As Sarah mentioned to me, this article includes a comparison of some of the benefits and challenges of a nursing career, tips on choosing an accessible nursing school, and examines different nursing career paths, their demands, and accommodations available. It also includes practical advice on job interviews, disclosing disabilities to employers, and understanding legal protections.
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The need for caring and skilled nurses is higher than ever. For people with disabilities, getting into nursing might seem like a tough road with a lot of unknowns. Luckily, it isn’t just doable, people with different abilities can find the career extremely fulfilling. Plenty of opportunities and resources exist for those who want to make a mark in healthcare, no matter the challenges they might face.
From DSC: I have had two instances recently where the phone-based systems (i.e., the Voice Response Units) haven’t worked…at all. They either wouldn’t let me do something as simple as updating my credit card number on file or checking on the status of a prescription. Human beings had to get involved to help me get the issues resolved. (Sounds a bit like the recent issues with the FAFSA forms, as I think about it.)
This is old hat, I know. This is common knowledge. But with AI, I’m increasingly concerned that the temptations are there for the MBAs/executives out there to lay off employees and boost their short-term profits (so that Wall Street will reward them and so that they can get their year-end bonuses).
The reminder/lesson for businesses and organizations of all types (including colleges and universities):
Unless you want to piss off and lose your customers, always allow your customers to stop using a VRU and go directly to a person that they can talk to.
Then empower those employees on the front lines as much as possible so that they can get the issues resolved for your customers.
Don’t think you are putting your MBA to good use by laying off your employees after you implement some new VRU system or AI-backed system. Don’t be too quick to think that you’re going to save all kinds of money by going with AI. This might be the case down the line, but I wouldn’t be too quick to get there yet. And even when you do get there, please allow us to talk to human beings.
Accenture announced today that it would acquire the learning platform Udacity as part of an effort to build a learning platform focused on the growing interest in AI. While the company didn’t specify how much it paid for Udacity, it also announced a $1 billion investment in building a technology learning platform it’s calling LearnVantage.
“The rise of generative AI represents one of the most transformative changes in how work gets done and is driving a growing need for enterprises to train and upskill people in cloud, data and AI as they build their digital core and reinvent their enterprises,” Kishore Durg, global lead of Accenture LearnVantage said in a statement.
1. AI already plays a central part in the instructional design process A whopping 95.3% of the instructional designers interviewed said they use AI in their day to day work. Those who don’t use AI cite access or permission issues as the primary reason that they haven’t integrated AI into their process.
2. AI is predominantly used at the design and development stages of the instructional design process
When mapped to the ADDIE process, the breakdown of use cases goes as follows:
Analysis: 5.5% of use cases
Design: 32.1%
Development: 53.2%
Implementation: 1.8%
Evaluation: 7.3%
Speaking of AI in our learning ecosystems, also see:
The majority of educators expect use of artificial intelligence tools will increase in their school or district over the next year, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey.
Applying Multimodal AI to L&D — from learningguild.com by Sarah Clark We’re just starting to see Multimodal AI systems hit the spotlight. Unlike the text-based and image-generation AI tools we’ve seen before, multimodal systems can absorb and generate content in multiple formats – text, image, video, audio, etc.
Using AI, the team was able to plow through 32.6 million possible battery materials in 80 hours, a task the team estimates would have taken them 20 years to do.
“The world is adapting to seismic shifts from generative AI,” says Luben Pampoulov, Partner at GSV Ventures. “AI co-pilots, AI tutors, AI content generators—AI is ubiquitous, and differentiation is increasingly critical. This is an impressive group of EdTech companies that are leveraging AI and driving positive outcomes for learners and society.”
Workforce Learning comprises 34% of the list, K-12 29%, Higher Education 24%, Adult Consumer Learning 10%, and Early Childhood 3%. Additionally, 21% of the companies stretch across two or more “Pre-K to Gray” categories. A broader move towards profitability is also evident: the collective gross and EBITDA margin score of the 2024 cohort increased 5% compared to 2023.
Selected from 2,000+ companies around the world based on revenue scale, revenue growth, user reach, geographic diversification, and margin profile, this impressive group is reaching an estimated 3 billion people and generating an estimated $23 billion in revenue.
While headlines trumpet the demise of the college degree, our joint report with Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work reveals a different reality. Many companies have announced dropping degree requirements, but sustained hiring changes remain elusive for most. This report identifies where the reality of Skills-Based Hiring is lagging well-meaning ambitions, and shows which companies are getting it right.
By 2027, businesses predict that almost half (44%) of workers’ core skills will be disrupted.
Technology is moving faster than companies can design and scale up their training programmes, found the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report.
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The Forum’s Global Risks Report 2024 found that “lack of economic opportunity” ranked as one of the top 10 biggest risks among risk experts over the next two years.
5. Skills will become even more important With 23% of jobs expected to change in the next five years, according to the Future of Jobs Report, millions of people will need to move between declining and growing jobs.
Partnering credentialing opportunities alongside pre-existing regional initiatives is a great way to get buy-in and create momentum.
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When Polk County schools began focusing on career and technical education in the spring of 2023, one of their goals was to help students succeed in the workplace by offering the opportunity to develop soft skills and earn micro-credentials to communicate with potential employers. The district collaborated with Education Design Lab, Muzzy Lane, Polk Vision, the Central Florida Development Council, and Southern New Hampshire University to make this dream a reality.
In its first few years, this collaboration has not only taught students valuable skills but has also provided employers with new recruitment opportunities and a linkage to a talent pipeline that they otherwise wouldn’t have had.
From DSC: This would be huge for all of our learning ecosystems, as the learning agents could remember where a particular student or employee is at in terms of their learning curve for a particular topic.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 6, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — While three-quarters of higher-education trustees (83%), faculty (81%) and administrators (76%) agree that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) will noticeably change their institutions in the next five years, community college trustees are more optimistic than their community college counterparts, with (37%) saying their organization is prepared for the change coming compared to just 16% of faculty and 11% of administrator respondents.
Those findings are from the 2023-2024 Digital Learning Pulse Survey conducted by Cengage and Bay View Analytics with support from the Association of Community College Trustees (ACCT), the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE), College Pulse and the United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) to understand the attitudes and concerns of higher education instructors and leadership.
From DSC: It takes time to understand what a given technology brings to the table…let alone a slew of emerging technologies under the artificial intelligence (AI) umbrella. It’s hard enough when the technology is fairly well established and not changing all the time. But its extremely difficult when significant change occurs almost daily.
The limited staff within the teaching & learning centers out there need time to research and learn about the relevant technologies and how to apply those techs to instructional design. The already stretched thin faculty members need time to learn about those techs as well — and if and how they want to apply them. It takes time and research and effort.
Provosts, deans, presidents, and such need time to learn things as well.
Bottom line: We need to have realistic expectations here.
AI Adoption in Corporate L&D — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman Where we are, and the importance of use cases in enabling change
The headline of the report is that we’ve never seen a technology adopted in enterprise as fast as generative AI. As of November 2023, two-thirds (67%) of survey respondents reported that their companies are using generative AI.
However, the vast majority of AI adopters in enterprise are still in the early stages; they’re experimenting at the edges, rather than making larger-scale, strategic decisions on how to leverage AI to accelerate our progress towards org goals and visions.
The single biggest hurdle to AI adoption in large corporates is a lack of appropriate use cases.
15 legal Substacks worth your time — from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong It’s my great pleasure to return the compliment of a Substack Recommendation and direct your attention to these terrific legal newsletters.
GeoLegal Notes, by Sean West, Co-Founder Hence Technologies, Santa Monica, CA. “Bridging the gap between global affairs and legal practice; helping equip legal leaders to thrive against a backdrop of increasing global complexity.”
—> Recommended post: Law and Politics of Supply Chains for Goods, AI and Knowledge
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In addition…please also take a moment to click through and check out these ten other excellent newsletters:
Abstract
We conducted the first randomized controlled trial to study the effect of AI assistance on human legal analysis. We randomly assigned law school students to complete realistic legal tasks either with or without the assistance of GPT-4. We tracked how long the students took on each task and blind-graded the results. We found that access to GPT-4 only slightly and inconsistently improved the quality of participants’ legal analysis but induced large and consistent increases in speed. AI assistance improved the quality of output unevenly—where it was useful at all, the lowest-skilled participants saw the largest improvements. On the other hand, AI assistance saved participants roughly the same amount of time regardless of their baseline speed. In follow up surveys, participants reported increased satisfaction from using AI to complete legal tasks and correctly predicted the tasks for which GPT-4 were most helpful. These results have important descriptive and normative implications for the future of lawyering. Descriptively, they suggest that AI assistance can significantly improve productivity and satisfaction, and that they can be selectively employed by lawyers in areas where they are most useful. Because these tools have an equalizing effect on performance, they may also promote equality in a famously unequal profession. Normatively, our findings suggest that law schools, lawyers, judges, and clients should affirmatively embrace AI tools and plan for a future in which they will become widespread.
Welcome to the first of a few special Legal Week 2024 edition episodes of “The Geek in Review,” where we looked for innovative and creative ideas on the road and recorded live from the bustling environment of the 2024 Legal Week conference in New York.
Marlene Gebauer notes the transformation of Legal Week into a thought leadership conference, with a special mention of keynote speaker Bryan Cranston’s impactful talk on storytelling, branding, and the thoughtful application of AI in both the acting world and the legal tech space.
In the second of a special series of interviews from Legal Week 2024 , co-hosts Greg Lambert and Marlene Gebauer welcomed Mollie Nichols, CEO, and Mark Noel, Chief Information and Technology Officer of Redgrave Data. Nichols and Noel discuss Redgrave Data’s mission to cut through the hype of legal tech innovations, particularly generative AI. Nichols emphasized the company’s focus on delivering custom solutions that meet clients’ actual needs and highlighted the importance of educating the legal community on effectively integrating new technologies into their practices.
Mark Noel emphasized the strategic addition of data scientists to their team, enabling Redgrave Data to develop and advise on cutting-edge technologies. He stressed the importance of applying generative AI judiciously, pointing out its limitations and the potential for misuse if not properly vetted. Noel and Nichols shared insights on navigating the legal tech landscape, emphasizing efficiency, data management, and the careful evaluation of tech solutions.
I can’t recall any prior technology that has simultaneously trigged both of breathless enthusiasm and panicked resistance . While the technology shows game changing promise, there are significant ethical, client relations, security and intellectual property concerns which still need to be addressed. The C-Suite survey charts the issues of concern where are impeding adoption of GenAI.
These days, whenever a customer asks me for my view of generative AI for law and where and how they should be using it, I reply with a simple analogy: Think ‘Google Maps for lawyers’.
Analogising generative AI for law to mapping technology begins with thinking about legal matters as journeys. A similar conceptualisation appears in a recent article by Justin Turman, legal systems and processes manager at Stryker, with legal work as flight paths. Either way, you have a desired destination (winning a lawsuit, closing a deal, finalising a contract, etc.) and many possible ‘routes’ reflecting various strategic and tactical decisions along the way. At various junctures, it is helpful to get intelligence and directions on how to proceed. And, as with driving (or flying), circumstances are subject to change along the way – newly discovered facts, shifts in goals, etc.
Based on that bathroom-break induced inspiration, Neal went on to develop — and this week launch — Lexplug, a site developed for law students “to make interacting with cases more accessible, efficient, and engaging.”
Search, Query and Simplify Case BriefsAt its core, Lexplug is a library of case briefs, all created by Neal using GPT-4. So far, he has created 7,000 briefs, and hopes to have 50,000 by the end of the year. To decide which cases to prioritize, he collected a variety of syllabi for basic law school courses such as constitutional law and torts and extracted the key cases. He also has the full text of every briefed case.
But there is another, related, kind of justice gap in this country. It is the funding gap between those who are developing legal technology to better meet the legal needs of low-income Americans and those who are developing legal tech to serve large law firms and corporate legal departments.
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At Legalweek, the focus of the conference is almost exclusively on tech for large law firms and corporate legal departments. The sponsors and exhibitors are focused on products for e-discovery, contract lifecycle management, large firm financial and business management, and the like. The programs, similarly, focus on data privacy, e-discovery, information governance, contract technology, and large-scale litigation.
The exhibit hall spans three floors, the booths are big and bright, and the vendors seemingly all throw parties that are over the top, or quite literally near the top, at venues such as the Rainbow Room at the top of Rockefeller Center, with freely flowing alcohol and plenty of food.
By contrast, at the ITC conference, the attendees come mostly from the ranks of legal aid offices, pro-bono programs, court self-help staff, and the like. The programs focus on how understaffed legal aid offices and understaffed courts and understaffed community programs can use technology to help meet the influx of low-income people seeking legal help.
The juxtaposition of the glitziness of one conference and the modesty of the other speaks to the larger issue of inequity in legal tech – and specifically financial inequity.
Last month, business leaders and child care advocates from a handful of states convened on Zoom. Representing Michigan, Kentucky, North Carolina and Virginia, they had come together to discuss a new child care model, called “Tri-Share,” that has gained traction across the country, including in their respective regions.
The cost-sharing model, in which the state government, the employer and the employee each pay for one-third of the cost of child care, first launched in 2021 in Michigan, where it is furthest along. But it has become so popular that other states, including New York, North Carolina and Kentucky, have already secured funding for their own adaptations of the program.
But this is the first time the department has released guidance on how assistive technology relates to the special education law. That’s partly because schools have come to rely so much more on technology for teaching and learning, Wright-Gallo said.
The guidance, released last month, is aimed at parents, specialists who provide services to babies and toddlers at risk of developmental delays, special educators, general educators, school and district leaders, technology specialists and directors, and state education officials, Wright-Gallo said.
More and more parents are taking charge of their children’s education through homeschooling. Manisha Snoyer’s podcast and online homeschooling community, Teach Your Kids, is seeking to empower parents with the guidance, tools, and network they need to thrive as educators for their children. She joined the Future of Education to discuss her work, dispel misconceptions about homeschooling, and consider the future of this growing trend. I was intrigued to explore her observations that, through modularity, families can pull apart socialization, childcare, and the learning itself to make the benefits of homeschooling much more accessible. As always, subscribers can listen to the audio, watch the video, or read the transcript.
School absenteeism sky-rocketed post-pandemic: 6.5 million more students missed at least 10% or more of the 2021-22 school year than in 2017-18. This means 14.7 million students were chronically absent even after schools reopened from the pandemic. While preliminary data shows that absentee rates slightly decreased in the 2022-23 school year, truancy remains a serious concern for our nation’s K-12 system.
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If we want to get students back in the classroom and avoid poor outcomes for our nation’s young people, U.S. leaders must rethink how we operate K-12 education. One potential solution is reinventing high school to ensure every young person is exposed to the world of work through career-oriented education and learning. An analysis of international cross-section data found that nations enrolling a large proportion of students in vocational or career-focused programs have significantly higher school attendance rates and higher completion rates than those that don’t.
What can I do if my child’s teacher takes recess away? — from understood.org By Kristin J. Carothers, PhD School can be extra hard for kids with ADHD when teachers take recess away. An expert weighs in on how you can work with teachers to find a solution.
For teachers: What to expect in an IEP meeting — from understood.org by Amanda Morin
You’re not alone in having questions about IEP meetings. If you’re not a special education teacher, you may not have a lot of training around the IEP process. Here are some of the basics:
The future of corporate learning and development (L&D) is being profoundly reshaped by the progress we are witnessing in artificial intelligence (AI). The increasing availability of new technologies and tools is causing L&D leaders and their teams to rethink their strategy and processes, and even their team structure. The resulting shift, already gaining momentum, will soon move us toward a future where learning experiences are deeply personal, interactive, and contextually rich.
The technological advancements at the forefront of this revolution:
Allow us to create high-quality content faster and at a fraction of the cost previously experienced.
Provide us with a range of new modalities of delivery, such as chat interfaces, as well as immersive and experiential simulations and games.
Enable us to transform learning and training more and more into a journey uniquely tailored to each individual’s learning path, strengths, weaknesses, and confidence levels.
We are already seeing signs of the immediate future—one where AI will adapt not only content but the entire learner experience, on-the-fly and aligned with the needs and requirements of the learner at a specific moment of need.
AI-assisted design & development work: A dramatic shift This prediction was right. There has been a seismic shift in instructional design, and the role is evolving toward content curation, editing, and resource orchestration. Critical thinking skills are becoming more important than ever to make sure that the final learning asset is accurate. All of this is happening thanks to AI tools like:
Adobe Firefly…
ChatGPT…
Another tool, one that isn’t usually part of the L&D ecosystem, is Microsoft’s Azure AI Services…
Early estimates indicate these improvements save between 30 percent and 60 percent of development time.
As a reminder, meta-learning, in this context, refers to tools that serve up experiences to learners based on their preferences, needs, and goals. It is the superstructure behind the content assets (e.g., programs, courses, articles, videos, etc.) that assembles everything into a coherent, and purposeful, body of knowledge for the users.