Online learning platform Coursera is taking a page straight out of TikTok’s playbook. The company has launched a new AI-powered feed designed to serve short-form educational content in a scrollable, personalized format, signaling a major shift in how digital learning platforms may try to keep users engaged.
The feature introduces bite-sized video lessons, clips, and explainers curated through artificial intelligence based on a user’s interests, learning habits, career goals, and previous course activity. Instead of committing to hour-long lectures or full certification programs upfront, users can now discover short educational snippets designed to make learning feel more casual, accessible, and addictive.
Users scroll through a feed of short educational videos and AI-curated learning moments covering topics ranging from coding and business to AI, productivity, data science, and personal development.
“Learning ecosystems begin with people.”— Getting Smart
ASU/GSV Summit
There’s something about walking into a space like the ASU+GSV Summit that feels a little like stepping into a living, breathing idea. You hear fragments of possibility in passing conversations, see it in the way people lean in a little closer during sessions, feel it in the quiet moments when something lands and you know it’s going to stay with you. This year, what lingered wasn’t just the talk of innovation; it was a deeper pull toward something more human. A reminder that before we build better systems, we have to create better conditions for dreaming. And there’s a kind of quiet joy that emerges when educators find each other in that work, when ideas connect, and you can feel the bridges across networks and ecosystems getting stronger in real time.
And dreaming is not a given. It requires space, safety, and adults who understand the weight of what they’re holding. The most powerful moments weren’t about what we can do for learners, but how we show up with them. Adults who are still learning, still stretching, still willing to have their thinking reshaped are the ones who make room for young people to imagine beyond what they’ve seen. That kind of space doesn’t happen by accident. It’s protected. It’s intentional. It’s built by people who know their non-negotiables, who draw clear lines around dignity and belonging so learners can take risks without fear of losing themselves in the process.
Across conversations on pathways, experience, and AI, there was a steady undercurrent. Knowledge alone isn’t carrying the day anymore. Young people need chances to test, to try, to wrestle with ideas in real contexts. That’s where wisdom starts to take shape. AI showed up as a partner in that work, not the main character, but a tool that can expand thinking when used well. Still, the heartbeat of it all is human. It’s the relationships, the networks, the shared belief that we don’t have to do this alone. When adults come together to learn, to challenge each other, and to build something bigger than their own corner, they create the kind of ecosystems where young people don’t just prepare for the future, they begin to shape it.
Jean-Claude Brizard on the Center for Learner Pathway Innovations Key Points
* Design pathways as “unbounded” and co-created: Build systems where learners have real agency and visibility into options—without being locked into narrow tracks or regional constraints.
* Modernize credentialing to recognize all learning: Districts should capture and verify learning from internships, projects, and out-of-school experiences (e.g., via learner records/verified experiences) so students can communicate value to employers and colleges.
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.
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.
5 Tech Strategies to Enhance Student-Led Learning — from edutopia.org by Rachelle Dené Poth While technology has potential to distract students, it can also boost engagement and help them actively demonstrate their learning.
Over the years, I have learned that engagement doesn’t happen simply by adding technology. It increases when we give students more ownership by designing experiences that allow them to build, collaborate, reflect, and teach one another. Depending on how we use it, technology can either amplify engagement or distract from it. Technology can help build students’ confidence in learning, but it can also lead to passivity. When technology is used to amplify students’ voice, choice, and ownership in learning, their engagement will naturally increase.
Here are five strategies and some digital tools that can be used across grade levels and content areas to boost student engagement, build confidence, foster collaboration, and support meaningful learning experiences.
Project-Based Learning (PBL) Implementing a PBL Design Challenge in Your School — from edutopia.org by Lisa Beck & Kim Mishkin A weeklong, schoolwide project-based learning challenge encourages students to try to tackle meaningful problems.
For the past five years, Hudson Lab School (HLS), a K–8 progressive school committed to project?based learning (PBL), has kicked off each school year with an exciting tradition: Design Challenge Week. In five days, students take on a real?world problem, explore each phase of the design process, and present what they created and learned to an authentic audience. Design Challenge Week introduces concepts that students will revisit all year and offers a model for how any educational setting could experiment with PBL on a smaller scale. Even short, well?designed challenges can lead to deeply engaged learning experiences.
No more than a minute after you’ve provided instruction on the day’s targeted content and given students directions for their next task, some brave soul utters the line that brings tired teachers to their knees: “What are we supposed to be doing?”
None of us want this. As teachers, we all want students to fully understand what they’re supposed to be doing so that they can be successful as they do it.
Good news: A few small changes in how we give directions can be the lever that boosts student understanding and engagement.
Around the same time, the concept of microschooling was gaining traction nationally. Microschools offer multiage learning environments that focus on personalized, often less-regulated instruction. Popularity grew during the pandemic when families sought learning alternatives in online, hybrid and pod options; an estimated 750,000 to 2 million students now attend the schools.
The schools are typically privately run, but Philhower saw a role for them in his small district. Last year, he won approval from the state’s charter school board to establish the Indiana Microschool Collaborative, which he says will incubate a network of microschools statewide. They will operate as charter schools, meaning they are public but have more flexibility in terms of curricula and other operations than traditional public schools.
In the rush to expand work-based learning (WBL), it is easy to focus on the “placement”—the logistics of getting a student into a workplace. But a placement alone isn’t a strategy. If an experience doesn’t help a student build the internal capacity to navigate their own future, we are simply checking a box.
At GPS Ed, we believe WBL is most powerful when viewed as a sequenced journey of career literacy. It starts with early awareness and exploration, giving students the chance to “try on” different roles, and scales up to intensive, hands-on experiences. By centering this journey on the 4 As—authenticity, aspiration, ability, agency—we ensure that the time invested by students, schools, and employers yields a lifelong return.
Ten years ago, we made a bet on relationships over replication. Instead of franchising a model, we chose to build an ecosystem—the CAPS Network—grounded in the belief that an entrepreneurial approach would create ripples of innovation with exponential scaling power. We believed that by harnessing the power of relationships for good, we could help more students discover who they are and where they belong in the world.
Today, with over 1,200 alumni voices captured in our 2025 Alumni Impact Study, we’re seeing those ripples turn into waves. And we believe these waves can and will be surfed by educators all across the globe. We are committed to the idea that our purpose (providing more students in more places the time and space for self-discovery) is more important than our brand. As such, we want our learnings to be leveraged by anyone and everyone to make a positive impact.
Confidence, Engagement, and Loveexplores the data we rarely track but desperately need. This piece argues that alumni confidence, sustained engagement, and a sense of being loved by their school communities are leading indicators of long-term success. It challenges K–12 systems to look beyond test scores and graduation rates and instead ask what happens after students leave, who stays connected, and how belonging shapes opportunity. The result is a call to rethink accountability around relationships, not just results.
What if the biggest change in education isn’t a new app… but the end of the university monopoly on credibility?
Jensen Huang has framed AI as a platform shift—an industrial revolution that turns intelligence into infrastructure. And when intelligence becomes cheap, personal, and always available, education stops being a place you go… and becomes a system that follows you. The question isn’t whether universities will disappear. The question is whether the old model—high cost, slow updates, one-size-fits-all—can survive a world where every student can have a private tutor, a lab partner, and a curriculum designer on demand.
This video explores what AI has in store for education—and why traditional universities may need to reinvent themselves fast.
In this video you’ll discover:
How AI tutors could deliver personalized learning at scale
Why credentials may shift from “degrees” to proof-of-skill portfolios
What happens when the “middle” of studying becomes automated
How universities could evolve: research hubs, networks, and high-trust credentialing
The risks: cheating, dependency, bias, and widening inequality
The 3 skills that become priceless when information is everywhere: judgment, curiosity, and responsibility
From DSC:
There appears to be another, similar video, but with a different date and length of the video. So I’m including this other recording as well here:
What if universities don’t “disappear”… but lose their monopoly on learning, credentials, and opportunity?
AI is turning education into something radically different: personal, instant, adaptive, and always available. When every student can have a 24/7 tutor, a writing coach, a coding partner, and a study plan designed specifically for them, the old model—one professor, one curriculum, one pace for everyone—starts to look outdated. And the biggest disruption isn’t the classroom. It’s the credential. Because in an AI world, proof of skill can become more valuable than a piece of paper.
This video explores the end of universities as we know them: what AI is bringing, what will break, what will survive, and what replaces the traditional path.
In this video you’ll discover:
Why AI tutoring could outperform one-size-fits-all lectures
How “degrees” may shift into skill proof: portfolios, projects, and verified competency
What happens when the “middle” of studying becomes automated
How universities may evolve: research hubs, networks, high-trust credentialing
The dark side: cheating, dependency, inequality, and biased evaluation
The new advantage: judgment, creativity, and responsibility in a world of instant answers
We’re excited to announce and share our new Parents Guide to Microschools, a clear and approachable introduction to one of the fastest growing learning models in the country. The guide unpacks what microschools are, how they work and why families are increasingly drawn to intimate, relationship centered environments. It highlights features like flexible schedules, small cohorts, personalized pathways and hands-on learning so parents can picture what these settings actually look and feel like.
It also equips families with practical tools to navigate the decision making process: key questions to ask during visits, indicators of strong culture and instruction, considerations around cost and accreditation and how to assess overall fit for each learner. Whether parents are simply curious or actively exploring new options, this guide offers clarity, confidence and a starting point for imagining what learning could look like next.
What happens when high school students and kindergartners collaborate? Art. Innovation. Growth. And so much more.
Inspired by illustrator Mica Angela Hendricks’s collaborations with her 4-year-old daughter—in which Hendricks would begin by drawing a portrait and then have her daughter add to it—I formalized the concept into an inter-grade art lesson. It’s a replicable, three-stage project based on vertical collaboration. This model bridges the creative and social gap between students, weaving together technical skill and imagination through methods based in social and emotional learning (SEL).
It operates by passing a structured project back and forth, compelling older students to engage with empathy, relationship maintenance, and responsible decision-making. Simultaneously, it empowers younger students, giving them significant creative autonomy through their own responsible choices. By breaking down the separation between age groups, cross-grade collaborations cultivate essential skills in ways that isolated classrooms typically can’t.
In this article, I’ll provide a flexible framework for vertical collaboration—a blueprint that teachers can adapt for their own cross-grade collaborations.
A Moment That Changed My View of Teaching I’ll never forget a student I’ll call Jalen. He was bright and quick with answers, sharp in debate, but he had built a wall around himself after a difficult year at home. He’d stopped turning in work and began sitting silently in the back of the room, disengaged and defiant.
One afternoon, instead of lecturing him about missing assignments, I asked a different question: “What would make school feel worth showing up for again?”
That simple question opened a door. Over the following weeks, Jalen began sharing ideas for projects connected to his interests, designing sneakers and exploring how geometry applies to shoe patterns. I adapted lessons to let him create, design, and analyze. Slowly, his confidence returned. Months later, he told me, “You made me feel like my ideas mattered.”
That moment reminded me that teaching isn’t just about delivering content; it’s about restoring belief in learning, and in oneself.
Play brings joy and happiness to learning. Infusing play in schools prepares kids as future citizens.
When you play a game with your friends, how do you feel?
When you see children playing with other children, what do you notice?
Ask a child if they remember the worksheet they filled out last week.
Did they have fun?
Do they remember what they learned?
Let’s play more and discover how learning unfolds.
Schools can invest in more play through games, interactive experiences, and just making learning fun. Providing engaging activities through play creates learners who become critical thinkers, researchers, and designers.
Empowering Students Through a Focus on Incremental Progress — from edutopia.org by Kathy Collier Elementary teachers can help students feel confident tackling big goals by encouraging them to focus on getting a little bit better every day.
Discovering Global Sounds Through the Recorder — from edutopia.org by Nina Stern, JoDee Scissors Music teachers can guide exploration of musical styles from around the world to spark elementary students’ curiosity and build community.
In our efforts to improve school, especially in the United States, student voice has really gotten lost. We focus on test scores, top-down curriculum, and measures of success that never quite get to the humanity of our students. Not only have these efforts not succeeded in raising test scores (Schwartz, 2025), they haven’t given us much satisfaction in other ways, either: In a recent survey, nearly half of educators reported that student behavior was worse than before the pandemic, and that number had grown since teachers were surveyed just two years earlier (Stephens, 2025).
Although there are most certainly individual schools where great things are happening, too many schools are still missing the mark. Too many schools keep trying to address these problems without hearing from the very people who are impacted most: the students.
But there is another way. Four years ago, I started talking a lot about a new book I’d read called Street Data.
Cost is too high. Pathways are unclear. Options feel limited. For many prospective, current, or former students, these barriers define their relationship with higher education. As colleges and universities face the long-anticipated enrollment cliff, the question isn’t just how to recruit—it’s how to reimagine value, access, and engagement across the entire student journey.
Ellucian’s 2025 Student Voice Report offers one of the most comprehensive views into that journey to date. With responses from over 1,500 learners across the U.S.—including high school students, current undergrads, college grads, stop-outs, and opt-outs—the findings surface one clear mandate for institutions: meet students where they are, or risk losing them entirely.
What Are Learners Asking For? Across demographics, four priorities rose to the top: Affordability. Flexibility. Relevance. Clarity.
Students aren’t rejecting education—they’re rejecting systems that don’t clearly show how their investment leads to real outcomes.
Minarets High School prioritizes student-centered learning with innovative programs like project-based learning, digital tools, and unique offerings.
Emphasis on student voice and personalized learning fosters engagement, creativity, and real-world preparation, setting a benchmark for educational innovation.
High school should focus on personalized and purposeful learning experiences that engage students and build real-world skills.
Traditional transcripts should be replaced with richer learning and experience records to better communicate students’ skills to higher education and employers.
“Americans want to grant more control to students themselves, prioritizing a K-12 education where all students have the option to choose the courses they want to study based on interests and aspirations.”
Research on motivation and engagement supports personalized and purposeful learning. Students are more motivated when they see relevance and have some choice. We summarize this in six core principles to which schools should strive.
The Big Idea: A new collaborative effort led out of the Stanford center aims to tackle that goal—giving clearer shape to what it would mean to truly build a new “learning society.” As a starting point, the collaborative released a report and set of design principles this week, crafted through a year of discussion and debate among about three dozen fellows in leadership roles in education, industry, government, and research.
The fellows landed on nine core principles—including that working is learning and credentials are a means, not an end—designed to transition the United States from a “schooled society” to a “learning society.”
“Universal access to K-12 education and the massification of access to college were major accomplishments of 20th century America,” Stevens says. “But all that schooling also has downsides that only recently have come into common view. Conventional schooling is expensive, bureaucratic, and often inflexible.” .
I’ve since found enrichment in substitute teaching. Along the way, I’ve compiled a handful of strategies that have helped me stay involved and make a difference, one day at a time. Those strategies—which are useful for new substitutes still learning the ropes, as well as full-time teachers who are scaling back to substitute duties—are laid out below.
A Quiet Classroom Isn’t Always an Ideal Classroom — from edutopia.org by Clementina Jose By rethinking what a good day in the classroom looks and sounds like, new teachers can better support their students.
If your classroom hums with the energy of students asking questions, debating ideas, and working together, you haven’t failed. You’ve succeeded in building a space where learning isn’t about being compliant, but about being alive and present.
