Dr. Hardman’s post on LinkedIn
and/or
See Dr. Hardman’s post on substack.com entitled:
- The Illusion AI Productivity Gains
Why your AI tools aren’t delivering the ROI you were promised — and what to do about it
On 04/06/2026,
in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, digital learning, education, education technology, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, future, game-changing environment, generational differences, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, K-12 related, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning theories, online learning, participation, personalized/customized learning, research, student-related, teachers, technologies for your home, United States, universities,
by Daniel Christian
The quest to build a better AI tutor — from hechingerreport.org by Jill Barshay
Researchers make progress with an older ed tech idea: personalized practice
One promising idea has less to do with how an AI tutor explains concepts and more with what it asks students to practice next.
A team at the University of Pennsylvania, which included some AI skeptics, recently tested this approach in a study of close to 800 Taiwanese high school students learning Python programming. All the students used the same AI tutor, which was designed not to give away answers.
But there was one key difference. Half the students were randomly assigned to a fixed sequence of practice problems, progressing from easy to hard. The other half received a personalized sequence with the AI tutor continuously adjusting the difficulty of each problem based on how the student was performing and interacting with the chatbot.
The idea is based on what educators call the “zone of proximal development.” When problems are too easy, students get bored. When they’re too hard, students get frustrated. The goal is to keep students in a sweet spot: challenged, but not overwhelmed.
The researchers found that students in the personalized group did better on a final exam than students in the fixed problem group. The difference was characterized as the equivalent of 6 to 9 months of additional schooling, an eye-catching claim for an after-school online course that lasted only five months.
…
To address this, Chung’s team combined a large language model with a separate machine-learning algorithm that analyzes how students interact with the online course platform — how they answer the practice questions, how many times they revise or edit their coding, and the quality of their conversations with the chatbot — and uses that information to decide which problem to serve up next.
On 10/27/2025,
in colleges, community colleges, curriculum, faculty/staff, funding / grants, future of higher education, higher education, learning ecosystem, legislatures / government / legal, policy, political science, research, society, United States, universities, vendors,
by Daniel Christian
70% of Americans say feds shouldn’t control admissions, curriculum — from highereddive.com by Natalie Schwartz
The Public Religion Research Institute poll comes as the Trump administration is pressuring colleges to change their policies.
Dive Brief:
- Most polled Americans, 70%, disagreed that the federal government should control “admissions, faculty hiring, and curriculum at U.S. colleges and universities to ensure they do not teach inappropriate material,” according to a survey released Wednesday by the Public Religion Research Institute.
- The majority of Americans across political parties — 84% of Democrats, 75% of independents and 58% of Republicans — disagreed with federal control over these elements of college operations.
- The poll’s results come as the Trump administration seeks to exert control over college workings, including in its recent offer of priority for federal research funding in exchange for making sweeping policy changes aligned with the government’s priorities.
Also see:
- ‘Nothing less than government control’: Higher ed responds to Trump’s compact — from highereddive.com by Ben Unglesbee
Federal officials offered preferential funding treatment to nine initial colleges in exchange for sweeping changes. Here’s how they replied.
On 10/15/2025,
in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Africa, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Asia, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, communications, communities of practice, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, emerging technologies, entrepreneurship, Europe, experimentation, Facebook / Meta Platforms, game-changing environment, generational differences, Google, intelligent systems, media/film, multimedia, NVIDIA, Open AI, pace of change, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, programming, research, society, tools, trends, UK, United States, vendors, workplace,
by Daniel Christian
The State of AI Report 2025 — from nathanbenaich.substack.com by Nathan Benaich
In short, it’s been a monumental 12 months for AI. Our eighth annual report is the most comprehensive it’s ever been, covering what you need to know about research, industry, politics, and safety – along with our first State of AI Usage Survey of 1,200 practitioners.
On 10/01/2025,
in 21st century, education, global / globalization, learning ecosystem, professional development, research, skills, society, teachers, United States,
by Daniel Christian
The World’s Classrooms Are Short 44 Million Teachers — from edsurge.com by Nadia Tamez-Robledo
It’s not just pay that’s a problem in retaining and recruiting educators, experts say.
K-12 education worldwide is facing a two-pronged dilemma: A global shortage of 44 million teachers by 2030 and not enough funding to train or retain them, according to a report released by UNESCO and the International Taskforce on Teachers for Education 2030 following the summit. Countries around the world risk not having enough teachers — or not enough high-caliber teachers — for the rising number of students expected to enter primary and secondary school within the next five years.
The report’s findings reflect what some school districts and states have been grappling with in the United States, where research has consistently shown that teachers face lower rates of well-being and satisfaction with pay than similarly employed workers in other fields.
On 09/23/2025,
in Access to Justice (A2J), ideas, innovation, law schools, Legal operations, legal reform, legal technologies, legislatures / government / legal, research, society, sociology, UK, United States,
by Daniel Christian
On LawNext: Justice Workers — Reimagining Access to Justice as Democracy Work, with Rebecca Sandefur and Matthew Burnett — from lawnext.com by Bob Ambrogi
With as many as 120 million legal problems going unresolved in America each year, traditional lawyer-centered approaches to access to justice have consistently failed to meet the scale of need. But what if the solution is not just about providing more legal services — what if it lies in fundamentally rethinking who can provide legal help?
In today’s episode, host Bob Ambrogi is joined by two of the nation’s leading researchers on access to justice: Rebecca Sandefur, professor and director of the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University and a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and Matthew Burnett, director of research and programs for the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center.