

AI Set to Save Professionals 12 Hours Per Week by 2029 — from legalitprofessionals.com

Thomson Reuters, a global content and technology company, today released its 2024 Future of Professionals report, an annual survey of more than 2,200 professionals working across legal, tax, and risk & compliance fields globally. Respondents predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to save them 12 hours per week in the next five years, or four hours per week over the upcoming year – equating to 200 hours annually.

This timesaving potential is the equivalent productivity boost of adding an extra colleague for every 10 team members on staff. Harnessing the power of AI across various professions opens immense economic opportunities. For a U.S. lawyer, this could translate to an estimated $100,000 in additional billable hours.*

“AI will be a vital tool in overcoming the access to justice challenge.” [Susskind] + other legaltech-related items

On 07/09/2024, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Access to Justice (A2J), Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, career development, change, law schools, legal reform, legal technologies, legislatures / government / legal, tools, UK, United States, vendors, by Daniel Christian

Rethinking Legal Ops Skills: Generalists Versus Specialists — from abovethelaw.com by Silvie Tucker and Brandi Pack
This ongoing conversation highlights the changing demands on legal ops practitioners.

A thought-provoking discussion is unfolding in the legal operations community regarding one intriguing question: Should legal operations professionals strive to be generalists or specialists?

The conversation is timely as the marketplace consolidates and companies grapple with the best way to fill valuable and limited headcount allotments. It also highlights the evolving landscape of legal operations and the changing demands on its practitioners.
…
The Evolution of Legal Ops
Over the past decade, the field of legal operations has undergone significant transformation. Initially strictly focused on streamlining processes and reducing costs, the role has expanded to include various responsibilities driven by technological advancements and heightened industry expectations. Key areas of expansion include:

He added: “I have for long been of the view – for decades – that AI will be a vital tool in overcoming the access to justice challenge. Existing and emerging technologies are now very promising.”

Richard Susskind

In A First for Law Practice Management Platforms, Clio Rolls Out An Integrated E-Filing Service in Texas — from lawnext.com by Bob Ambrogi

Last October, during its annual Clio Cloud Conference, the law practice management company Clio announced its plan to roll out an e-filing service, called Clio File, during 2024, starting with Texas, which would make it the first law practice management platform with built-in e-filing. Today, it delivered on that promise, launching Clio File for e-filing in Texas courts.

“Lawyers can now seamlessly submit court documents directly from our flagship practice management product, Clio Manage, streamlining their workflows and simplifying the filing process,” said Chris Stock, vice president of legal content and migrations at Clio. “This is an exciting step in expanding the capabilities of our platform, providing a comprehensive solution for legal documents, from drafting to court filing.”

Just-Launched Quench Uses Gen AI to Bring Greater Speed and Accuracy to Medico-Legal Records Review — from lawnext.com by Bob Ambrogi

A cardiologist with a background in medical technology, computer science and artificial intelligence has launched a product for legal professionals and physician expert witnesses that targets the tedious task of reviewing and analyzing thousands of pages of medical records.

The product, Quench SmartChart, uses generative AI to streamline the medico-legal review process, enabling users to quickly extract, summarize and create chronologies from large, disorganized PDFs of medical records.

The product also includes a natural language chat feature, AskQuench, that lets users interact with and interrogate records to surface essential insights.

Is College Worth It? Poll Finds Only 36% of Americans Have Confidence in Higher Education — from usnews.com by Associated Press
A new poll finds Americans are increasingly skeptical about the value and cost of college

Americans are increasingly skeptical about the value and cost of college, with most saying they feel the U.S. higher education system is headed in the “wrong direction,” according to a new poll.

Overall, only 36% of adults say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to the report released Monday by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. That confidence level has declined steadily from 57% in 2015.

Enrollment Planning in the Specter of Closure — from insidehighered.com by Mark Campbell and Rachel Schreiber; via GSV
Misunderstandings about enrollment management and changing student needs can make a bad situation worse, Mark Campbell and Rachel Schreiber write.

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

However, we find that many institutions provide little to no information to prospective students about actual outcomes for graduates. Examples include: What does applying to graduate school look like for graduates? Employment and earning potential? Average student loan debt? What do alumni say about their experience? What data do you have that is compelling to answer these and related questions? Families increasingly ask, “What is the ROI on this investment?”
…
Another important issue relates to the unwillingness of leaders to evolve the institution to meet market demands. We have too often seen that storied, historic institutions have cultures that are change averse, and this seems to be particularly true in the liberal arts. This statement might appear to be controversial—but only if misunderstood.

To be clear, the humanities and the arts are vital, critical aspects of our institutions. But today’s prospective students are highly focused on career outcomes, given the financial investment they and their families are being asked to make. We believe that curricular offerings can place a high value on the core principles of the humanities and liberal arts while also preparing students for careers.

By contrast, curricular innovation, alterations to long-held marketing practices, openness to self-reflection regarding out-of-date programs, practices and policies—in short, a willingness to change and adapt—are all key. Finally, vital and successful institutions develop long-term strategic enrollment plans that are tactical, realistic and assessable and for which there is clarity about accountability. Putting these practices in place now can avert catastrophe down the road.

Career and Technical Education Clears New Pathways to Opportunity [Manno]

On 06/29/2024, in adult learning, apprenticeships, career development, higher education, K-12 related, learning ecosystem, pathways, society, sociology, student-related, vocational / trades, by Daniel Christian

Career and Technical Education Clears New Pathways to Opportunity — from educationnext.org by Bruno V. Manno; via Ryan Craig
A student’s post-secondary options need not be binary

Many Americans, including the last wave of Gen Z-ers now entering high schools, want schools to offer more education and training options for young people like career and technical education, or CTE. They broadly agree that the K–12 goal of “college for all” over the last several decades has not served all students well. It should be replaced with “opportunity pluralism,” or the recognition that a college degree is one of many pathways to post-secondary success.

School-based CTE programs (there are also programs for adults) typically prepare middle and high school students for a range of high-wage, high-skill, and high-demand careers. These include fields like advanced manufacturing, health sciences, and information technology which often do not require a two- or four-year college degree. CTE programs award students recognized credentials like industry certifications and licenses.

Learning Ecosystems

More people with disabilities are joining the U.S. workforce. Here’s why — and where they’re working. [Borden]

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