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.
Healthcare High Schools — from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain Bloomberg and hospitals back dual-enrollment path from K-12 to high-demand jobs.
More career exploration in high school is needed to help Americans make better-informed choices about their education and job options, experts agree. And serious, employer-backed efforts to tighten connections between school and work are likely to emerge first in healthcare, given the industry’s severe staffing woes.
A new $250M investment by Bloomberg Philanthropies could be an important step in this direction. The money will seed the creation of healthcare-focused high schools in 10 U.S. locations, with a plan to enroll 6K students who will graduate directly from the early-college high schools into high-demand healthcare jobs that pay family-sustaining wages.
Last year, the landscape of K-12 education transformed as a record-breaking 20 states expanded school choice options. However, that is not the only school choice story to come out of 2023. As the nation steps into 2024, a fresh emphasis on innovation has emerged, along with new options for families. This is particularly true within the realm of microschooling.
Microschooling is an education model that is small by design — typically with 15 or fewer students of varying ages per class. It fosters a personalized and community-centric approach to learning that is especially effective in addressing the unique educational needs of diverse student populations. Programs like Education Savings Accounts are helping to fuel these microschools.
Large classes create more distractions for students who struggle to focus, and they inevitably get less attention and support as there are more students for teachers to work with. High numbers of students make it more difficult to plan for individual needs and force teachers to teach to an imaginary middle. A rigid schedule makes it easy to schedule adults and services, but it is a challenge for kids who need time to get engaged and prefer to keep working at a challenge once they are locked in.
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Now that I know what can engage and motivate these students, I can imagine creating more opportunities that allow them to harness their talents and grow their skills and knowledge. But we’re already a third of the way through the school year, and my curriculum requires me to teach certain topics for certain lengths of time, which doesn’t leave room for many of the types of experiences these kids need. Soon, June will come and I’ll pass them along to the next teacher, who won’t know what I know and will need another four months to learn it, wasting valuable time in these students’ educations.
From DSC: We need teachers and professors to be able to contribute to learners’ records. Each student can review and decide whether they want to allow access to other teachers– or even to employers. Educators could insert what they’ve found to work with a particular student, what passions/interests that student has, or what to avoid (if possible). For example, has this student undergone some trauma, and therefore trauma-informed teaching should be employed.
IEPs could be a part of learners’ records/profiles. The teams working on implementing these IEP’s could share important, searchable information.
Washington state issued new guidelines for K-12 public schools last week based on the principle of “embracing a human-centered approach to AI,” which also embraces the use of AI in the education process. The state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Chris Reykdal, commented in a letter accompanying the new guidelines:
Tertiary Education in the UK needs a fresh idea. What we need is an initiative on the same scale as The Open University, kicked off over 50 years ago.
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It is clear that an educational vision is needed and I think the best starting point is that outlined and executed by Paul LeBlanc at SNHU. It is substantial, well articulated and has worked in what has become the largest University in the US.
It would be based on the competence model, with a focus on skills shortages. Here’s a starter with 25 ideas, a manifesto of sorts, based on lessons learnt from other successful models:
Non-traditional students in terms of age and background
Quick and easy application process
Personalised learning using AI
Multimodal from the start
Full range of summarisation, create self-assessment, dialogue tools
It’s an era many instructors would like to put behind them: black boxes on Zoom screens, muffled discussions behind masks, students struggling to stay engaged. But how much more challenging would teaching during the pandemic have been if colleges did not have experts on staff to help with the transition? On many campuses, teaching-center directors, instructional designers, educational technologists, and others worked alongside professors to explore learning-management systems, master video technology, and rethink what and how they teach.
A new book out this month, Higher Education Beyond Covid: New Teaching Paradigms and Promise, explores this period through the stories of campus teaching and learning centers. Their experiences reflect successes and failures, and what higher education could learn as it plans for the future.
As usual, our readers were full of suggestions. Kathryn Schild, the lead instructional designer in faculty development and instructional support at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, shared a guide she’s compiled on holding asynchronous discussions, which includes a section on difficult topics.
In an email, Schild also pulled out a few ideas she thought were particularly relevant to Le’s question, including:
Set the ground rules as a class. One way to do this is to share your draft rules in a collaborative document and ask students to annotate it and add suggestions.
Plan to hold fewer difficult discussions than in a face-to-face class, and work on quality over quantity. This could include multiweek discussions, where you spiral through the same issue with fresh perspectives as the class learns new approaches.
Start with relationship-building interactions in the first few weeks, such as introductions, low-stakes group assignments, or peer feedback, etc.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta, took part in the first-ever Metaverse interview using photo-realistic virtual avatars, demonstrating the Metaverse’s capability for virtual communication.
Zuckerberg appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast, using scans of both Fridman and Zuckerberg to create realistic avatars instead of using a live video feed. A computer model of the avatar’s faces and bodies are put into a Codec, using a headset to send an encoded version of the avatar.
The interview explored the future of AI in the metaverse, as well as the Quest 3 headset and the future of humanity.
Big Ideas is Education Week’s annual special report that brings the expertise of our newsroom—and occasionally those beyond our newsroom—to bear on the challenges you might be facing in your classroom, school, or district. Big Ideas questions the status quo and explores opportunities to help you build a better, more just learning environment for all students. Browse our collection.
PXU City HS has no physical site — its 83 students create custom programs, choosing from a menu of some 500 options fromPhoenix Union High School District’s bricks-and-mortar schools; its online-only program, internships; jobs; college classes; and career training programs.
But in the process, it became clear just how many high school-aged students were working, caring for siblings, filling in for their parents or significantly behind — or ahead and bored — academically.
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If PXU City works as well for all its students as it does for Dominguez, he adds, every high school in the district ought to throw away the bell schedule and offer a truly personalized education.
There are 10 areas of study students chose from:architectural design, business administration logistics-distribution, computer science, construction technology, cybersecurity, diesel/auto technology, energy technologies, human and social services, teaching and training, and sports medicine.
Students pick a job within the program they’re working toward, but that can change, Cordia said, noting that there are hundreds of possible jobs within the automotive program.
The school received e more than 1,000 applications from interested students, he said, calling it “very humbling.”
Addendum that also involves changes within the K12 learning ecosystem:
What does it mean to be a student in 2023, on the fading tail end of a global pandemic and in the midst of lingering uncertainty about the world? What do students still need from a postsecondary education, and where does technology serve as a fulcrum—for better and for worse—both opening and closing students’ paths forward through their educational journeys?
In this report we draw on data from EDUCAUSE’s 2023 Student Survey to offer higher education leaders and decision-makers key insights as they consider what these questions might mean for their particular institutions and communities.
The report explores findings across three main areas, each representing a key challenge (and opportunity) institutions are going to face now and in the future:
Supporting students on and off campus
The role of students as consumers in the educational marketplace
Equity and accessibility in teaching and learning
Students who are empowered to “choose their own adventure” with their course modality engagements are far more satisfied with their course experiences than those who don’t get to choose.
This is the first faculty research conducted by EDUCAUSE since 2019. Since then, the higher education landscape has been through a lot, including COVID-19, fluctuations in enrollment and public funding, and the rapid adoption of multiple instructional modalities and new technologies. In this report, we describe the findings of the research in four key areas:
Modality preferences and the impacts of teaching in non-preferred modes
Experiences teaching online and hybrid courses
Technology and digital availability of course components
Types of support needed and utilized for teaching
From DSC: Polling the faculty members and getting their feedback is not as relevant and important to the future of higher education as better addressing the needs and wants of parents and students who are paying the bills. Asking faculty members what they want to post online is not as relevant as what students want and need to see online.
“It’s an example of the streamlined admissions practices that colleges across the country are using to combat the ongoing problem of low student enrollment.”
DC: But it’s not getting at the problem of *not providing enough value* for the price. https://t.co/Ye1FFep48z
— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) August 25, 2023
From DSC: More fringe responses — versus overhauling pricing, updating curriculum, providing more opportunities to try out jobs before investing in a degree, and/or better rewarding those adjunct faculty members who are doing the majority of the teaching on many campuses.
Before the pandemic, online learning programs were typically for people going back to school to augment or change their career or pursuing a graduate degree to enhance their career while they work. That attitude is shifting as students juggle learning with jobs, family responsibilities, and commutes. In California, 4 in 5 community college classes were in person before the pandemic. By 2021, just 1 in 4 were in person, while 65% were online, according to the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office.
Younger students are also opting for online classes. EducationDynamics found in 2023 that the largest share of students pursuing undergraduate or graduate degrees online is 35 or younger. That said, 35% of students pursuing online undergraduate degrees are between
So, as educators, mentors, and guides to our future generations, we must ask ourselves three pivotal questions:
What value do we offer to our students?
What value will they need to offer to the world?
How are we preparing them to offer that value?
The answers to these questions are crucial, and they will redefine the trajectory of our education system.
We need to create an environment that encourages curiosity, embraces failure as a learning opportunity, and celebrates diversity. We need to teach our students how to learn, how to ask the right questions, and how to think for themselves.
Leveraging ChatGPT for learning is the most meaningful skill this year for lifelong learners. But it’s too hard to find resources to master it.
As a learning science nerd, I’ve explored hundreds of prompts over the past months. Most of the advice doesn’t go beyond text summaries and multiple-choice testing.
That’s why I’ve created this article — it merges learning science with prompt writing to help you learn anything faster.
Midjourney AI Art for Teachers (for any kind of teacher, not just Art Teachers) — from The AI Educator on YouTube by Dan Fitzpatrick
From DSC: This is a very nice, clearly illustrated, free video to get started with the Midjourney (text-to-image) app. Nice work Dan!
In the new-normal of generative AI, how does one articulate the value of academic integrity? This blog presents my current response in about 2,500 words; a complete answer could fill a sizable book.
Massive amounts of misinformation are disseminated about generative AI, so the first part of my discussion clarifies what large language models (Chat-GPT and its counterparts) can currently do and what they cannot accomplish at this point in time. The second part describes ways in which generative AI can be misused as a means of learning; unfortunately, many people are now advocating for these mistaken applications to education. The third part describes ways in which large language models (LLM), used well, may substantially improve learning and education. I close with a plea for a robust, informed public discussion about these topics and issues.
Many of the more than a dozen teachers TIME interviewed for this story argue that the way to get kids to care is to proactively use ChatGPT in the classroom.
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Some of those creative ideas are already in effect at Peninsula High School in Gig Harbor, about an hour from Seattle. In Erin Rossing’s precalculus class, a student got ChatGPT to generate a rap about vectors and trigonometry in the style of Kanye West, while geometry students used the program to write mathematical proofs in the style of raps, which they performed in a classroom competition. In Kara Beloate’s English-Language Arts class, she allowed students reading Shakespeare’s Othello to use ChatGPT to translate lines into modern English to help them understand the text, so that they could spend class time discussing the plot and themes.
I found that other developed countries share concerns about students cheating but are moving quickly to use AI to personalize education, enhance language lessons and help teachers with mundane tasks, such as grading. Some of these countries are in the early stages of training teachers to use AI and developing curriculum standards for what students should know and be able to do with the technology.
Several countries began positioning themselves several years ago to invest in AI in education in order to compete in the fourth industrial revolution.
AI in Education— from educationnext.org by John Bailey The leap into a new era of machine intelligence carries risks and challenges, but also plenty of promise
In the realm of education, this technology will influence how students learn, how teachers work, and ultimately how we structure our education system. Some educators and leaders look forward to these changes with great enthusiasm. Sal Kahn, founder of Khan Academy, went so far as to say in a TED talk that AI has the potential to effect “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” But others warn that AI will enable the spread of misinformation, facilitate cheating in school and college, kill whatever vestiges of individual privacy remain, and cause massive job loss. The challenge is to harness the positive potential while avoiding or mitigating the harm.
Generative AI and education futures — from ucl.ac.uk Video highlights from Professor Mike Sharples’ keynote address at the 2023 UCL Education Conference, which explored opportunities to prosper with AI as a part of education.
Bringing AI Literacy to High Schools— from by Nikki Goth Itoi Stanford education researchers collaborated with teachers to develop classroom-ready AI resources for high school instructors across subject areas.
To address these two imperatives, all high schools need access to basic AI tools and training. Yet the reality is that many underserved schools in low-income areas lack the bandwidth, skills, and confidence to guide their students through an AI-powered world. And if the pattern continues, AI will only worsen existing inequities. With this concern top of mind plus initial funding from the McCoy Ethics Center, Lee began recruiting some graduate students and high school teachers to explore how to give more people equal footing in the AI space.
Per Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO: “This system-wide industry micro-credential program sets an innovative blueprint for the future of higher education.”
The University of Texas and Coursera, the online learning platform and a pioneer of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS), are launching a large-scale, industry-recognized micro-credential program. The collaboration was announced today in a blogpost by Coursera.
Through the new partnership, every student, faculty, and staff (and even alumni) across all nine universities in the University of Texas (UT) System will gain access to Courser’s Career Academy for no additional cost to them.
The most significant problem I’ve seen for aspiring instructional designers is that they don’t have a solid plan in place with how to make acquiring a new job a reality. What does this involve? A monumental portion of instructional design is knowing about how learning works. Yes, there are other components about instructional design like technology, project management, relationship management, research, but at the end of the day, you need to know how people learn to design meaningful learning experiences. So, think of your instructional design journey as a learning experience. How would you reverse engineer this process to help you obtain your goal? Let’s start by asking a few questions:
