Five principles for thinking like a futurist — from er.educause.edu by Marina Gorbis
Thinking about the future allows us to imagine what kind of future we want to live in and how we can get there.
Excerpt:
In my twenty years at the Institute, I’ve developed five core principles for futures thinking:
Delivering learning across a lifetime: Higher education’s new paradigm — from evolllution.com with thanks to Mr. Amrit Ahluwalia for his work on this
Excerpt:
Higher education is no longer a single engagement in an individual’s life, or a stop-off point between high school and a career.
Today, and into the future, higher education’s role is ongoing as the demands of the future labor market will require individuals to continuously up-skill and re-skill to remain relevant. As such, while the traditional two- or four-year postsecondary model will continue to play an important role, colleges and universities must expand their repertoire to consciously deliver learning across individuals’ lifetimes.
Read on to learn how the 100 Year Life is changing the fundamental learning needs of individuals across the labor market, and to understand how postsecondary institutions can evolve to fulfil their missions within this new paradigm.
From DSC:
This important perspective/trend reminds me of the graphic below…
Also see:
The employee of the future, he added, “typically will have a new job every five years, probably for 60 to 80 years, and probably every one of those will require skills you did not learn in college.”
In case you missed it, WMU-Cooley’s President and Board of Directors took a look at our tuition rates and made the decision to reduce them by 21 percent starting Fall 2020! https://t.co/FjC6hk4vnE pic.twitter.com/NkCMAzoomE
— WMU-Cooley Law School (@WMUcooleylaw) October 16, 2019
From DSC:
Regular readers of this blog will know that for years, I’ve made it one of my goals to try and raise awareness of the need for institutions of higher education to lower their tuitions! For example, Yohan Na and I designed the graphic below way back in 2009.
Through those years, I cringed when I kept hearing various Boards say, “We only increased our tuition by ___ % — the lowest percentage increase in our state.” The direction was completely wrong! It needed to go down, not up. If you work in higher ed, I encourage you to find a way for that to happen at your own institution.
So I’m very pleased to report that the WMU-Thomas M. Cooley Law School — where I work — was able to reduce tuition by 21%!!!
Don’t get me wrong, some tough decisions were made to pave the way for that to occur. But this will be the case no matter which institution of higher education that you look at. An institution will have to make some tough choices to reduce their tuition. But it HAS to occur. We can’t keep this upward trajectory going.
If we don’t change this trajectory, we will continue to put enormous gorillas (of debt) on our graduates’ backs! Such debt will take our graduates decades to pay off.
We need to be aware of these invisible gorillas of debt. That is, our students move on…and we don’t see them. But their gorillas remain.
Addendum on 10/18/19:
Victoria Vuletich, the assistant dean at the Grand Rapids, Michigan campus of Western Michigan University Cooley Law School, was interviewed by the State Bar of Michigan’s Legal Talk Network to discuss what the law school experience is like for the current generation of students.
Priorities for new lawyers are changing. Can the legal industry keep up? — — from law.com by Annie Datesh, Natasha Allen, and Nicole Hatcher, Atrium
As the legal field continues to move forward, it is well-primed to place greater value on technological advancements, diverse leadership, and healthy work cultures over settling for the status quo.
Excerpts:
Yet the legal industry these lawyers are joining is evolving, and now increasingly hosts a new cohort of professionals—those shaped by technology and innovation, and who value diversity, mentorship, and efficiency over homogeneous workplaces with minimal coaching and exhausted capacities.
…
Amid a strengthening job market, why are jobs in a generally well-respected industry being looked over in favor of other industries? One reason could be the legal industry’s notorious lack of progressiveness. The industry’s technology landscape is one such area of slow growth; its lack of diversity is another.
The legal industry’s long-standing dismissal of technology, while slowly changing, is fairly well known. While legal technology holds enormous potential for law firms, the industry as a whole has been famously slow to adopt modern technologies or meaningfully innovate on the traditional law firm business model. Why? For smaller firms, money can be tight, and solutions can be expensive.
The good news is that the legal industry is slowly but surely becoming more receptive to the benefits of evolving its traditional approach to the business and practice of law. Legal technologies continue to offer increased efficiencies to law firms, should they elect to adopt them, and the call for diversity and other cultural improvements within firms and the legal industry more broadly is on the rise.
…
Those players in the legal industry who are able to recognize prevailing industry trends now will be in the best position to act on them.
An inserted graphic from DSC:
Artificial Intelligence in Future and Present — from datafloq.com
A look at what AI might do and what it can actually do in various industries…
Top jobs in 2040 will involve virtual reality, artificial intelligence & robotics — from themanufacturer.com by Jonny Williamson
Emerging technologies such as virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics will strongly influence the careers we do in the future, according to new research from BAE Systems.
Excerpt:
DIY Mindset Reshaping Education — from campustechnology.com by Dian Schaffhauser
Excerpt:
A do-it-yourself mindset is changing the face of education worldwide, according to new survey results. Learners are “patching together” their education from a “menu of options,” including self-teaching, short courses and bootcamps, and they believe that self-service instruction will become even more prevalent for lifelong learning. In the United Sates specifically, 84 percent of people said learning would become even more self-service the older they get.
Among those who have needed to reskill in the last two years to continue doing their jobs, 42 percent found information online and taught themselves and 41 percent took a course or training offered by their employers, a professional association or bootcamp, compared to just 28 percent who pursued a professional certification program, 25 percent who enrolled in a university-level degree program or 12 percent who did nothing.
If people had to learn something new for their career quickly, they said they would be more likely turn to a short training program (47 percent), followed by access to a free resource such as YouTube, Lynda.com or Khan Academy (33 percent). A smaller share (20 percent) would head to an accredited university or college.
From DSC:
This is why the prediction from Thomas Frey carries weight and why I’ve been tracking a new learning platform for the 21st century. Given:
…there needs to be a new, up-to-date, highly responsive, inexpensive learning-related platform for the 21st century. I call this learning platform of the future, “Learning from the Living [Class] Room.” And while it requires subject matter experts / humans in significant ways, AI and other technologies will be embedded throughout such a platform.
“I’ve been predicting that by 2030 the largest company on the internet is going to be an education-based company that we haven’t heard of yet,” Frey, the senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute think tank, tells Business Insider.
— source
Addendum on 9/18/19:
For $400 per course, students will be able to gain access to course videos that are cinematically filmed and taught by “some of the brightest minds in academia.” Outlier.org students will also have access to problem sets, one-on-one tutoring and assessments proctored through artificial intelligence.
Someone is always listening — from Future Today Institute
Excerpt:
Very Near-Futures Scenarios (2020 – 2022):
Catastrophic: Big tech and consumer device industries collect and store our conversations surreptitiously while developing new ways to monetize that data. They anonymize and sell it to developers wanting to create their own voice apps or to research institutions wanting to do studies using real-world conversation. Some platforms develop lucrative fee structures allowing others access to our voice data: business intelligence firms, market research agencies, polling agencies, political parties and individual law enforcement organizations. Consumers have little to no ability to see and understand how their voice data are being used and by whom. Opting out of collection systems is intentionally opaque. Trust erodes. Civil unrest grows.
Action Meter:
Watchlist:
Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech — from npr.org by Aarti Shahani
Excerpts:
Regulate us. That’s the unexpected message from one of the country’s leading tech executives. Microsoft President Brad Smith argues that governments need to put some “guardrails” around engineers and the tech titans they serve.
If public leaders don’t, he says, the Internet giants will cannibalize the very fabric of this country.
“We need to work together; we need to work with governments to protect, frankly, something that is far more important than technology: democracy. It was here before us. It needs to be here and healthy after us,” Smith says.
“Almost no technology has gone so entirely unregulated, for so long, as digital technology,” Smith says.
Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education: Applications, Promise and Perils, and Ethical Questions — from er.educause.edu by Elana Zeide
What are the benefits and challenges of using artificial intelligence to promote student success, improve retention, streamline enrollment, and better manage resources in higher education?
Excerpt:
The promise of AI applications lies partly in their efficiency and partly in their efficacy. AI systems can capture a much wider array of data, at more granularity, than can humans. And these systems can do so in real time. They can also analyze many, many students—whether those students are in a classroom or in a student body or in a pool of applicants. In addition, AI systems offer excellent observations and inferences very quickly and at minimal cost. These efficiencies will lead, we hope, to increased efficacy—to more effective teaching, learning, institutional decisions, and guidance. So this is one promise of AI: that it will show us things we can’t assess or even envision given the limitations of human cognition and the difficulty of dealing with many different variables and a wide array of students.
…
A second peril in the use of artificial intelligence in higher education consists of the various legal considerations, mostly involving different bodies of privacy and data-protection law. Federal student-privacy legislation is focused on ensuring that institutions (1) get consent to disclose personally identifiable information and (2) give students the ability to access their information and challenge what they think is incorrect.7 The first is not much of an issue if institutions are not sharing the information with outside parties or if they are sharing through the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which means an institution does not have to get explicit consent from students. The second requirement—providing students with access to the information that is being used about them—is going to be an increasingly interesting issue.8 I believe that as the decisions being made by artificial intelligence become much more significant and as students become more aware of what is happening, colleges and universities will be pressured to show students this information. People are starting to want to know how algorithmic and AI decisions are impacting their lives.
My short advice about legal considerations? Talk to your lawyers. The circumstances vary considerably from institution to institution.
