liberal arts

“Microcredentials Can Make a Huge Difference in Higher Education” [Riggs], education debt swells, + several other items re: HE

On 05/15/2023, in colleges, community colleges, cost of getting a degree, economics, faculty, higher education, law schools, learning ecosystem, liberal arts, parents/guardians, policy, student-related, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

Microcredentials Can Make a Huge Difference in Higher Education — from newthinking.com by Shannon Riggs
The Ecampus executive director of academic programs and learning innovation at Oregon State University believes that shorter form, low-cost courses can open up colleges to more people.

That so much student loan debt exists is a clear signal that higher education needs to innovate to reduce costs, increase access and improve students’ return on investment. Microcredentials are one way we can do this.

As the Supreme Court weighs Biden’s student loan forgiveness, education debt swells — from cnbc.com by Jessica Dickler

KEY POINTS

As the Supreme Court weighs President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, college tuition keeps climbing.
This year’s incoming freshman class can expect to borrow as much as $37,000 to help cover the cost of a bachelor’s degree, according to a recent report.

College is only getting more expensive. Tuition and fees plus room and board at four-year, in-state public colleges rose more than 2% to $23,250, on average, in the 2022-23 academic year; at four-year private colleges, it increased by more than 3% to $53,430, according to the College Board, which tracks trends in college pricing and student aid.

Many students now borrow to cover the tab, which has already propelled collective student loan debt in the U.S. past $1.7 trillion.

Access, Outcomes, and Value: Envisioning the Future of Higher Education — from milkeninstitute.org with Jeff Selingo, Gene Block, Jim Gash, Eric Gertler, and Nicole Hurd

Leaders of colleges and universities face unprecedented challenges today. Tuition has more than doubled over the past two decades as state and federal funding has decreased. Renewed debates about affirmative action and legacy admissions are roiling many campuses and confusing students about what it takes to get accepted. Growing numbers of administrators are matched by declining student enrollment, placing new financial pressures on institutions of higher learning. And many prospective students and their parents are losing faith in the ROI of such an expensive investment and asking the simple question: Is it all worth it? Join distinguished leaders from public and private institutions for this panel discussion on how they are navigating these shifts and how they see the future of higher education.

What the New ‘U.S. News’ Law-School Rankings Reveal About the Rankings Enterprise — from chronicle.com by Francie Diep

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

This year’s lists also offer a hint of how widespread the rankings revolt was. Seventeen medical schools and 62 law schools — nearly a third of the law schools U.S. News ranks — didn’t turn in data to the magazine this year. (It’s not clear what nonparticipation rates have been in the past. Reached by email to request historical context, a spokesperson for U.S. News pointed to webpages that are no longer online. U.S. News ranked law and medical schools that didn’t cooperate this year by using publicly available and past survey data.)

Report: Many borrowers who could benefit from income-driven repayment don’t know about it — from highereddive.com by Laura Spitalniak

Dive Brief:

Student loan borrowers who would stand to benefit the most from income-driven repayment plans, or IDRs, are less likely to know about them, according to a new report from left-leaning think tank New America.
Around 2 in 5 student-debt holders earning less than $30,000 a year reported being unfamiliar with the repayment plans. Under a proposed plan from the U.S. Education Department, IDR minimum monthly loan payments for low-income earners, such as this group, could drop to $0.
Just under half of borrowers in default had not heard of IDRs, despite the plans offering a pathway to becoming current on their loans, the report said. Only one-third of currently defaulted borrowers had ever enrolled in IDR.

Addendum on 5/16/23:

I’m a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We’re Using ChatGPT. — from chronicle.com by

Excerpt:

There’s a remarkable disconnect between how professors and administrators think students use generative AI on written work and how we actually use it. Many assume that if an essay is written with the help of ChatGPT, there will be some sort of evidence — it will have a distinctive “voice,” it won’t make very complex arguments, or it will be written in a way that AI-detection programs will pick up on. Those are dangerous misconceptions. In reality, it’s very easy to use AI to do the lion’s share of the thinking while still submitting work that looks like your own.

The common fear among teachers is that AI is actually writing our essays for us, but that isn’t what happens. You can hand ChatGPT a prompt and ask it for a finished product, but you’ll probably get an essay with a very general claim, middle-school-level sentence structure, and half as many words as you wanted. The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to have the AI walk you through the writing process step by step.

.

From DSC:
The idea of personalized storytelling is highly intriguing to me. If you write a story for someone with their name and character in it, they will likely be even more engaged with the story/content. Our daughter recently did this with a substitute teacher, who she really wanted to thank before she left (for another assignment at another school). I thought it was very creative of her.

How Your Students are Using AI — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman

Excerpts:

Here’s are the five biggest lessons we’ve learned:

1. Many students are already embracing AI in their day to day study
2. Students need AI education, and fast.
3. Students have a preference for free or low-cost alternatives to often expensive, paid-for services
4. Students find value in personalised, dialogue-based learning experiences
5. Ed Tech companies will need to evolve in order to survive.
  .

Curricular Resources about AI for Teaching (CRAFT) — from craft.stanford.edu
A project from the Stanford Graduate School of Education

Excerpt:

We’re building resources to teach AI literacies for high school and college instructors and assembling them into a full curriculum that will be deployed in a course with the National Educational Equity Lab offered in Fall 2023.
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AI video is getting insanely powerful.

Soon, you’ll be able to create a Hollywood-grade movie from your pocket.

Here’s the most breathtaking AI-generated videos I’ve seen:

— The AI Solopreneur (@aisolopreneur) May 11, 2023

ChatGPT has changed the world.

It does lack in some areas, but my favorite use case is leveraging it to teach me things twice as fast.

Here are the 10 best prompts to learn anything faster:

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) May 11, 2023

Why I’m Excited About ChatGPT — from insidehighered.com by Jennie Young
Here are 10 ways ChatGPT will be a boon to first-year writing instruction, Jennie Young writes.

Excerpt:

But from my perspective as a first-year writing program director, I’m excited about how this emerging technology will help students from all kinds of educational backgrounds learn and focus on higher-order thinking skills faster. Here are 10 reasons I’m excited about ChatGPT.

? stfu and take my money

This is the most impressive campaign I’ve seen from a mega brand so far using AI & StableDiffusion.

Would love a breakdown of how this was all done.

pic.twitter.com/H5ryW3owi4

— Linus (???) (@LinusEkenstam) May 12, 2023

edX Debuts Two AI-Powered Learning Assistants Built on ChatGPT — from press.edx.org; with thanks to Matthew Tower for this resource
edX plugin launches in ChatGPT plugin store to give users access to content and course discovery
edX Xpert delivers AI-powered learning and customer support within the edX platform

Excerpt:

LANHAM, Md. – May 12, 2023 – edX, a leading global online learning platform from 2U, Inc. (Nasdaq: TWOU), today announced the debut of two AI-powered innovations: the new edX plugin for ChatGPT and edX Xpert, an AI-powered learning assistant on the edX platform. Both tools leverage the technology of AI research and deployment company OpenAI to deliver real-time academic support and course discovery to help learners achieve their goals.

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.”

Our World Shaken, Not Stirred: Synthetic entertainment, hybrid social experiences, syncing ourselves with apps, and more. [Belsky]

On 04/12/2023, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning / Algorithms, career development, change, changing business models, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, communications, communities of practice, content development, aggregation, repositories, copyright/ownership/NFTs, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, creativity, digital audio, digital storytelling, digital video, disruption, drama/theater, education technology, educational games / serious games, emerging technologies, Emotion, engagement / engaging students, entrepreneurship, experimentation, future, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, K-12 related, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, legislatures / government / legal, liberal arts, media/film, multimedia, new business models, online media, platforms, presentations, productivity / tips and tricks, skills, story, storytelling, teaching & learning, tools, training / L&D, United States, universities, vision/possibilities, webinars, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Before we get to Scott Belsky’s article, here’s an interesting/related item from Tobi Lutke:

I just clued in how insane text2vid will get soon. As crazy as this sounds, we will be able to generate movies from just minor prompts and the path there is pretty clear.

— tobi lutke (@tobi) March 29, 2023

Our World Shaken, Not Stirred: Synthetic entertainment, hybrid social experiences, syncing ourselves with apps, and more. — from implications.com by Scott Belsky
Things will get weird. And exciting.

Excerpts:

Recent advances in technology will ~~stir~~ shake the pot of culture and our day-to-day experiences. Examples? A new era of synthetic entertainment will emerge, online social dynamics will become “hybrid experiences” where AI personas are equal players, and we will sync ourselves with applications as opposed to using applications.

A new era of synthetic entertainment will emerge as the world’s video archives – as well as actors’ bodies and voices – will be used to train models. Expect sequels made without actor participation, a new era of ai-outfitted creative economy participants, a deluge of imaginative media that would have been cost prohibitive, and copyright wars and legislation.

Unauthorized sequels, spin-offs, some amazing stuff, and a legal dumpster fire: Now lets shift beyond Hollywood to the fast-growing long tail of prosumer-made entertainment. This is where entirely new genres of entertainment will emerge including the unauthorized sequels and spinoffs that I expect we will start seeing.

Also relevant/see:

Digital storytelling with generative AI: notes on the appearance of #AICinema — from bryanalexander.org by Bryan Alexander

Excerpt:

This is how I viewed a fascinating article about the so-called #AICinema movement. Benj Edwards describes this nascent current and interviews one of its practitioners, Julie Wieland. It’s a great example of people creating small stories using tech – in this case, generative AI, specifically the image creator Midjourney.

Bryan links to:

Artists astound with AI-generated film stills from a parallel universe — from arstechnica.com by Benj Edwards
A Q&A with “synthographer” Julie Wieland on the #aicinema movement.

From DSC:
How will text-to-video impact the Learning and Development world? Teaching and learning? Those people communicating within communities of practice? Those creating presentations and/or offering webinars?

Hmmm…should be interesting!

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:

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

Designing Virtual Edtech Faculty Development Workshops That Stick: 10 Guiding Principles — from er.educause.edu by Tolulope (Tolu) Noah
These ten principles offer guidance on ways to design and facilitate effective and engaging virtual workshops that leave faculty feeling better equipped to implement new edtech tools.

Excerpt:

I share here ten guiding principles that have shaped my design and facilitation of virtual synchronous edtech workshops. These guiding principles are based on lessons learned in both my previous role as a professional learning specialist at a major technology company and my current role as a faculty developer at a university. In the spirit of James M. Lang’s book Small Teaching, my hope is that the principles shared here may prompt reflection on the small yet impactful moves academic technology specialists, instructional designers, and educational developers can make to create virtual learning experiences whereby faculty leave feeling better equipped to implement the edtech tools they have learned.

Somewhat relevant/see:

Evidence-Based Learning Design 101 — by Dr. Philippa Hardman
A practical guide on how to bake the science of learning into the art of course design

Excerpt:

As I reflect on the experience and what I’ve learned so far, I thought I’d share a response to the question I probably get asked most: what process do you use to go from an idea to a designed learning experience?

So, let’s do a rapid review of the four step process I and my bootcamp alumni use – aka the DOMS™? process – to go from zero to a designed learning experience.

ChatGPT as a teaching tool, not a cheating tool [Rose]

On 03/14/2023, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adjunct faculty, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning / Algorithms, colleges, digital learning, education technology, emerging technologies, experimentation, faculty, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, IT in HE, law schools, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, liberal arts, pedagogy, personalized/customized learning, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, teaching & learning, tools, UK, United States, universities, by Daniel Christian

ChatGPT as a teaching tool, not a cheating tool — from timeshighereducation.com by Jennifer Rose
How to use ChatGPT as a tool to spur students’ inner feedback and thus aid their learning and skills development

Excerpt:

Use ChatGPT to spur student’s inner feedback
One way that ChatGPT answers can be used in class is by asking students to compare what they have written with a ChatGPT answer. This draws on David Nicol’s work on making inner feedback explicit and using comparative judgement. His work demonstrates that in writing down answers to comparative questions students can produce high-quality feedback for themselves which is instant and actionable. Applying this to a ChatGPT answer, the following questions could be used:

Which is better, the ChatGPT response or yours? Why?
What two points can you learn from the ChatGPT response that will help you improve your work?
What can you add from your answer to improve the ChatGPT answer?
How could the assignment question set be improved to allow the student to demonstrate higher-order skills such as critical thinking?
How can you use what you have learned to stay ahead of AI and produce higher-quality work than ChatGPT?

What would higher ed (or even K-12) look like if you could completely scrap it and start over? [Carty]

On 03/11/2023, in business side of he, colleges, community colleges, cost of getting a degree, dangers of the status quo, Design Thinking, higher education, K-12 related, learning ecosystem, liberal arts, reinvent, United States, universities, vision/possibilities, vocational / trades, writing, by Daniel Christian

Transfers From Community College Continue to Fall — from insidehighered.com by Sara Weissman
Despite the decline in transfers, a new report also says six-year college completion rates among transfer students improved.

Excerpt:

Transfers between community colleges and four-year institutions continued to drop last fall, an ongoing trend since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. But the report also contains some good news, including that six-year college completion rates among transfer students improved, despite the disruptive nature of the pandemic.
…
“Upward transfer has continued to decline pretty steadily at this point in every year since the pandemic,” Shapiro said during a media briefing Wednesday. “This suggests that baccalaureate attainment is beginning to appear increasingly out of reach for community college students,” particularly for students enrolled in urban and suburban community colleges, which saw steeper declines in transfers to universities than community colleges in towns or rural areas.

Teaching in an Age of ‘Militant Apathy’ — from chronicle.com by Beth McMurtrie
Immersive education offers a way to reach students. But can it ever become the norm?

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

But as many students continue to exhibit debilitating levels of anxiety, hopelessness, and disconnection — what one professor termed “militant apathy” — colleges are struggling to come up with a response beyond short-term solutions. The standard curricula in higher ed — and the way it’s discussed as primarily a path to economic success — can exacerbate those feelings. Students are told the main point of college is to move up the economic ladder, so no wonder it feels transactional. And the threat of failure must seem paralyzing given the high cost of a degree.
…
Colleges try to counter that by telling students that critical-thinking and communication skills are important as well. “But that’s a pretty vague argument that isn’t obvious for students to internalize and motivate their behavior. So what you see then is widespread disengagement from the curriculum,” says Arum. “For educators like me, what’s missing is what education is about. It’s about psychological well-being and flourishing and growth and human development and encouraging a set of dispositions, attitudes and behaviors that lead to fulfilling lives.”

“In every context, the student needs to feel like they are driving, they are the ones managing their own learning,” says Immordino-Yang. Instead, students have come to expect “‘you tell me what to do and I’ll do it,’” she says. “We need to take that away. That is a crutch. That is not real learning. That is compliance.”

From DSC:
The liberal arts are so important. But at what cost? What are people willing to pay for a more rounded education? The market is speaking — and the liberal arts are dying. I think that less expensive forms of online-based learning may turn out to be the best chance of the liberal arts surviving in the 21st century. The price must come waaaay down.

And speaking of the cost of getting a degree, this item is relevant as well:

Colleges Fear Cost of Doing Business Will Become Much Costlier — from chronicle.com by Lee Gardner
Inflation, enrollment woes, and increasing intolerance of tuition increases have made this budget season especially difficult.

Excerpts:

In decades past, colleges might have mitigated precarious budgets by raising tuition, but that’s a hard row to hoe in 2023.
…
The public colleges most feeling the financial squeeze from lowered enrollments are regional universities and community colleges, which typically receive less state support per student than public flagship universities.
…
Inflation remains high, at around 6 percent, and the biggest worry that it presents for college leaders comes from upward pressure on wages, says Staisloff.

While the sky may not be falling for higher education, Staisloff says “the cloud ceiling keeps dropping and dropping and dropping and dropping, and that’s getting harder to ignore.”

Speaking of the cost of getting a degree as well as higher education’s need to reinvent itself, also see:

College Doesn’t Need to Take Four Years — an opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal by Scott L. Wyatt and Allen C. Guelzo
For many students, the standard bachelor’s degree program has become a costly straitjacket.

AI starter tools for video content creation — from techthatmatters.beehiiv.com by Harsh Makadia

Excerpt:

One of the most exciting applications of AI is in the realm of content creation. What if I told you there are tools to generate videos in mins?

Try these tools today:

Supercreator AI: Create short form videos 10x faster
Lumen5: Automatically turn blog posts into videos
InVideo: Idea to YouTube video
Synthesia: Create videos from plain text in minutes
Narakeet: Get a professionally sounding audio or video in minutes
Movio: Create engaging video content

Why Faculty Must Learn to Swim in Other Waters — from insidehighered.com by Rachel Toor, professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane.

Excerpts:

Academics, even with the best intentions, and especially if we’ve never left school, don’t realize that we’re all swimming in our own little pond.

Most faculty members continue to teach how they were taught. We focus on our disciplines. We indoctrinate students into academic conventions and genres. We sling jargon like short-order cooks. We ask students to write 20-page research papers—the likes of which few professions would ever require.

But how often do faculty members require students to create final projects that will help them get a job?

How many professors are adept at writing a one-page job cover letter? Or a one-page résumé?

From DSC:
I appreciate these great thoughts here from Rachel Toor. Besides helping students learn about networking (and actually putting those skills into practice), applying their research skills to finding good job/organization fits, write effective cover letters, etc., I think such real-world skill development needs to be integrated into the very core of what they are teaching. It needs to be integrated into the curriculum.

ChatGPT for Spanish Classrooms [Biscotti] + other tools-related postings

On 02/14/2023, in 21st century, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning / Algorithms, bots, education technology, internet, K-12 related, languages and translation, liberal arts, podcasting, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, teachers, teaching & learning, tools, Uncategorized, vendors, writing, by Daniel Christian

ChatGPT for Spanish Classrooms — from rdene915.com by Nicole Biscotti, M. Ed.

Excerpt:

ChatGPT is just what the busy Spanish teacher necesita – no wasted time searching for the perfect “lectura” (text). Effective language instruction is coupled with learning about culture and now I’m able to generate texts in seconds AND I can even center them around a Latin American country, cultural point of interest, holiday, grammatical structure, etc. Differentiation and personalized learning, those lofty teaching ideals that can feel a bit heavy when you mean well but have 35 kids in your room, have become that much easier to attain with ChatGPT. It’s possible to generate texts about diverse aspects of culture in seconds and make adjustments for interests, length, rigor, etc. (Kuo & Lai, 2006) (Salaberry, 1999; Rost, 2002).

CURATING YOUR CLASSROOM WITH 9 MUST-HAVE TOOLS FOR RESOURCE COLLECTION – EASY EDTECH PODCAST 202 — from classtechtips.com by Monica Burns

Description:

How do you share resources with students? In this episode, we’ll focus on what happens after you find the very best resources to share with students. You’ll also hear about nine digital tools to help educators build a resource collection for students. So whether you have ten great resources on endangered species to share with your fourth graders or a dozen tutorial videos to share with your eleventh graders, this episode is for you!

50+ Useful AI Writing Tools to Know (2023) — from hongkiat.com

Excerpt:

AI writing tools generate content based on the keywords or prompt provided by users. You can then improve upon the output and make it suitable according to your own requirements.

There are different types of AI writing tools and in this post we are featuring some of the best ones. From content generators and editors to translators and typing assistants, there’s a whole gamut of AI-powered writing tools in the list. Take a look and see if one (or more) catches your interest.

How to Use Minecraft as a Teaching Tool — from intelligenthq.com

Excerpt:

Kids today have grown up with Minecraft, so it’s easy to get them enthusiastic about lessons using it. They can build anything they like, and use Minecraft skins to make the characters they create uniquely their own, getting them especially enthusiastic and involved in their lessons.

Teachers who learn how to use Minecraft as a teaching tool have found that it noticeably improves problem solving, creativity, and the ability to work together. It teaches both 21st century skills and timeless lessons.

On a somewhat related note, also see:

Master The Art Of The Internet With These 10 Tips — from lawtechnologytoday.org
.

Introducing: ChatGPT Edu-Mega-Prompts [Hardman] + several other items re: AI

On 02/06/2023, in adjunct faculty, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning / Algorithms, assessment, bots, colleges, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, digital audio, education, education technology, emerging technologies, faculty, higher education, ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, journalism, K-12 related, languages and translation, law schools, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, learning theories, liberal arts, memory, Natural Language Processing (NLP), open courseware and systems, pedagogy, productivity / tips and tricks, psychology, skills, streams of content, teachers, teaching & learning, tools, training / L&D, vision/possibilities, voice recognition / voice enabled interfaces, by Daniel Christian

Introducing: ChatGPT Edu-Mega-Prompts — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman; with thanks to Ray Schroeder out on LinkedIn for this resource
How to combine the power of AI + learning science to improve your efficiency & effectiveness as an educator

From DSC:
Before relaying some excerpts, I want to say that I get the gist of what Dr. Hardman is saying re: quizzes. But I’m surprised to hear she had so many pedagogical concerns with quizzes. I, too, would like to see quizzes used as an instrument of learning and to practice recall — and not just for assessment. But I would give quizzes a higher thumbs up than what she did. I think she was also trying to say that quizzes don’t always identify misconceptions or inaccurate foundational information.

Excerpts:

The Bad News: Most AI technologies that have been built specifically for educators in the last few years and months imitate and threaten to spread the use of broken instructional practices (i.e. content + quiz).

The Good News: Armed with prompts which are carefully crafted to ask the right thing in the right way, educators can use AI like GPT3 to improve the effectiveness of their instructional practices.

As is always the case, ChatGPT is your assistant. If you’re not happy with the result, you can edit and refine it using your expertise, either alone or through further conversation with ChatGPT.

For example, once the first response is generated, you can ask ChatGPT to make the activity more or less complex, to change the scenario and/or suggest more or different resources – the options are endless.

Philippa recommended checking out Rob Lennon’s streams of content. Here’s an example from his Twitter account:

Everyone’s using ChatGPT.

But almost everyone’s STUCK in beginner mode.

10 techniques to get massively ahead with AI:

(cut-and-paste these prompts?)

— Rob Lennon ? | Audience Growth (@thatroblennon) January 3, 2023

Also relevant/see:

3 Trends That May Unlock AI’s Potential for L&D in 2023 — from learningguild.com by Juan Naranjo

Excerpts:

AI-assisted design and development work
This is the trend most likely to have a dramatic evolution this year.
…
Solutions like large language models, speech generators, content generators, image generators, translation tools, transcription tools, and video generators, among many others, will transform the way IDs create the learning experiences our organizations use. Two examples are:

1. IDs will be doing more curation and less creation:

Many IDs will start pulling raw material from content generators (built using natural language processing platforms like Open AI’s GPT-3, Microsoft’s LUIS, IBM’s Watson, Google’s BERT, etc.) to obtain ideas and drafts that they can then clean up and add to the assets they are assembling. As technology advances, the output from these platforms will be more suitable to become final drafts, and the curation and clean-up tasks will be faster and easier.
Then, the designer can leverage a solution like DALL-E 2 (or a product developed based on it) to obtain visuals that can (or not) be modified with programs like Illustrator or Photoshop (see image below for Dall-E’s “Cubist interpretation of AI and brain science.”

2. IDs will spend less, and in some cases no time at all, creating learning pathways

AI engines contained in LXPs and other platforms will select the right courses for employees and guide these learners from their current level of knowledge and skill to their goal state with substantially less human intervention.

The Creator of ChatGPT Thinks AI Should Be Regulated — from time.com by John Simons

Excerpts:

Somehow, Mira Murati can forthrightly discuss the dangers of AI while making you feel like it’s all going to be OK.
…
A growing number of leaders in the field are warning of the dangers of AI. Do you have any misgivings about the technology?

This is a unique moment in time where we do have agency in how it shapes society. And it goes both ways: the technology shapes us and we shape it. There are a lot of hard problems to figure out. How do you get the model to do the thing that you want it to do, and how you make sure it’s aligned with human intention and ultimately in service of humanity? There are also a ton of questions around societal impact, and there are a lot of ethical and philosophical questions that we need to consider. And it’s important that we bring in different voices, like philosophers, social scientists, artists, and people from the humanities.

Whispers of A.I.’s Modular Future — from newyorker.com by James Somers; via Sam DeBrule

Excerpts:

Gerganov adapted it from a program called Whisper, released in September by OpenAI, the same organization behind ChatGPTand dall-e. Whisper transcribes speech in more than ninety languages. In some of them, the software is capable of superhuman performance—that is, it can actually parse what somebody’s saying better than a human can.
…
Until recently, world-beating A.I.s like Whisper were the exclusive province of the big tech firms that developed them.

Ever since I’ve had tape to type up—lectures to transcribe, interviews to write down—I’ve dreamed of a program that would do it for me. The transcription process took so long, requiring so many small rewindings, that my hands and back would cramp. As a journalist, knowing what awaited me probably warped my reporting: instead of meeting someone in person with a tape recorder, it often seemed easier just to talk on the phone, typing up the good parts in the moment.

From DSC:
Journalism majors — and even seasoned journalists — should keep an eye on this type of application, as it will save them a significant amount of time and/or money.

Microsoft Teams Premium: Cut costs and add AI-powered productivity — from microsoft.com by Nicole Herskowitz

Excerpt:

Built on the familiar, all-in-one collaborative experience of Microsoft Teams, Teams Premium brings the latest technologies, including Large Language Models powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, to make meetings more intelligent, personalized, and protected—whether it’s one-on-one, large meetings, virtual appointments, or webinars.

Learning Ecosystems

Higher Learning Commission’s 2023 Trends

Designing Virtual Edtech Faculty Development Workshops That Stick: 10 Guiding Principles [Noah]

ChatGPT as a teaching tool, not a cheating tool [Rose]

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