colleges

Credentialed Learning For All [gettingsmart.com]

On 04/13/2023, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Blockchain, career development, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, credentialing, education, education reform, experimentation, future, global / globalization, heutagogy, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, ideas, informal learning, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, K-12 related, learner profiles, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, lifelong learning, pathways, personalized/customized learning, platforms, professional development, reinvent, skills, society, student-related, training / L&D, United States, universities, vendors, virtual K-12 schools, vision/possibilities, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

Credentialed Learning For All — from gettingsmart.com

Vision

Learning happens throughout life and is not isolated to the K-12 or higher education sectors. Yet, often, validations of learning only happen in these specific areas. The system of evaluation based on courses, grades, and credit serves as a poor proxy for communicating skills given the variation in course content, grade inflation, and inclusion of participation and extra credit within course grades.

Credentialed learning provides a way to accurately document human capability for all learners throughout their life. A lifetime credentialed learning ecosystem provides better granularity around learning, better documentation of the learning, and more relevance for both the credential recipient and reviewer. This improves the match between higher education and/or employment with the individual, while also providing a more clear and accurate lifetime learning pathway.

With a fully-credentialed system, individuals can own well-documented evidence of a lifetime of learning and choose what and when to share this data. This technology enables every learner to have more opportunities for finding the best career match without today’s existing barriers around cost, access, and proxies.

Addendum on 4/28/23 — speaking of credentials:

First Rung — from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain
New research shows stacking credentials pays off for low-income learners.

Stacking credentials pays off for many low-income students, new research finds, but only if learners move up the education ladder. Also, Kansas is hoping a new grant program will attract more companies to participate in microinternships.

From DSC:
Regarding the core curricula of colleges and universities…

For decades now, faculty members have taught what they wanted to teach and what interested them. They taught what they wanted to research vs. what the wider marketplace/workplace needed. They were not responsive to the needs of the workplace — nor to the needs of their students!

And this situation has been all the more compounded by the increasing costs of obtaining a degree plus the exponential pace of change. We weren’t doing a good job before this exponential pace of change started taking place — and now it’s (almost?) impossible to keep up.

The bottom line on the article below: ***It’s sales.***

Therefore, it’s about what you are selling — and at what price. The story hasn’t changed much. The narrative (i.e., the curricula and more) is pretty much the same thing that’s been sold for years.

But the days of faculty members teaching whatever they wanted to are over, or significantly waning.

Faculty members, faculty senates, provosts, presidents, and accreditors are reaping what they’ve sown.

The questions are now:

Will new seeds be sown?
Will new crops arise in the future?
Will there be new narratives?
Will institutions be able to reinvent themselves (one potential example here)? Or will their cultures not allow such significant change to take place? Will alternatives to institutions of traditional higher education continue to pick up steam?

A Profession on the Edge — from chronicle.com by Eric Hoover
Why enrollment leaders are wearing down, burning out, and leaving jobs they once loved.

Excerpts:

Similar stories are echoing throughout the hallways of higher education. Vice presidents for enrollment, as well as admissions deans and directors, are wearing down, burning out, and leaving jobs they once loved. Though there’s no way to compile a chart quantifying the churn, industry insiders describe it as significant. “We’re at an inflection point,” says Rick Clark, executive director of undergraduate admission at Georgia Tech. “There have always been people leaving the field, but not in the numbers we’re seeing now.”

Some are being shoved out the door by presidents and boards. Some are resigning out of exhaustion, frustration, and disillusionment. And some who once sought top-level positions are rethinking their ambitions. “The pressures have ratcheted up tenfold,” says Angel B. Pérez, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, known as NACAC. “I talk with someone each week who’s either leaving the field or considering leaving.”

From DSC:
This quote points to what I’m trying to address here:

Dahlstrom and other veterans of the field say they’ve experienced something especially disquieting: an erosion of faith in the transformational power of higher education. Though she sought a career in admissions to help students, her disillusionment grew after taking on a leadership role. She became less confident that she was equipped to effect positive changes, at her institution or beyond, especially when it came to the challenge of expanding college access in a nation of socioeconomic disparities: “I felt like a cog in a huge machine that’s not working, yet continues to grind while only small, temporary fixes are made.”

How Easy Is It/Will It Be to Use AI to Design a Course? [Boston]

On 04/12/2023, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, CMS/LMS, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate universities / corporate training, digital learning, elearning, emerging technologies, experimentation, future, game-changing environment, higher education, ideas, innovation, instructional design, interaction design, interactivity, IT in HE, law schools, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, microlearning, multimedia, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, teaching & learning, tools, traditional / tradition, United States, universities, vendors, by Daniel Christian

How Easy Is It/Will It Be to Use AI to Design a Course? — from wallyboston.com by Wally Boston

Excerpt:

Last week I received a text message from a friend to check out a March 29^th Campus Technology article about French AI startup, Nolej. Nolej (pronounced “Knowledge”) has developed an OpenAI-based instructional content generator for educators called NolejAI.

Access to NolejAI is through a browser. Users can upload video, audio, text documents, or a website url. NolejAI will generate an interactive micro-learning package which is a standalone digital lesson including content transcript, summaries, a glossary of terms, flashcards, and quizzes. All the lesson materials generated is based upon the uploaded materials.

From DSC:
I wonder if this will turn out to be the case:

I am sure it’s only a matter of time before NolejAI or another product becomes capable of generating a standard three credit hour college course. Whether that is six months or two years, it’s likely sooner than we think.

Also relevant/see:

The Ultimate 100 AI Tools

The Future of Teaching is Here — from samchaltain.substack.com by Sam Chaltain

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

It’s not sexy, but I feel like Sal Khan’s recent video introducing his Academy’s GPT-fueled AI tutor augurs the future of the teaching profession — and not just at Khan Academy.
…
The tutor is already fully capable of offering personalized feedback, hints and suggestions for just about any topic for which there are already clearly established answers — from solving math equations with parentheses to digesting John Locke’s political philosophy.
…
But now we’ve entered a new chapter — dare I say, a Technological Singularity (20 years early) — one in which Chat-GPT in particular, and the daily flood of AI tools more generally, has changed the nature of the teacher/student relationship even more irrevocably than before.

As a result, from this day forward, the job of a teacher REALLY needs to stop being about transmission.

So what should it start being instead?
…
In which case, the future of teaching is not about transmission, but it is about the other trans- words: transmedia exploration, transdisciplinary weaving, transcultural understanding, and, yes, personal and societal transformation.

How to Create Compelling Writing Assignments in a ChatGPT Age [Lang]

On 04/11/2023, in colleges, community colleges, experimentation, faculty, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), instructional design, intelligent systems, Learning Experience Design, teaching & learning, tools, United States, universities, writing, by Daniel Christian

How to Create Compelling Writing Assignments in a ChatGPT Age — from chronicle.com by James M. Lang
A recent book offers a road map to new kinds of assignments to inspire your students to write.

Excerpt:

A few days after I returned from the conference, I received a book in the mail that affirmed my newfound sense that 2023 has the potential to usher in an age of creative thinking about teaching and writing: Jessica Singer Early’s Next Generation Genres: Teaching Writing for Civic and Academic Engagement. Although her book doesn’t directly address ChatGPT, it offers exactly the kind of innovative ideas we need as we wrestle — or dance — with the implications of artificial intelligence for college teaching.
…
Clearly Jessica Singer Early has joined the leaning-into camp, seeing artificial intelligence as another invitation to reinvent ourselves in the classroom — just as she encourages readers to do in Next Generation Genres, and as this teacher plans to do in the fall.

Who Will Be the Academic Prompt Engineering Experts? [Boston]

On 04/11/2023, in 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, colleges, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, emerging technologies, experimentation, faculty, MBA, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, United States, universities, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Who Will Be the Academic Prompt Engineering Experts? — from wallyboston.com by Wally Boston

Excerpts:

As I mentioned in a post a month ago, prompt engineering is the term of art for prompting a generative AI tool like ChatGPT-4 to produce an answer to a question, analysis of a problem, or an essay about a particular topic.
…
It’s ironic that the “experts” providing prompt engineering courses are not academics. I happen to believe that there are academics mastering prompt engineering as I write this.
…
Last week, I wrote about generative AI tools that could be used to decrease the instructional design time required to build a college course. I also wrote an article about Villanova University professor Noah Barsky’s opinion piece suggesting that all MBA curriculums should be rewritten to teach their students how to utilize AI tools in their professions. Business schools with outdated curriculums will not prepare their graduates for businesses expecting them to be able to master state of the art AI tools.

Also relevant/see:

From DSC:
Read that again…

“In June, when students are finishing up their classes, they may be punished by their instructors for using AI as a writing tool. But in July, when they’re out on the job market, they can be punished by their employers or potential employers for not knowing how to use AI as a writing tool.”

Also relevant/see:

11 Tips to Take Your ChatGPT Prompts to the Next Level — from wired.com by David Nield
Sure, anyone can use OpenAI’s chatbot. But with smart engineering, you can get way more interesting results.

Excerpts:

You don’t have to do all the typing yourself when it comes to ChatGPT. Copy and paste is your friend, and there’s no problem with pasting in text from other sources.
…
Another way to improve the responses you get from ChatGPT is to give it some data to work with before you ask your question.
…
Your answers can be seriously improved if you give ChatGPT some ingredients to work with before asking for a response.

Stanford’s 2023 AI Index Report — from aiindex.stanford.edu

Why some college professors are adopting ChatGPT AI as quickly as students — from cnbc.com by Carolyn Chun

Key Points:

A recent analysis by researchers at NYU, Princeton and the Wharton School finds that many of the jobs that will be most “exposed” to generative AI such as ChatGPT are in the college teaching profession.
One of the first narratives to emerge from the sudden explosion in usage of ChatGPT is the risk of students cheating on writing assignments.
But use by college teachers is growing quickly too, and adoption by educators may be critical to making the case that AI will augment the jobs humans are doing rather than replace them.

Also relevant/see:

ANALYSIS: ‘Microcredentials’ poised to disrupt higher ed as degrees lose relevance to employers — from campusreform.org by Shelby Kearns; with thanks to Ray Schroeder on LinkedIn for this resource

Key points:

Survey respondents are demonstrating confidence in microcredentials–online training programs that take no more than six months to complete–as four-year degree programs often overlook job training.
‘Grade inflation and efforts to help everyone … attend college make it harder for employers to differentiate among applicants.’

The Secret to Great Learning Design? Focus on Problems, not Solutions — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman
What a recent resurgence of research into problem-based learning has taught us about the value & impact of problem-based approaches

Excerpts:

Problem-based learning is an instructional approach that engages students in active, collaborative, and self-directed learning by exploring complex, real-world problems (rather than sitting and listening to a stage on the stage).

In a Problem-based learning scenario, students work in small groups and, under the guidance of a facilitator or instructor, identify, research, and analyse a problem before proposing and evaluating potential solutions and reaching a resolution.
…
Here are five of the most interesting research projects published on problem-based learning in the last few months:

Some items re: the state of — and the future of — higher education

On 03/31/2023, in adjunct faculty, Alternatives, business side of he, colleges, community colleges, cost of getting a degree, dangers of the status quo, higher education, leadership, parents/guardians, reinvent, society, sociology, staying relevant, surviving, United States, universities, youth, by Daniel Christian

When It Comes to College Closures, the Sky Is Never Going to Fall — from chronicle.com by Lee Gardner
Are you tired of reading nearly annual predictions of a looming wave of colleges shutting down? Not nearly as tired as one Chronicle reporter.

Excerpts:

I’ve learned a lot of things about how colleges work in the last 10 years, including that they die hard. They make new appeals to students and alumni. They scrimp. They raise their tuition-discount rate yet again. They limp along with budget deficits, sometimes for years. They make withdrawals from their endowments. They sell off assets. They look for partnerships, mergers, and buyers, although sometimes when it’s far too late.

I could be wrong, of course, and there may be a giant wave of college closures rearing somewhere on the horizon. But I can guarantee you that there are dozens of institutions in danger of quietly slipping toward a gradual end as you read this.

Also highly relevant here/see:

Contingent faculty jobs are still the standard, AAUP report finds — from highereddive.com by Laura Spitalniak

Dive Brief:

Colleges are continuing to increase their reliance on faculty positions that lack pathways to tenure, according to a new report from the American Association of University Professors. Over two-thirds of faculty members, 68%, held contingent positions in fall 2021, compared to about 47% in fall 1987.
Part-time work is also becoming more common. Almost half of faculty, 48%, taught part time in fall 2021, up from 33% in fall 1987. Less than 1% of all part-time faculty positions are tenured or tenure-track, according to AAUP.
Both of these factors are cutting into the number of available tenured positions, the report said. Fewer than 1 in 4 faculty members, 24%, held tenured full-time positions in fall 2021. That number fell from 39% in fall 1987.

Americans Are Losing Faith in College Education, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds — from wsj.com by Douglas Belkin (behind a firewall)
Confidence in value of a degree plummeted among women and senior citizens during pandemic

Excerpt:

A majority of Americans don’t think a college degree is worth the cost, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, a new low in confidence in what has long been a hallmark of the American dream.

The survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, found that 56% of Americans think earning a four-year degree is a bad bet compared with 42% who retain faith in the credential.

Skepticism is strongest among people ages 18-34, and people with college degrees are among those whose opinions have soured the most, portending a profound shift for higher education in the years ahead.

ChatGPT: Student insights are necessary to help universities plan for the future — from theconversation.com by Alpha Abebe and Fenella Amarasinghe

Excerpt:

In the race to get ahead of new technologies, are we forgetting about the perspectives of the most important stakeholders within our post-secondary institutions: the students?

Leaving students out of early discussions and decision-making processes is almost always a recipe for ill-fitting, ineffective and/or damaging approaches. The mantra “nothing for us without us” comes to mind here.

To help new students adapt, some colleges are eliminating grades [Marcus]

On 03/28/2023, in assessment, change, colleges, credentialing, experimentation, higher education, ideas, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, liberal arts, student-related, teaching & learning, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

To help new students adapt, some colleges are eliminating grades — from npr.org by Jon Marcus

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Experiences like these are among the reasons behind a growing movement to stop assigning conventional A through F letter grades to first-year college students and, sometimes, upperclassmen.

Called “un-grading,” the idea is meant to ease the transition to higher education — especially for freshmen who are the first in their families to go to college or who weren’t well prepared for college-level work in high school and need more time to master it.

But advocates say the most important reason to adopt un-grading is that students have become so preoccupied with grades, they aren’t actually learning.

Which trends are on your radar? Fantastic resource for #HigherEducation about the changing ecology: Higher Learning Commission’s Annual Trends Report. https://t.co/Lzgph6u3lP

— Melanie Booth, Ed.D. (@boothmelanie) March 25, 2023

Learning Ecosystems

How to Create Compelling Writing Assignments in a ChatGPT Age [Lang]

ANALYSIS: ‘Microcredentials’ poised to disrupt higher ed as degrees lose relevance to employers [Kearns]

Some items re: the state of — and the future of — higher education

Higher Learning Commission’s 2023 Trends

Bruff: “Did you know that the entire collection of teaching guides written by the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching has been shared?”

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