Also see:
What the Future of Learning Looks Like in the Era of AI — from the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan, by Sean Corp
AI & the Future of Learning Summit brings industry, education leaders together to discuss higher education’s opportunity to lead, what students need, and what partnerships are possible
As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the nature of work and learning, speakers at the University of Michigan’s AI & the Future of Learning Summit delivered a clear message: higher education must take a leading role in defining what comes next.
One CEO of a leading educational technology company put it like this: “The only bad thing would be universities standing still.”
Universities must embrace their roles as providers of continuous, lifelong learning that evolves alongside technological change.
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This shift is already affecting early-career pathways. Employers are placing greater emphasis on experience, while traditional entry-level roles are becoming less accessible. There is often a gap between what a credential represents and the expectations of employers.
That gap is particularly evident in access to internships. Chris Parrish, co-founder and president of Podium, noted that millions of students compete for a limited number of internships each year, making it increasingly difficult to gain the experience employers demand.
“If you miss out on an internship, you’re twice as likely to be unemployed,” Parrish said.
The Course Is Dying as the Unit of Learning — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman
Here’s why, and what’s replacing It
What the Bleeding Edge Looks like in Practice
So what does “the new stack” actually look like when organisations lean into this? Here are four real patterns already in play.
Engineering: from engine courses to in-workflow AI coaching.
Product development: from courses to craft-specific agents.
Compliance: from annual course to nudge systems.|
Enablement systems, not catalogues.
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The quest to build a better AI tutor — from hechingerreport.org by Jill Barshay
Researchers make progress with an older ed tech idea: personalized practice
One promising idea has less to do with how an AI tutor explains concepts and more with what it asks students to practice next.
A team at the University of Pennsylvania, which included some AI skeptics, recently tested this approach in a study of close to 800 Taiwanese high school students learning Python programming. All the students used the same AI tutor, which was designed not to give away answers.
But there was one key difference. Half the students were randomly assigned to a fixed sequence of practice problems, progressing from easy to hard. The other half received a personalized sequence with the AI tutor continuously adjusting the difficulty of each problem based on how the student was performing and interacting with the chatbot.
The idea is based on what educators call the “zone of proximal development.” When problems are too easy, students get bored. When they’re too hard, students get frustrated. The goal is to keep students in a sweet spot: challenged, but not overwhelmed.
The researchers found that students in the personalized group did better on a final exam than students in the fixed problem group. The difference was characterized as the equivalent of 6 to 9 months of additional schooling, an eye-catching claim for an after-school online course that lasted only five months.
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To address this, Chung’s team combined a large language model with a separate machine-learning algorithm that analyzes how students interact with the online course platform — how they answer the practice questions, how many times they revise or edit their coding, and the quality of their conversations with the chatbot — and uses that information to decide which problem to serve up next.
AI and the Law: What Educators Need to Know About Responsible Use in a Rapidly Changing Landscape — from rdene915.com by Dr. Rachelle Dené Poth, JD
As both an attorney and educator who has spent more than eight years researching, teaching, presenting, and writing about AI, I have worked with schools across K–12 and higher education that are navigating these exact questions. The legal implications of AI are not barriers to innovation, but I consider them to serve as guardrails that assist schools with adopting technology responsibly. The key is protecting students, educators, and institutions and staying informed. Understanding the legal landscape and any potential legal implications as a result of the use of AI in classrooms helps schools move forward with confidence rather than hesitation.
Sections of Rachelle’s posting include:
Legal AI Access at 83%, But Trust Issues Remain — from artificiallawyer.com
A new survey of over 200 inhouse and law firm leaders provides solid evidence that while AI tools are now ‘standard’ across our sector, that trust in AI outputs fundamentally drives usage, along with ROI – and vice versa.
The data, from ALSP Factor, shows that 83% had ‘broad AI access’, which is up from 61% in 2025, and in itself is a very positive development that tells us legal AI is now becoming ubiquitous for commercial lawyers, with around 54% using such tools ‘often’.
From DSC:
I have been proposing that the AI-based learning platform of the future will be constantly doing this — every single day. It will know what the in-demand skills are — at any given moment in time. It will then be able to direct you to resources that will help you gain those skills. Though in my vision, the system is querying actual/open job descriptions, not analyzing learning data from enterprise learners. Perhaps I should add that to the vision.
Coursera’s Job Skills Report 2026: Top skills for your students — from coursera.org
The Job Skills Report 2026 analyzes learning data from more than 6 million enterprise learners to identify the future job skills organizations need most. It’s designed for HR and L&D leaders; data, IT, and software & product development leaders; higher education administrators; and government agencies seeking actionable insights on workforce skills trends and AI-driven transformation.
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Drawing on data from 6 million enterprise learners across nearly 7,000 organizations, the Job Skills Report 2026 guides you through the skills reshaping the global economy. This year’s analysis spans Data, IT, and Software & Product Development—and the Generative AI skills becoming essential for every role.
From DSC:
The types of postings/articles (such as the one below) make me ask, are we not shooting ourselves in the foot with AI and recent college graduates? If the bottom rungs continue to disappear, internships and apprenticeships can only go so far. There aren’t enough of them — especially valuable ones. So as this article points out, there will be threats to the long-term health of our talent pipelines unless we can take steps to thwart those impacts — and to do so fairly soon.
To me…vocational training and jobs are looking better all the time — i.e., plumbers, carpenters, electricians, mechanics, and more.
Can New Graduates Compete With AI? — from builtin.combyRichard Johnson
The increasing adoption of AI automation is compressing early-career jobs. How should new graduates get a foothold in the economy now?
Summary: AI is hollowing out entry-level roles by automating routine tasks, eliminating a rung on the career ladder. New graduates face intense competition and a rising skill floor. While firms gain short-term productivity, they risk a long-term talent shortage by eliminating junior training grounds.
Conversations about AI have covered all grounds: hype, fear and slop. But while some roll their eyes at yet another automation headline, soon?to?be graduates are watching the labor market with a very different level of urgency. They’re entering a world where the old paradox of needing experience to get experience is colliding with a new reality: AI is absorbing the standardized, routine tasks that once defined entry?level work. The result isn’t just a shift in job descriptions or skill-requirements, but rather a structural reshaping of the career pipeline.
Entry-level workers face an outsized disruption to their long-term career trajectories. They have the least buffer to adapt given their lack of relevant job market experience and heightened financial pressure to secure a job quickly with the student-debt repayment periods for recent graduates looming.
Momentum early in one’s career matters, and the first job on a resume shapes future compensation bands and opportunities. It also serves as a signal for perceived specialization or, at minimum, interest. Losing that foothold has compounding effects to one’s career ladder.
Also relevant/see:
New Anthropic Institute to Study Risks and Economic Effects of Advanced AI — from campustechnology.com by John K. Waters
Key Takeaways
Here is Chris Martin’s posting on LinkedIn.com:
Here is Dominik Mate Kovacs’ posting on LinkedIn.com:
The AI ‘hivemind’: Why so many student essays sound alike — from hechingerreport.org by Jill Barshay
A study of more than 70 large language models found similar answers to brainstorming and creative writing prompts
The answers were frequently indistinguishable across different models by different companies that have different architectures and use different training data. The metaphors, imagery, word choices, sentence structures — even punctuation — often converged. Jiang’s team called this phenomenon “inter-model homogeneity” and quantified the overlaps and similarities. To drive the point home, Jiang titled her paper, the “Artificial Hivemind.” The study won a best paper award at the annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in December 2025, one of the premier gatherings for AI research.
AI Has No Moral Compass. Do You? — from michelleweise.substack.com by Michelle Weise & Dana Walsh
Why the Age of AI Demands We Take Character Formation Seriously
Here’s something to chew on:
Anthropic, the company behind Claude — a chatbot used by 30 million users per month — has exactly one person (whom we know of) working on AI ethics. One. A young Scottish philosopher is doing the vital work of training a large language model to discern right from wrong.
I don’t say this to shame Anthropic. In fact, Anthropic appears to be the only company (that we know of) being explicit about the moral foundations and reasoning of its chatbot. Hundreds of millions of users worldwide are leveraging tools from other LLMs that do not appear to have an explicit moral compass being cultivated from within.
I raise this because this is yet another example of where we are: extraordinary technical power advancing without an equally strong moral infrastructure to support it.
Why do we keep producing people who are skilled but not wise?
Here is Pradnya’s posting out on LinkedIn.com:
From DSC…note these excerpts from Pradnya’s posting:
Pradnya links to a page out at ParadisoSolutions.com. Check out some of the functionality this AI-powered system provides:
The Future of College in an AI World — from linkedin.com by Jeff Selingo
In today’s issue: The tension over AI in higher ed; application inflation continues and testing is back; what’s the future of the original classroom technology, the learning management system.
Hundreds of higher ed and industry leaders gathered Tuesday for a summit
on AI and the future of learning at the University of Michigan.
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Conversations like the one we had at Michigan this week are necessary, but the action rarely matches the ambition.
AI Music Generators: Teaching With These Catchy AI Tools — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
AI music generators are getting better and better, and there are more applications in the classroom as a result.
Are All AI Music Generators More Or Less The Same?
No. After experimenting with a few various free ones, I found a wide range of quality with the same prompts.
Gemini is the only one I’d currently recommend. It’s user-friendly but limited and only creates 30-second clips. Other music generators could potentially outperform Gemini with prompt adjustments. The ones I tried did better with the instrumentals but struggled more with the lyrics, and that kind of defeated the purpose of the tool for me.
ChatDOC: Teaching With The AI Summarizing Tool — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
ChatDOC lets users turn any PDF into an AI chatbot that can summarize the text, answer questions, and generate quizzes.
What Is ChatDOC?
ChatDOC is an AI designed to help users interact with PDFs of various types, be it research papers, short stories, or chapters from larger works. Users upload a PDF and then have the opportunity to “chat” with that document, that is speak with a chatbot that bases its answers off of the uploaded text.
ChatDOC can perform tasks such as provide a short summary, search for specific terms, explain the overall theme if it’s a work of literature, or unpack the science in a research paper.
Other similar tools are out there, but ChatDOC is definitely one of the better PDF readers I’ve used. Its free version is quick and easy-to-use, and delivers on its promise of providing an AI that can discuss a given document with users and even quiz them on it.
From AI access to workforce readiness — from chieflearningofficer.com by Johnny Hamilton, Amy Stratbucker, & Brad Bigelow
Is your workforce using the right tool with an outdated mindset and playbook? Why old playbooks fall short — and what learning leaders must do next.
The leadership opportunity
Organizations do not need to predict every future AI capability. They need systems that allow people to explore with curiosity, practice safely, reflect deeply and adapt continuously — starting with what they already have and extending as capabilities evolve.
For CLOs, this is a moment to lead from the center of change — designing workforce readiness that keeps pace with accelerating technology while making work more rewarding for employees and more valuable for the organization. That is how AI moves from the promise of transformation to demonstrated readiness and, ultimately, from promise to performance.
Addendums on 3/19/26:
How to Build Practice-Based Learning Activities with AI — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman
Four evidence-based methods for designing, building & deploying active learning activities with your favourite LLM
Most L&D teams are using AI to make content faster. The real opportunity is using it as a practice engine.
The Synthesia 2026 AI in L&D Report f2026 AI in L&D Report found that the fastest-growing areas of planned AI adoption aren’t in content creation — they’re in assessments and simulations (36%), adaptive pathways (33%), and AI tutors (29%). In other words: L&D teams are starting to realise that the most powerful use of AI isn’t producing learning materials. It’s creating environments where learners actually practise.
And you can build these right now — no dev team, no custom platform, no code. Each method below includes a prompt you can paste into your preferred AI tool to generate a working interactive prototype: a self-contained practice activity with a briefing screen, a live AI interaction, and a debrief — all running in the browser, ready to share with stakeholders or deploy to learners.
OpenAI Adds Interactive Math and Science Learning Tools to ChatGPT — from campustechnology.com by Rhea Kelly
Key Takeaways
How to Get Consistent, On-Brand Course Images from Any AI Image Tool — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman
A 3-step workflow that works every time — whatever AI tool you’re using
Most designers try to describe their way to an image. That’s the wrong approach. The goal is to show the tool the world it should be working in, then give it the minimum it needs to place your subject inside that world.
Every long, over-specified prompt is a sign that your visual inputs aren’t doing enough work.
The fix is an 3-step process which gives you superpowers in AI image generation…
How AI Could Transform, or Replace, the LMS — from futureupodcast.com by Jeff Selingo, Michael Horn, and Matthew Pittinsky
Tuesday, March 10, 2026 – For 30 years now, colleges have relied on the Learning Management System, or LMS, as a key portal for professors and students to teach and learn. It’s a tool that has helped colleges adapt to online learning and bring digital tools to classroom teaching. But generative AI seems poised to disrupt the LMS. And it’s unclear whether the LMS will evolve—or be replaced altogether. For this episode, Jeff and Michael talk with a pioneer of the technology, Matthew Pittinsky, about the lessons of past moments of tech disruption like the smartphone and cloud computing and about what could be different this time. This episode is made with support from Ascendium Education Group.
Gemini, Explained — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan
5 features worth your time — tested and compared
Google’s AI, Gemini, has quickly become one of the AI tools I rely on most. It builds dashboards and creates remarkable infographics. It spins out comprehensive research reports in minutes that would once have taken days to assemble.
It’s improving every month. On March 13, Google announced Ask Maps, so you can query Gemini about things like “Which nearby tennis courts are open with lights so I can play tonight?” On March 10, Gemini added new integrations to build, summarize, and analyze your Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
In today’s post below: catch up on the Gemini features worth your time, candid comparisons with other AI tools, and answers to the questions I hear most.
How we’re reimagining Maps with Gemini — from blog.google
Ask Maps answers your real-world questions with a conversation, and Immersive Navigation makes your route more intuitive.
Today, Google Maps is fundamentally changing what a map can do. By bringing together the world’s freshest map with our most capable Gemini models, we’re transforming exploration into a simple conversation and making driving more intuitive than ever with our biggest navigation upgrade in over a decade.
Ask anything about any place
We’re introducing Ask Maps, a new conversational experience that answers complex, real-world questions a map could never answer before. Now you can ask for things like, “My phone is dying — where can I charge it without having to wait in a long line for coffee?” or “Is there a public tennis court with lights on that I can play at tonight?” Previously, finding this information meant lots of research and sifting through reviews. But now, you can just tap the “Ask Maps” button and get your questions answered conversationally, with a customized map to help you visualize your options.
U.S. Department of Labor Defines 5 Key Areas of AI Literacy — from campustechnology.com by Rhea Kelly
Key Takeaways
Teach Smarter with AI — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan and Lance Eaton
10 tested strategies from two educators who actually use them
I recently talked with Lance Eaton, Senior Associate Director of AI and Teaching & Learning at Northeastern University and writer of AI + Education = Simplified. We traded ideas about what’s actually working. We came up with 10 specific, practical ways anyone who teaches, coaches, or leads can put AI to work.
Watch the full conversation above, or read highlights below.
Beyond Audio Summaries: How to Use NotebookLM to *Actually* Design Better Learning — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman
Five methods to maximise the value of NotebookLM’s features
In practice, what makes NotebookLM different for learning designers is four things:
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5 Evidence-Based Methods NotebookLM Operationalises…
Shadow AI Isn’t a Threat: It’s a Signal — from campustechnology.com by Damien Eversmann
Unofficial AI use on campus reveals more about institutional gaps than misbehavior.
Key Takeaways
How L&D Can Lead in the Age of AI Even If Your Company’s Not Ready — from learningguild.com
How to lead even when your company doesn’t allow AI
Even if your corporation isn’t ready for AI, you can still research tools personally to stay ahead of the curve, so when organizational restrictions lift, you are ready to use AI for learning right away. Here are some tools you can test at home if they’re restricted in your workplace:
The Higher Ed Playbook for AI Affordability — from campustechnology.com by Jason Dunn-Potter
Key Takeaways
Claude is quietly becoming the go-to AI tool for learning designers. Here’s a 101 guide. — from Linkedin.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman