From DSC: Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to gift someone an article or access to a particular learning module? This would be the case whether you are a subscriber to that vendor/service or not. I thought about this after seeing the following email from MLive.com. .
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Not only is this a brilliant marketing move — as recipients can get an idea of the services/value offered — but it can provide concrete information to someone.
Perhaps colleges and universities should take this idea and run with it. They could gift courses and/or individual lectures! Doing so could open up some new revenue streams, aid adult learners in their lifelong learning pathways, and help people build new skills — all while helping market the colleges and universities. Involved faculty/staff members could get a percentage of the sales. Sounds like a WIN-WIN to me.
From DSC: I was hoping to see a bit more from Deborah’s answer to where she sees higher education (including Alma College) might end up 35 years from now. Her answer seemed like business as usual — the status quo. Nothing will change (hopefully, in her perspective). If that’s the case, many will be shut out of higher education. We can do better. I don’t mean to bash a residential, liberal arts, collegiate experience. I worked for such an institution for 10 years! But it needs to be augmented. New business models. More access.
Students can earn an associate degree from Butler University at no cost to them, and continue on to earn a bachelor’s degree for $10,000, thanks to a new program.
On Friday, Butler announced it is opening a new two-year college on campus that will offer associate degrees in business and allied health. The program will start enrolling students in fall 2025.
The program is focused on Indianapolis-area students from low-income backgrounds, including students who are undocumented. The university said in its Friday announcement that it wants to make college more accessible and affordable for previously underserved students, and help them navigate the college-going process.
From DSC: As I’ve long stated on the Learning from the Living [Class]Room vision, we are heading toward a new AI-empowered learning platform — where humans play a critically important role in making this new learning ecosystem work.
Along these lines, I ran into this site out on X/Twitter. We’ll see how this unfolds, but it will be an interesting space to watch.
From DSC: This future learning platform will also focus on developing skills and competencies. Along those lines, see:
Scale for Skills-First— from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain An ed-tech giant’s ambitious moves into digital credentialing and learner records.
A Digital Canvas for Skills
Instructure was a player in the skills and credentials space before its recent acquisition of Parchment, a digital transcript company. But that $800M move made many observers wonder if Instructure can develop digital records of skills that learners, colleges, and employers might actually use broadly.
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Ultimately, he says, the CLR approach will allow students to bring these various learning types into a coherent format for employers.
Instructure seeks a leadership role in working with other organizations to establish common standards for credentials and learner records, to help create consistency. The company collaborates closely with 1EdTech. And last month it helped launch the 1EdTech TrustEd Microcredential Coalition, which aims to increase quality and trust in digital credentials.
“We need more high-impact learning practices in prison” — from college-inside.beehiiv.com by Charlotte West Internships, apprenticeships, and work learning opportunities allow incarcerated students to keep learning after they graduate.
Maine and other states like Colorado are trying to tackle this issue through internships and employment opportunities that allow incarcerated students and graduates to put their professional knowledge and skills into practice — and in some cases, earn a living wage while doing so.
Employment and professional training opportunities inside were a major theme at the 2023 National Conference for Higher Education in Prison, where 800 educators, administrators, students and alumni from dozens of prison education programs gathered in Atlanta, Georgia last week.
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.
Researchers from edX, an education platform for upskilling workers, conducted a survey involving over 1,500 executives and knowledge workers. The findings revealed that nearly half of CEOs believe AI could potentially replace “most” or even all aspects of their own positions.
What’s even more intriguing is that 47% of the surveyed executives not only see the possibility of AI taking over their roles but also view it as a desirable development.
Why? Because they anticipate that AI could rekindle the need for traditional leadership for those who remain.
“Success in the CEO role hinges on effective leadership, and AI can liberate time for this crucial aspect of their role,” Andy Morgan, Head of edX for Business comments on the findings.
“CEOs understand that time saved on routine tasks can stimulate innovation, nurture creativity, and facilitate essential upskilling for their teams, fostering both individual and organizational success,” he adds.
But CEOs already know this: EdX’s research echoed that 79% of executives fear that if they don’t learn how to use AI, they’ll be unprepared for the future of work.
From DSC: By the way, my first knee-jerk reaction to this was:
WHAT?!?!?!? And this from people who earn WAAAAY more than the average employee, no doubt.
After a chance to calm down a bit, I see that the article does say that CEOs aren’t going anywhere. Ah…ok…got it.
Time-based business models are liable for disruption via a value-based overhaul of compensation. Today, as most designers, lawyers, and many trades in between continue to charge by the hour, the AL-powered step-function improvements in workflows are liable to shake things up.
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In such a world, time-based billing simply won’t work anymore unless the value derived from these services is also compressed by a multiple (unlikely). The classic time-based model of billing for lawyers, designers, consultants, freelancers etc is officially antiquated. So, how might the value be captured in a future where we no longer bill by the hour? …
The worlds of creativity and marketing are rapidly changing – and rapidly coming together.
#AI #businessmodels #lawyers #billablehour
It becomes clear that just prompting to get images is a rather elementary use case of AI, compared to the ability to place and move objects, change perspective, adjust lighting, and many other actions using AI.
Huge new updates to ChatGPT / GPT-4.
1. Upload and chat with any PDF document
2. Use tools without switching chats
AlphaFold is an AI system developed by DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. It regularly achieves accuracy competitive with experiment.
But one other consequence is that I believe it may destroy the $68 billion search engine optimization industry that companies like Google helped create.
For the past 25 years or so, websites, news outlets, blogs and many others with a URL that wanted to get attention have used search engine optimization, or SEO, to “convince” search engines to share their content as high as possible in the results they provide to readers. This has helped drive traffic to their sites and has also spawned an industry of consultants and marketers who advise on how best to do that.
As an associate professor of information and operations management, I study the economics of e-commerce. I believe the growing use of generative AI will likely make all of that obsolete.
OpenAI is rolling out new beta features for ChatGPT Plus members right now. Subscribers have reported that the update includes the ability to upload files and work with them, as well as multimodal support. Basically, users won’t have to select modes like Browse with Bing from the GPT-4 dropdown — it will instead guess what they want based on context.
Oct 27 (Reuters) – Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google has agreed to invest up to $2 billion in the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, a spokesperson for the startup said on Friday.
The company has invested $500 million upfront into the OpenAI rival and agreed to add $1.5 billion more over time, the spokesperson said.
Google is already an investor in Anthropic, and the fresh investment would underscore a ramp-up in its efforts to better compete with Microsoft (MSFT.O), a major backer of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, as Big Tech companies race to infuse AI into their applications.
More colleges are resetting tuition. Does the strategy work? — from highereddive.com by Danielle McLean Some institutions have seen short-term enrollment gains from slashing their sticker prices, but the strategy doesn’t guarantee a turnaround.
But as more colleges take the tuition reset plunge, questions around the effectiveness of strategy remain. Some colleges have seen immediate and long-term benefits from the practice, with surging enrollments and applications. However, for many colleges, that growth tapered off over the next few years. And the resets were not enough to turn around the financial fortunes of every college.
“For some schools, they did it and maybe they were too far gone,” said Lucie Lapovsky, an economist and higher education consultant who’s worked with colleges on tuition resets. “Most of our private colleges in this country are challenged right now. It’s not easy.”
As student loan payments resume this month, more than 43 million Americans carrying that debt saw the end of more than three years of relief from monthly payments. But the financial landscape in which they resume payments has shifted.
Researchers are still working to understand the impact that the pause had on borrowers’ finances, said Jonathan Glater, a professor at Berkeley Law and co-founder of the Student Loan Law Initiative.
“People who are precarious at the outset…will also be financially more precarious when the payment obligations resume,” Glater said.
Since 2003, student debt has been the fastest-growing form of household debt, increasing more than 500% over the two decades, far more than increases in mortgage and auto debt that occurred over the same period, according to data from the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
The Public Is Giving Up on Higher Ed — from chronicle.com by Michael D. Smith Our current system isn’t working for society. Digital alternatives can change that.
Excerpts:
I fear that we in the academy are willfully ignoring this problem. Bring up student-loan debt and you’ll hear that it’s the government’s fault. Bring up online learning and you’ll hear that it is — and always will be — inferior to in-person education. Bring up exclusionary admissions practices and you’ll hear something close to, “Well, the poor can attend community colleges.”
On one hand, our defensiveness is natural. Change is hard, and technological change that risks making traditional parts of our sector obsolete is even harder. “A professor must have an incentive to adopt new technology,” a tenured colleague recently told me regarding online learning. “Innovation adoption will occur one funeral at a time.”
But while our defense of the status quo is understandable, maybe we should ask whether it’s ethical, given what we know about the injustice inherent in our current system. I believe a happier future for all involved — faculty, administrators, and students — is within reach, but requires we stop reflexively protecting our deeply flawed system. How can we do that? We could start by embracing three fundamental principles.
1. Digitization will change higher education.
… 2. We should want to embrace this change. …
3. We have a way to embrace this change.
I fear that we in the academy are willfully ignoring this problem. Bring up student-loan debt and you’ll hear that it’s the government’s fault. Bring up online learning and you’ll hear that it is — and always will be — inferior to in-person education. Bring up exclusionary admissions practices and you’ll hear something close to, “Well, the poor can attend community colleges.”
The more I look around higher education, the more clearly it seems to me that there are three practices which we carry out every day – which seemed baked right into the very DNA of our current system of higher education – that are inimical to the actual purpose of higher education. Those practices are:
Lecturing,
Traditional grading, and
Student evaluations of teaching.
Before you get upset, let me say: I don’t think any of these practices is “evil”, and my understanding of the history of education says that all three were developed with good intentions, for legitimate reasons, to solve real problems. (With the possible exception of student evaluations of teaching – I’m working on trying to figure out where these came from and why they were invented.) But regardless of the background and intentions, they have taken over higher education like an invasive species.
“If you looked at the average person outside of higher education and said, you know, ‘We’ve created a culture in higher ed where our core thing we do isn’t valued,’ that makes absolutely no sense,” says Amy Hawkins, assistant provost for teaching and academic leadership at the University of Central Arkansas, which has been working to change that dynamic on campus. “It would be like saying in a company, ‘Well, customer service isn’t really a big deal to us. We’re about product development. We treat our customers like crap.’ I mean. That’s nonsensical.”
Does the public know this? And does it care?
Surveys show that what the public values most about higher education is good teaching and meaningful learning.
What makes an effective microcredential programme? — from by Temesgen Kifle Short, flexible and skills-focused, microcredentials must balance the needs of students and industry. Here are tips on how to develop courses that achieve this
Here are tips for higher education institutions (HEIs) to consider when creating and delivering microcredential programmes so they meet the needs of all stakeholders.
Collaborate with accrediting bodies, employers and other HEIs
An introduction to creating escape rooms— from timeshighereducation.com by Bernardo Pereira Nunes Bernardo Pereira Nunes offers tips on how to get started on an escape room experience that will boost students’ teamwork, leadership, communication and problem-solving skills
But I’ve also been hearing one intriguing question, over and over, that isn’t directly about loans or repayment, so much as it is about how to avoid them entirely. And it’s coming from parents of kids who’ve not yet traded in their sticker collections for student loans.
“I’ve got one little guy who’s about six years old,” Caleb Queern, of Austin, Texas, told me recently. “And my questions are, number one: How much should we be saving between now and the time my little guy is ready for college? And number two: What’s the best way to save for it?”
Is school transformation possible without replacing the existing education system? In addition to Tom, Kelly Young of Education Reimagined joined me to argue that it’s not. In an educational landscape that constantly seeks marginal improvements, my guests spoke to the importance of embracing new value networks that support innovative approaches to learning. The conversation touched on the issue of programs that remain niche solutions, rather than robust, learner-centered alternatives. In exploring the concept of value networks, they both challenged the notion of transforming individual schools or districts alone. They argue for the creation of a new value network to truly revolutionize the education system. Of course, they admit that achieving this is no small feat, as it requires a paradigm shift in mindset and a careful balance between innovation and existing structures. In this conversation, we wrestle with the full implications of their findings and more.
The idea was simple: ask sixty community leaders to fan across the city’s public schools, follow in the footsteps of its youngest citizens, and report back on what they saw.
Fifty-nine said yes. What they found, Pickering says, “were kids with dead eyes. Kids not engaged. And kids who knew that school was a game – and the game was rigged.”
So the Billy Madison team used its findings to design a prospective high school that would actually produce what its participants said they wanted to see:
Let kids pursue their passions. Give them real work to do. And get them out of the school building, and in the community.
This thought-provoking discussion delves into the topic of system replacement in education. Is school transformation possible without replacing the existing education system? Joining [Michael] to discuss the question are Thomas Arnett of the Christensen Institute and Kelly Young of Education Reimagined.
In an educational landscape that constantly seeks marginal improvements, [Michael’s] guests speak to the importance of embracing new value networks that support innovative approaches to learning. They bring to light the issue of programs that remain niche solutions, rather than robust, learner-centered alternatives. In exploring the concept of value networks, [Michael’s] guests challenge the notion of transforming individual schools or districts alone. They argue for the creation of a new value network to truly revolutionize the education system. Of course, they admit that achieving this is no small feat, as it requires a paradigm shift in mindset and a careful balance between innovation and existing structures. In this conversation, we wrestle with the full implications of their findings and more.
From DSC: This reminds me of the importance of TrimTab Groups who invent or test out something new apart from the mothership.
The 2023 GEM Report on technology and education explores these debates, examining education challenges to which appropriate use of technology can offer solutions (access, equity and inclusion; quality; technology advancement; system management), while recognizing that many solutions proposed may also be detrimental.
The report also explores three system-wide conditions (access to technology, governance regulation, and teacher preparation) that need to be met for any technology in education to reach its full potential.
Bloom Academy is the first and only self-directed learning center in Las Vegas – microschooling as true, nontraditional and permissionless education alternative. 5 Questions with Microschool Founders Sarah & Yamila.https://t.co/RvxtwGXvkZ
Since last spring, journalists at The 74 have been crossing the U.S. as part of our 2023 High School Road Trip. It has embraced both emerging and established high school models, taking us to 13 schools from Rhode Island to California, Arizona to South Carolina, and in between.
It has brought us face-to-face with innovation, with programs that promote everything from nursing to aerospace to maritime-themed careers.
At each school, educators seem to be asking one key question: What if we could start over and try something totally new?
What we’ve found represents just a small sample of the incredible diversity that U.S. high schools now offer, but we’re noticing a few striking similarities that educators in these schools, free to experiment with new models, now share. Here are the top eight: .
What does it take to empower parents and decentralize schooling? Why is a diversity of school models important to parents? Are we at a tipping point? .
Several meta-analyses, which summarize the evidence from many studies, have found higher achievement when students take quizzes instead of, say, reviewing notes or rereading a book chapter. “There’s decades and decades of research showing that taking practice tests will actually improve your learning,” said David Shanks, a professor of psychology and deputy dean of the Faculty of Brain Sciences at University College London.
Still, many students get overwhelmed during tests. Shanks and a team of four researchers wanted to find out whether quizzes exacerbate test anxiety. The team collected 24 studies that measured students’ test anxiety and found that, on average, practice tests and quizzes not only improved academic achievement, but also ended up reducing test anxiety. Their meta-analysis was published in Educational Psychology Review in August 2023.
The End of Scantron Tests— from theatlantic.com by Matteo Wong Machine-graded bubble sheets are the defining feature of American schools. Today’s kindergartners may never have to fill one out.
There are several possible reasons why pretesting worked in this study.
Students paid more attention to the pretested material during the lecture.
The pretest activated prior knowledge (some of them are clearly doing a lot of prework), and allowed them to encode the new information more deeply.
They were doing a lot of studying of the pretested information outside of class.
There are some great spaced retrieval effects going on. That is, students saw the material before lecture, they took a quiz on it during the pretest, then later they reviewed or quizzed themselves on that same material again during self-study.
After barring educators from returning to Michigan schools in any capacity for nine months following their retirement, the state legislature is looking to lift the ban and pay some returnees up to $30,200 in the process.
Under House Bill 4752, lawmakers would amend the state’s public school retirement act to allow retirees to work for schools while continuing to receive their pensions and other retirement benefits, such as health care.
A new international survey of lawyers, law students and consumers finds that nearly half believe generative AI will have a significant or transformative impact on the practice of law.
Conducted by LexisNexis and released this morning at ILTACON, the annual conference of the International Legal Technology Association, the survey polled 7,950 lawyers, law students and consumers in the U.S., U.K., Canada and France about their overall awareness of generative AI and their perspectives on its potential impact on the practice of law.
Thomson Reuters has released its Future of Professionals Report. The research was conducted during the months of May and June 2023 via an online survey. More than 1,200 professionals from the legal, tax and accounting, and risk professions employed by corporations, firms, and government agencies completed the survey.
Art created by artificial intelligence cannot receive copyright protection under U.S. law, a federal judge ruled last week in a case that could influence the outcomes of future disputes over authorship and intellectual property.
This is how the billable hour dies— from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong Let me tell you a story about the AI-driven evolution of pricing in the legal market. It might not happen for many years. It might happen much sooner. But when it does, I expect it’ll look like this.
So assemble some of your most creative, forward-thinking people, and ask them: “If the firm could no longer bill our work by the hour, how could we turn a profit?” Give them this article from 2012 to get them started. Show them the firm’s financials for the last 24 months, so that they know how you’re making money now. Have them speak with clients, technology experts, and pricing consultants for insights — might as well get them to ask ChatGPT, too. The answers you get will form the basis of your future strategic plans.
“Enrollment is driving everything right now,” said James Sparkman, the founder of Alpha Education…
DC: Enrollment = sales
Welcome to the realization that HE is a business. Welcome to a world & dynamics that other co’s/organizations have known for years. https://t.co/VBbOcWZxPw
— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) August 2, 2023
