strategy

The Other Regulatory Time Bomb — from onedtech.philhillaa.com by Phil Hill
Higher ed in the US is not prepared for what’s about to hit in April for new accessibility rules

Most higher-ed leaders have at least heard that new federal accessibility rules are coming in 2026 under Title II of the ADA, but it is apparent from conversations at the WCET and Educause annual conferences that very few understand what that actually means for digital learning and broad institutional risk. The rule isn’t some abstract compliance update: it requires every public institution to ensure that all web and media content meets WCAG 2.1 AA, including the use of audio descriptions for prerecorded video. Accessible PDF documents and video captions alone will no longer be enough. Yet on most campuses, the conversation has been understood only as a buzzword, delegated to accessibility coordinators and media specialists who lack the budget or authority to make systemic changes.

And no, relying on faculty to add audio descriptions en masse is not going to happen.

The result is a looming institutional risk that few presidents, CFOs, or CIOs have even quantified.

The problem with just handing over an army of agents to junior consultants + other items re: AI in general

On 11/05/2025, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, bots, business, career development, change, changing business models, collaboration, emerging technologies, experimentation, leadership, strategy, the downsides of how people use tech, tools, United States, vendors, workplace, by Daniel Christian

KPMG wants junior consultants to ditch the grunt work and hand it over to teams of AI agents — from businessinsider.com by Polly Thompson

The Big Four consulting and accounting firm is training its junior consultants to manage teams of AI agents — digital assistants capable of completing tasks without human input.

“We want juniors to become managers of agents,” Niale Cleobury, KPMG’s global AI workforce lead, told Business Insider in an interview.

KPMG plans to give new consulting recruits access to a catalog of AI agents capable of creating presentation slides, analyzing data, and conducting in-depth research, Cleobury said.

The goal is for these agents to perform much of the analytical and administrative work once assigned to junior consultants, allowing them to become more involved in strategic decisions.

From DSC:
For a junior staff member to provide quality assurance in working with agents, an employee must know what they’re talking about in the first place. They must have expertise and relevant knowledge. Otherwise, how will they spot the hallucinations?

So the question is, how can businesses build such expertise in junior staff members while they are delegating things to an army of agents? This question applies to the next posting below as well. Having agents report to you is all well and good — IF you know when the agents are producing helpful/accurate information and when they got things all wrong.

This Is the Next Vital Job Skill in the AI Economy — from builtin.com by Saurabh Sharma
The future of tech work belongs to AI managers.

Summary: A fundamental shift is making knowledge workers “AI managers.” The most valuable employees will direct intelligent AI agents, which requires new competencies: delegation, quality assurance and workflow orchestration across multiple agents. Companies must bridge the training gap to enable this move from simple software use to strategic collaboration with intelligent, yet imperfect, systems.

The shift is happening subtly, but it’s happening. Workers are learning to prompt agents, navigate AI capabilities, understand failure modes and hand off complex tasks to AI. And if they haven’t started yet, they probably will: A new study from IDC and Salesforce found that 72 percent of CEOs think most employees will have an AI agent reporting to them within five years. This isn’t about using a new kind of software tool — it’s about directing intelligent systems that can reason, search, analyze and create.

Soon, the most valuable employees won’t just know how to use AI; they’ll know how to manage it. And that requires a fundamentally different skill set than anything we’ve taught in the workplace before.

AI agents failed 97% of freelance tasks; here’s why… — from theneurondaily.com by Grant Harvey

AI Agents Can’t Actually Do Your Job (Yet)—New Benchmark Reveals The Gap

DEEP DIVE: AI can make you faster at your job, but can only do 2-3% of jobs by itself.

The hype: AI agents will automate entire workflows! Replace freelancers! Handle complex tasks end-to-end!

The reality: a measly 2-3% completion rate.

See, Scale AI and CAIS just released the Remote Labor Index (paper), a benchmark where AI agents attempted real freelance tasks. The best-performing model earned just $1,810 out of $143,991 in available work, and yes, finishing only 2-3% of jobs.

The new legal intelligence — from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong
We’ve built machines that can reason like lawyers. Artificial legal intelligence is becoming scalable, portable and accessible in ways lawyers are not. We need to think hard about the implications.

Much of the legal tech world is still talking about Clio CEO Jack Newton’s keynote at last week’s ClioCon, where he announced two major new features: the “Intelligent Legal Work Platform,” which combines legal research, drafting and workflow into a single legal workspace; and “Clio for Enterprise,” a suite of legal work offerings aimed at BigLaw.

Both these features build on Clio’s out-of-nowhere $1B acquisition of vLex (and its legally grounded LLM Vincent) back in June.

A new source of legal intelligence has entered the legal sector.
…
Legal intelligence, once confined uniquely to lawyers, is now available from machines. That’s going to transform the legal sector.

Where the real action is: enterprise AI’s quiet revolution in legal tech and beyond — from canadianlawyermag.com by Tim Wilbur
Harvey, Clio, and Cohere signal that organizational solutions will lead the next wave of change

The public conversation about artificial intelligence is dominated by the spectacular and the controversial: deepfake videos, AI-induced psychosis, and the privacy risks posed by consumer-facing chatbots like ChatGPT. But while these stories grab headlines, a quieter – and arguably more transformative – revolution is underway in enterprise software. In legal technology, in particular, AI is rapidly reshaping how law firms and legal departments operate and compete. This shift is just one example of how enterprise AI, not just consumer AI, is where real action is happening.

Both Harvey and Clio illustrate a crucial point: the future of legal tech is not about disruption for its own sake, but partnership and integration. Harvey’s collaborations with LexisNexis and others are about creating a cohesive experience for law firms, not rendering them obsolete. As Pereira put it, “We don’t see it so much as disruption. Law firms actually already do this… We see it as ‘how do we help you build infrastructure that supercharges this?’”
…
The rapid evolution in legal tech is just one example of a broader trend: the real action in AI is happening in enterprise software, not just in consumer-facing products. While ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini dominate the headlines, companies like Cohere are quietly transforming how organizations across industries leverage AI.

Also from canadianlawyermag.com, see:

Harvey’s $5 billion bet: Why the hottest company in legal tech is eyeing Canada
Co-founder Gabe Pereyra says their new Toronto office will have both tech expertise and customer support

The AI company’s plan to open an office in Toronto isn’t just about expanding territory – it’s a strategic push to tap into top technical talent and capture a market known for legal innovation.

Unseeable prompt injections in screenshots: more vulnerabilities in Comet and other AI browsers — from brave.com by Artem Chaikin and Shivan Kaul Sahib

Building on our previous disclosure of the Perplexity Comet vulnerability, we’ve continued our security research across the agentic browser landscape. What we’ve found confirms our initial concerns: indirect prompt injection is not an isolated issue, but a systemic challenge facing the entire category of AI-powered browsers. This post examines additional attack vectors we’ve identified and tested across different implementations.

As we’ve written before, AI-powered browsers that can take actions on your behalf are powerful yet extremely risky. If you’re signed into sensitive accounts like your bank or your email provider in your browser, simplysummarizing a Reddit postcould result in an attacker being able to steal money or your private data.

The above item was mentioned by Grant Harvey out at The Neuron in the following posting:

AI browser risks and the “AI trust tax” you’re already paying — from theneurondaily.com by Grant Harvey
PLUS: OpenAI’s new music maker + China’s 90% power?cut AI server.

Robin AI’s Big Bet on Legal Tech Meets Market Reality — from lawfuel.com

Robin’s Legal Tech Backfire
Robin AI, the poster child for the “AI meets law” revolution, is learning the hard way that venture capital fairy dust doesn’t guarantee happily-ever-after. The London-based legal tech firm, once proudly waving its genAI-plus-human-experts flag, is now cutting staff after growth dreams collided with the brick wall of economic reality.

The company confirmed that redundancies are under way following a failed major funding push. Earlier promises of explosive revenue have fizzled. Despite around $50 million in venture cash over the past two years, Robin’s 2025 numbers have fallen short of investor expectations. The team that once ballooned to 200 is now shrinking.

The field is now swarming with contenders: CLM platforms stuffing genAI into every feature, corporate legal teams bypassing vendors entirely by prodding ChatGPT directly, and new entrants like Harvey and Legora guzzling capital to bulldoze into the market. Even Workday is muscling in.

Meanwhile, ALSPs and AI-powered pseudo-law firms like Crosby and Eudia are eating market share like it’s free pizza. The number of inhouse teams actually buying these tools at scale is still frustratingly small. And investors don’t have much patience for slow burns anymore.

Why Being ‘Rude’ to AI Could Win Your Next Case or Deal — from thebrainyacts.beehiiv.com by Josh Kubicki

TL;DR: AI no longer rewards politeness—new research shows direct, assertive prompts yield better, more detailed responses. Learn why this shift matters for legal precision, test real-world examples (polite vs. blunt), and set up custom instructions in OpenAI (plus tips for other models) to make your AI a concise analytical tool, not a chatty one. Actionable steps inside to upgrade your workflow immediately.

Is Your Institution Ready for the Earnings Premium Buzzsaw? — from ailearninsights.substack.com by Alfred Essa

On Wednesday [October 29th, 2025], I’m launching the Beta version of an Education Accountability Website (”EDU Accountability Lab”). It analyzes federal student aid, institutional outcomes, and accountability metrics across 6,000+ colleges and universities in the US.

Our Mission
The EDU Accountability Lab delivers independent, data-driven analysis of higher education with a focus on accountability, affordability, and outcomes. Our audience includes policymakers, researchers, and taxpayers who seek greater transparency and effectiveness in postsecondary education. We take no advocacy position on specific institutions, programs, metrics, or policies. Our goal is to provide clear and well-documented methods that support policy discussions, strengthen institutional accountability, and improve public understanding of the value of higher education.

But right now, there’s one area demanding urgent attention.

Starting July 1, 2026, every degree program at every institution receiving federal student aid must prove its graduates earn more than people without that credential—or lose Title IV eligibility.

This isn’t about institutions passing or failing. It’s about programs. Every Bachelor’s in Psychology. Every Master’s in Education. Every Associate in Nursing. Each one assessed separately. Each one facing the same pass-or-fail tests.

Resilient by Design: The Future of America’s Community Colleges — from aacc.nche.edu

This report highlights several truths:

Leadership capacity must expand. Presidents and leaders are now expected to be fundraisers, policy navigators, cultural change agents, and data-informed strategists. Leadership can no longer be about a single individual—it must be a team sport. AACC is charged with helping you and your teams build these capacities through leadership academies, peer learning communities, and practical toolkits.
The strength of our network is our greatest asset. No college faces its challenges alone, because within our membership there are leaders who have already innovated, stumbled, and succeeded. Resilient by Design urges AACC to serve as the connector and amplifier of this collective wisdom, developing playbooks and scaling proven practices in areas from guided pathways to artificial intelligence to workforce partnerships.
Innovation in models and tools is urgent. Budgets must be strategic, business models must be reimagined, and ROI must be proven—not only to funders and policymakers, but to the students and communities we serve. Community colleges must claim their role as engines of economic vitality and social mobility, advancing both immediate workforce needs and long-term wealth-building for students.
Policy engagement must be deepened. Federal advocacy remains essential, but the daily realities of our institutions are shaped by state and regional policy. AACC will increasingly support members with state-level resources, legislative templates, and partnerships that equip you to advocate effectively in your unique contexts.
Employer engagement must become transformational. Students deserve not just degrees, but careers. The report challenges us to create career-connected colleges where employers co-design curricula, offer meaningful work-based learning, and help ensure graduates are not just prepared for today’s jobs but resilient for tomorrow’s.

Ground-level Impacts of the Changing Landscape of Higher Education — from onedtech.philhillaa.com by Glenda Morgan; emphasis DSC
Evidence from the Virginia Community College System

In that spirit, in this post I examine a report from Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) on Virginia’s Community Colleges and the changing higher-education landscape. The report offers a rich view of how several major issues are evolving at the institutional level over time, an instructive case study in big changes and their implications.

Its empirical depth also prompts broader questions we should ask across higher education.

What does the shift toward career education and short-term training mean for institutional costs and funding?
How do we deliver effective student supports as enrollment moves online?
As demand shifts away from on-campus learning, do physical campuses need to get smaller?

Are we seeing a generalizable movement from academic programs to CTE to short-term options? If so, what does that imply for how community colleges are staffed and funded?

As online learning becomes a larger, permanent share of enrollment, do student services need a true bimodal redesign, built to serve both online and on-campus students effectively? Evidence suggests this urgent question is not being addressed, especially in cash-strapped community colleges.

As online learning grows, what happens to physical campuses? Improving space utilization likely means downsizing, which carries other implications. Campuses are community anchors, even for online students—so finding the right balance deserves serious debate.

Why Co-Teaching Will Be A Hot New Trend In Higher Education — from forbes.com by Brandon Busteed

When it comes to innovation in higher education, most bets are being placed on technology platforms and AI. But the innovation students, faculty and industry need most can be found in a much more human dimension: co-teaching. And specifically, a certain kind of co-teaching – between industry experts and educators.

While higher education has largely embraced the value of interdisciplinary teaching across different majors or fields of study, it has yet to embrace the value of co-teaching between industry and academia. Examples of co-teaching through industry-education collaborations are rare and underutilized across today’s higher ed landscape. But they may be the most valuable and relevant way to prepare students for success. And leveraging these collaborations can help institutions struggling to satisfy unfulfilled student demand for immersive work experiences such as internships.

From DSC:
It’s along these lines that I think that ADJUNCT faculty members should be highly sought after and paid much better — as the up-to-date knowledge and experience they bring into the classroom is very valuable. They should have equal say in terms of curriculum/programs and in the way a college or university is run.

Sora 2 and other video generation models introduce new storytelling capabilities + other items re: AI in general

On 10/06/2025, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, collaboration, communications, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, creativity, digital audio, digital storytelling, digital video, emerging technologies, Emotion, engagement / engaging students, ethics, experimentation, Google, graphics, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, intelligent systems, journalism, media/film, multimedia, Open AI, platforms, skills, story, storytelling, strategy, technologies for your home, tools, training / L&D, United States, vendors, visualizing information, workplace, by Daniel Christian

AI agents: Where are they now? From proof of concept to success stories — from hrexecutive.com by Jill Barth

The 4 Rs framework
Salesforce has developed what Holt Ware calls the “4 Rs for AI agent success.” They are:

Redesign by combining AI and human capabilities. This requires treating agents like new hires that need proper onboarding and management.
Reskilling should focus on learning future skills. “We think we know what they are,” Holt Ware notes, “but they will continue to change.”
Redeploy highly skilled people to determine how roles will change. When Salesforce launched an AI coding assistant, Holt Ware recalls, “We woke up the next day and said, ‘What do we do with these people now that they have more capacity?’ ” Their answer was to create an entirely new role: Forward-Deployed Engineers. This role has since played a growing part in driving customer success.
Rebalance workforce planning. Holt Ware references a CHRO who “famously said that this will be the last year we ever do workforce planning and it’s only people; next year, every team will be supplemented with agents.”

Synthetic Reality Unleashed: AI’s powerful Impact on the Future of Journalism — from techgenyz.com by Sreyashi Bhattacharya

Table of Contents

Highlights
What is “synthetic news”?
Examples in action
Why are newsrooms experimenting with synthetic tools
Challenges and Risks
What does the research say
- Transparency seems to matter. —What is next: trends & future
Conclusion

The latest video generation tool from OpenAI –> Sora 2

Sora 2 is here — from openai.com

Our latest video generation model is more physically accurate, realistic, and more controllable than prior systems. It also features synchronized dialogue and sound effects. Create with it in the new Sora app.

And a video on this out at YouTube:

Per The Rundown AI:

The Rundown: OpenAI just released Sora 2, its latest video model that now includes synchronized audio and dialogue, alongside a new social app where users can create, remix, and insert themselves into AI videos through a “Cameos” feature.
…
Why it matters: Model-wise, Sora 2 looks incredible — pushing us even further into the uncanny valley and creating tons of new storytelling capabilities. Cameos feels like a new viral memetic tool, but time will tell whether the AI social app can overcome the slop-factor and have staying power past the initial novelty.

OpenAI Just Dropped Sora 2 (And a Whole New Social App) — from heneuron.ai by Grant Harvey
OpenAI launched Sora 2 with a new iOS app that lets you insert yourself into AI-generated videos with realistic physics and sound, betting that giving users algorithm control and turning everyone into active creators will build a better social network than today’s addictive scroll machines.

What Sora 2 can do

Generate Olympic-level gymnastics routines, backflips on paddleboards (with accurate buoyancy!), and triple axels.
Follow intricate multi-shot instructions while maintaining world state across scenes.
Create realistic background soundscapes, dialogue, and sound effects automatically.
Insert YOU into any video after a quick one-time recording (they call this “cameos”).

The best video to show what it can do is probably this one, from OpenAI researcher Gabriel Peters, that depicts the behind the scenes of Sora 2 launch day…

Sora 2: AI Video Goes Social — from getsuperintel.com by Kim “Chubby” Isenberg
OpenAI’s latest AI video model is now an iOS app, letting users generate, remix, and even insert themselves into cinematic clips

Technically, Sora 2 is a major leap. It syncs audio with visuals, respects physics (a basketball bounces instead of teleporting), and follows multi-shot instructions with consistency. That makes outputs both more controllable and more believable. But the app format changes the game: it transforms world simulation from a research milestone into a social, co-creative experience where entertainment, creativity, and community intersect.

Also along the lines of creating digital video, see:

What used to take hours in After Effects now takes just one text prompt. Tools like Google’s Nano Banana, Seedream 4, Runway’s Aleph, and others are pioneering instruction-based editing, a breakthrough that collapses complex, multi-step VFX workflows into a single, implicit direction.

The history of VFX is filled with innovations that removed friction, but collapsing an entire multi-step workflow into a single prompt represents a new kind of leap.

For creators, this means the skill ceiling is no longer defined by technical know-how, it’s defined by imagination. If you can describe it, you can create it. For the industry, it points toward a near future where small teams and solo creators compete with the scale and polish of large studios.

Bilawal Sidhu

OpenAI DevDay 2025: everything you need to know — from getsuperintel.com by Kim “Chubby” Isenberg
Apps Inside ChatGPT, a New Era Unfolds

Something big shifted this week. OpenAI just turned ChatGPT into a platform – not just a product. With apps now running inside ChatGPT and a no-code Agent Builder for creating full AI workflows, the line between “using AI” and “building with AI” is fading fast. Developers suddenly have a new playground, and for the first time, anyone can assemble their own intelligent system without touching code. The question isn’t what AI can do anymore – it’s what you’ll make it do.

7 Teaching Practices that Nurture Student Voice [Gonzalez]

On 10/01/2025, in education, education reform, experimentation, face-to-face, ideas, instructional design, K-12 related, leadership, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, more voice more choice more control, strategy, student-related, teachers, United States, by Daniel Christian

7 Teaching Practices that Nurture Student Voice — from cultofpedagogy.com by Jennifer Gonzalez

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.

Learners need: More voice. More choice. More control. -- this image was created by Daniel Christian

Two items from Stephen Downes

On 10/01/2025, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, blogs / blogging / vlogging, Canada, colleges, community colleges, faculty/staff, higher education, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, lifelong learning, skills, society, strategy, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
As usual, here are some solid items and reflections from Stephen Downes:

The AI Tsunami Is Here: Reinventing Education for the Age of AI — from downes.ca by Stephen Downes

The framework seems reasonable, overall, but I would have to ask why the model, which includes things like “dynamic, adaptive content” and “multiple perspectives and sources” and “cultivation of self-directed learning” needs to happen in a university as such. Why not develop something like this as a society-wide initiative, removing the barriers for entry, and making it an ongoing part of people’s lives?

From DSC:
Why not develop something like this as a society-wide initiative, removing the barriers for entry, and making it an ongoing part of people’s lives?

Exactly.

Artificial Intelligence in Educational Research and Scholarship: Seven Framings — from downes.ca by Stephen Downes

There are those who draw a sharp distinction between formal academic papers and blog posts, and then there’s me, who reads something like this (16-page PDF), and sees nothing more than a set of short blog posts, where “writing was conducted in a sprint over the summer of 2025 using a shared Google doc.” I’m not saying this is bad (though the resulting article is a bit loose and unfocused) but I remind readers that academic research in this domain should properly consider, and credit, not only formal journal articles, but also the original blogs where so many of the ideas are originally posted.

From DSC:
Preach it Stephen! Blogging counts — big time! In fact, I wish that many more faculty members, staff, provosts, and presidents would blog to publically share their thinking, knowledge, and reflections.

Changes in the L&D / Corporate Learning World [as seen in article by Josh Bersin]

On 09/20/2025, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, bots, business, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, digital learning, elearning, emerging technologies, experimentation, Google, human-computer interaction (HCI), innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, microlearning, Microsoft, Open AI, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, strategy, tools, training / L&D, trends, United States, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Workday Acquires Sana To Transform Its Learning Platform And Much More— from joshbersin.com by Josh Bersin

Well now, as the corporate learning market shifts to AI, (read the details in our study “The Revolution in Corporate Learning” ), Workday can jump ahead. This is because the $400 billion corporate training market is moving quickly to an AI-Native dynamic content approach (witness OpenAI’s launch of in-line learning in its chatbot). We’re just finishing a year-long study of this space and our detailed report and maturity model will be out in Q4.
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With Sana, and a few other AI-native vendors (Uplimit, Arist, Disperz, Docebo), companies can upload audios, videos, documents, and even interviews with experts and the system build learning programs in minutes. We use Sana for Galileo Learn (our AI-powered learning academy for Leadership and HR), and we now have 750+ courses and can build new programs in days instead of months.

And there’s more; this type of system gives every employee a personalized, chat-based experience to learn.

Small, Rural Central California High School Continues To Defy Standardized Education — from gettingsmart.com by Michael Niehoff

Key Points

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.

Let High Schoolers Do Less? Let High Schoolers Experience More — from gettingsmart.com by Tom Vander Ark and Nate McClennen

Key Points

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.

New Effort Pushes the U.S. to Stop Getting ‘Schooled’ and Start Learning — from workshift.org by Elyse Ashburn

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.”
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How Substitute Teachers Can Connect With Their Students — from edutopia.org by Zachary Shell
Five enriching strategies to help subs stay involved and make a difference in the classroom.

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.

How HR is adapting as AI agents join the workforce — from hrexecutive.com by Jill Barth

Business leaders across the world are grappling with a reality that would have seemed like science fiction just a few decades ago: Artificial intelligence systems dubbed AI agents are becoming colleagues, not just tools. At many organizations, HR pros are already developing balanced and thoughtful machine-people workforces that meet business goals.

At Skillsoft, a global corporate learning company, Chief People Officer Ciara Harrington has spent the better part of three years leading digital transformation in real time. Through her front-row seat to CEO transitions, strategic pivots and the rapid acceleration of AI adoption, she’s developed a strong belief that organizations must be agile with people operations.

‘No role that’s not a tech role’
Under these modern conditions, she says, technology is becoming a common language in the workplace. “There is no role that’s not a tech role,” Harrington said during a recent discussion about the future of work. It’s a statement that gets at the heart of a shift many HR leaders are still coming to terms with.
…
But a key question remains: Who will manage the AI agents, specifically, HR leaders or someone else?

Now available: The 2025 Changing Landscape of Online Education (CHLOE) 10 Report

On 08/28/2025, in adjunct faculty, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business side of he, change, changing business models, collaboration, colleges, communications, communities of practice, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, credentialing, culture, digital learning, education technology, face-to-face, faculty/staff, higher education, instructional design, IT in HE, law schools, leadership, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, learning preferences, learning spaces, liberal arts, new business models, online learning, online media, online tutoring, organizational change, policy, strategy, student-related, teaching & learning, teaching online, traditional / tradition, trends, United States, universities, vision/possibilities, by Daniel Christian

The 2025 Changing Landscape of Online Education (CHLOE) 10 Report — from qualitymatters.org; emphasis below from DSC

Notable findings from the 73-page report include:

Online Interest Surges Across Student Populations: …
Institutional Preparedness Falters Amid Rising Demand: Despite accelerating demand, institutional readiness has stagnated—or regressed—in key areas. …
The Online Education Marketplace Is Increasingly Competitive: …
Alternative Credentials Take Center Stage: …
AI Integration Lacks Strategic Coordination: …

Just 28% of faculty are considered fully prepared for online course design, and 45% for teaching. Alarmingly, only 28% of institutions report having fully developed academic continuity plans for future emergency pivots to online.

Also relevant, see:

Great Expectations, Fragile Foundations — from onedtech.philhillaa.com by Glenda Morgan
Lessons about growth from the CHLOE & BOnES reports

Cultural resistance remains strong. Many [Chief Online Learning Officers] COLOs say faculty and deans still believe in-person learning is “just better,” creating headwinds even for modest online growth. As one respondent at a four-year institution with a large online presence put it:

Supportive departments [that] see the value in online may have very different levels of responsiveness compared to academic departments [that] are begrudgingly online. There is definitely a growing belief that students “should” be on-ground and are only choosing online because it’s easy/ convenient. Never mind the very real and growing population of nontraditional learners who can only take online classes, and the very real and growing population of traditional-aged learners who prefer online classes; many faculty/deans take a paternalistic, “we know what’s best” approach.

…
Ultimately, what we need is not just more ambition but better ambition. Ambition rooted in a realistic understanding of institutional capacity, a shared strategic vision, investments in policy and infrastructure, and a culture that supports online learning as a core part of the academic mission, not an auxiliary one. It’s time we talked about what it really takes to grow online learning , and where ambition needs to be matched by structure.

From DSC:
Yup. Culture is at the breakfast table again…boy, those strategies taste good.

I’d like to take some of this report — like the graphic below — and share it with former faculty members and members of a couple of my past job families’ leadership. They strongly didn’t agree with us when we tried to advocate for the development of online-based learning/programs at our organizations…but we were right. We were right all along. And we were LEADING all along. No doubt about it — even if the leadership at the time said that we weren’t leading.

The cultures of those organizations hurt us at the time. But our cultivating work eventually led to the development of online programs — unfortunately, after our groups were disbanded, they had to outsource those programs to OPMs.

Arizona State University — with its dramatic growth in online-based enrollments.

Learning Ecosystems

Ground-level Impacts of the Changing Landscape of Higher Education [Morgan]

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