There are many reasons for the paucity of Black teachers. But a June 2023 analysis of college students in Michigan highlights a particularly leaky part of the teacher pipeline: teacher preparation programs inside colleges and universities.
A quick note: When I refer to neurodivergent (ND) students, I mean people whose mental or neurological function is different from what is considered typical. This includes not only students with ADHD or autism, but also those with anxiety, depression, or other mental-health disorders. Crucially, I’m also writing here about the many college students who are struggling with their mental health for whatever reason, and need our understanding and care to prevent them from doing poorly, dropping out, or facing something much, much worse.
Two key messages underlie all of the advice that follows: More communication. Less suspicion.
Also from Katie Rose Guest Pryal out at The Chronicle, of Higher Education, see:
YouTube is experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app for iOS and Android devices, which are designed to help viewers learn more about a subject featured in an educational video. The feature will also help the video-sharing platform get a better understanding of how well each video covers a certain topic.
Since January 2023, I’ve talked with hundreds of instructors at dozens of institutions about how they might incorporate AI into their teaching. Through these conversations, I’ve noticed a few common issues:
Faculty and staff are overwhelmed and burned out. Even those on the cutting edge often feel they’re behind the curve.
It’s hard to know where to begin.
It can be difficult to find practical examples of AI use that are applicable across a variety of disciplines.
To help address these challenges, I’ve been working on a list of AI-infused learning activities that encourage experimentation in (relatively) small, manageable ways.
September 2023: The Secret Intelligent Beings on Campus— from stefanbauschard.substack.com by Stefan Bauschard Many of your students this fall will be enhanced by artificial intelligence, even if they don’t look like actual cyborgs. Do you want all of them to be enhanced, or just the highest SES students?
In the past few months we have been deluged with headlines about new AI tools and how much they are going to change society.
Some reporters have done amazing work holding the companies developing AI accountable, but many struggle to report on this new technology in a fair and accurate way.
We—an investigative reporter, a data journalist, and a computer scientist—have firsthand experience investigating AI. We’ve seen the tremendous potential these tools can have—but also their tremendous risks.
As their adoption grows, we believe that, soon enough, many reporters will encounter AI tools on their beat, so we wanted to put together a short guide to what we have learned.
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DSC:
Something I created via Adobe Firefly (Beta version)
Does this mean it will do away with the L&D job? Not at all — these tools give you superhuman powers to find content faster, put it in front of employees in a more useful way and more creatively craft character simulations, assessments, learning in the flow of work and more.
And it’s about time. We really haven’t had a massive innovation in L&D since the early days of the learning experience platform market, so we may be entering the most exciting era in a long time.
Let me give you the five most significant use cases I see. And more will come.
As I read online, I bookmark resources I find interesting and useful. I share these links periodically here on my blog. This post includes links on using tech with scenarios: AI, xAPI, and VR. I’ll also share some other AI tools and links on usability, resume tips for teachers, visual language, and a scenario sample.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates saying generative AI chatbots can teach kids to read in 18 months rather than years.
Artificial intelligence is beginning to prove that it can accelerate the impact teachers have on students and help solve a stubborn teacher shortage.
Chatbots backed by large language models can help students, from primary education to certification programs, self-guide through voluminous materials and tailor their education to specific learning styles [preferences].
Unfortunately, too often attention is focused on the problems of AI—that it allows students to cheat and can undermine the value of what teachers bring to the learning equation. This viewpoint ignores the immense possibilities that AI can bring to education and across every industry.
The fact is that students have already embraced this new technology, which is neither a new story nor a surprising one in education. Leaders should accept this and understand that people, not robots, must ultimately create the path forward. It is only by deploying resources, training and policies at every level of our institutions that we can begin to realize the vast potential of what AI can offer.
SAIL: State of Research: AI & Education — from buttondown.email by George Siemens Information re: current AI and Learning Labs, education updates, and technology
In this post I’d like to explore that apocalyptic model. For reasons of space, I’ll leave off analyzing student cheating motivations or questioning the entire edifice of grade-based assessment. I’ll save potential solutions for another post.
Let’s dive into the practical aspects of teaching to see why Mollick and Bogost foresee such a dire semester ahead.
I put together an initial prompt to set up Code Interpreter to create useful data visualizations. It gives it some basic principles of good chart design & also reminds it that it can output many kinds of files.
Code Interpreter continues OpenAI’s long tradition of giving terrible names to things, because it might be most useful for those who do not code at all. It essentially allows the most advanced AI available, GPT-4, to upload and download information, and to write and execute programs for you in a persistent workspace. That allows the AI to do all sorts of things it couldn’t do before, and be useful in ways that were impossible with ChatGPT.
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BREAKING: Code Interpreter is FINALLY rolling out to all ChatGPT Plus users.
It’s the most powerful feature OpenAI has released since GPT-4. It makes everyone a data analyst.
The current cohort of high school students, part of Generation Z, values postsecondary education but is increasingly interested in alternatives to four-year colleges, according to a new report from ECMC Group, a nonprofit focused on student success, and Vice Media.
In 2023, 65% of surveyed students said they would need education beyond high school, compared to 59% pre-pandemic, the report said. But 59% said they could be successful if they don’t get a four-year degree
Almost half, 48%, of high schoolers said their postsecondary education would ideally take three years or less, and just over a third, 35%, said it should take two years or less.
— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) July 7, 2023
From DSC: And some further comments on that article:
Rather than looking to modify the traditional higher education structures for 18-year-olds fresh out of high school, the College for Adult Learners and Continuing Education will establish its own processes for the nontraditional student.
The average age of students enrolled in the Center for Distance Education is 32, and many have kids or other life responsibilities that impact their time and ability to focus on education, Seal explains.
“It’s not so much that we’re competing with other institutions [for adult learners], it’s that we’re competing with life,” Seal says. “They’re not leaving to go to another institution—they’re leaving because of life things.”
Some resources and reflections from Stephen Downes:
East Los Angeles College, the most populous campus in the California Community College system, offered 60 percent of its courses in a hybrid or online format this past spring, most of them asynchronous. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, fewer than a quarter of courses were offered online.
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He said students have made their preferences clear via their enrollment trends—online course sections at the college have filled much more quickly lately than in-person courses.
But the bigger question hanging over the conference was this: Do colleges actually value good teaching? On the one hand, it would seem obvious that they must. Undergraduate education is the central reason most colleges exist. How could you not value your core product?
But look below the surface and what do you see? An industry in which the majority of instructors are adjuncts who are often low-paid and unlikely to receive any sort of professional development, let alone an office in which to meet with students after class. At research universities you will find many tenure-track professors who were warned not to devote too much time to teaching before securing tenure, since scholarship is what’s rewarded. Promotion and tenure policies on many campuses, research-intensive or not, over-rely on student evaluations when it comes to judging teaching expertise or commitment. Finally, given that most doctoral programs devote a nominal amount of time to teaching students how to teach, it’s easy to see why many professors stick to how they were taught as students, whether or not those methods were effective.
Recently, I had the absolute pleasure to be invited to co-present at the 67th Annual Association of University Architects Conference, conveniently hosted this year in Calgary, and even more conveniently having one day’s sessions housed within the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning. Our Vice Provost Teaching and Learning, Dr. Leslie Reid, was invited to share her experience in leading the Taylor Institute, and she brought in Dr. Natasha Kenny and myself to round out the session.
In planning for the session, we decided early on that we didn’t want to do A Presentation™. There would not be slides and slides of text, and no bullet points. We wanted to tell stories, and to learn from the ~100 expert university architects from across North America about how they approach the challenges we’ve faced in the last few years.
We broke the storytelling portion of the session into 3 parts:
Universality: Building for all or building for some (Leslie)
Planning: Tension between form and function (Natasha)
Flexibility: How to be flexible about flexibility (D’Arcy)
The Homework Apocalypse — from oneusefulthing.org by Ethan Mollick Fall is going to be very different this year. Educators need to be ready.
Excerpt:
Students will cheat with AI. But they also will begin to integrate AI into everything they do, raising new questions for educators. Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will want to accomplish more than they did before, and also want answers about what AI means for their future learning paths. Schools will need to decide how to respond to this flood of questions.
The challenge of AI in education can feel abstract, so to understand a bit more about what is going to happen, I wanted to examine some common assignment types.
The evaluation criteria included: ease of use, value, uniqueness in the market, and proof that the product helped make teachers’ lives easier and supported student achievement.
“We received an impressive array of nominations for this year’s awards,” says Christine Weiser, content director for Tech & Learning. “Our judges chose the products that they believed best supported innovation in the classroom and district.
Post-AI Assessment Design — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman A simple, three-step guide on how to design assessments in a post-AI world
Excerpt:
Step 1: Write Inquiry-Based Objectives
Inquiry-based objectives focus not just on the acquisition of knowledge but also on the development of skills and behaviours, like critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration and research skills.
They do this by requiring learners not just to recall or “describe back” concepts that are delivered via text, lecture or video. Instead, inquiry-based objectives require learners to construct their own understanding through the process of investigation, analysis and questioning.
Just for a minute, consider how education would change if the following were true –
AIs “hallucinated” less than humans
AIs could write in our own voices
AIs could accurately do math
AIs understood the unique academic (and eventually developmental) needs of each student and adapt instruction to that student
AIs could teach anything any student wanted or need to know any time of day or night
AIs could do this at a fraction of the cost of a human teacher or professor
Fall 2026 is three years away. Do you have a three year plan? Perhaps you should scrap it and write a new one (or at least realize that your current one cannot survive). If you run an academic institution in 2026 the same way you ran it in 2022, you might as well run it like you would have in 1920. If you run an academic institution in 2030 (or any year when AI surpasses human intelligence) the same way you ran it in 2022, you might as well run it like you would have in 1820. AIs will become more intelligent than us, perhaps in 10-20 years (LeCun), though there could be unanticipated breakthroughs that lower the time frame to a few years or less (Benjio); it’s just a question of when, not “if.”
On one creative use of AI — from aiandacademia.substack.com by Bryan Alexander A new practice with pedagogical possibilities
Excerpt:
Look at those material items again. The voiceover? Written by an AI and turned into audio by software. The images? Created by human prompts in Midjourney. The music is, I think, human created. And the idea came from a discussion between a human and an AI?
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How might this play out in a college or university class?
Imagine assignments which require students to craft such a video. Start from film, media studies, or computer science classes. Students work through a process:
I continue to try to imagine ways generative AI can impact teaching and learning, including learning materials like textbooks. Earlier this week I started wondering – what if, in the future, educators didn’t write textbooks at all? What if, instead, we only wrote structured collections of highly crafted prompts? Instead of reading a static textbook in a linear fashion, the learner would use the prompts to interact with a large language model.These prompts could help learners ask for things like:
overviews and in-depth explanations of specific topics in a specific sequence,
examples that the learner finds personally relevant and interesting,
interactive practice – including open-ended exercises – with immediate, corrective feedback,
the structure of the relationships between ideas and concepts,
Designed for K12 and Higher-Ed Educators & Administrators, this conference aims to provide a platform for educators, administrators, AI experts, students, parents, and EdTech leaders to discuss the impact of AI on education, address current challenges and potentials, share their perspectives and experiences, and explore innovative solutions. A special emphasis will be placed on including students’ voices in the conversation, highlighting their unique experiences and insights as the primary beneficiaries of these educational transformations.
The use of generative AI in K-12 settings is complex and still in its infancy. We need to consider how these tools can enhance student creativity, improve writing skills, and be transparent with students about how generative AI works so they can better understand its limitations. As with any new tech, our students will be exposed to it, and it is our task as educators to help them navigate this new territory as well-informed, curious explorers.
The education ministry has emphasized the need for students to understand artificial intelligence in new guidelines released Tuesday, setting out how generative AI can be integrated into schools and the precautions needed to address associated risks.
Students should comprehend the characteristics of AI, including its advantages and disadvantages, with the latter including personal information leakages and copyright infringement, before they use it, according to the guidelines. They explicitly state that passing off reports, essays or any other works produced by AI as one’s own is inappropriate.
Thanks to the rapid development of artificial intelligence tools like Dall-E and ChatGPT, my brother-in-law has been wrestling with low-level anxiety: Is it a good idea to steer his son down this path when AI threatens to devalue the work of creatives? Will there be a job for someone with that skill set in 10 years? He’s unsure. But instead of burying his head in the sand, he’s doing what any tech-savvy parent would do: He’s teaching his son how to use AI.
In recent months the family has picked up subscriptions to AI services. Now, in addition to drawing and sculpting and making movies and video games, my nephew is creating the monsters of his dreams with Midjourney, a generative AI tool that uses language prompts to produce images.
To bridge this knowledge gap, I decided to make a quick little dictionary of AI terms specifically tailored for educators worldwide. Initially created for my own benefit, I’ve reworked my own AI Dictionary for Educators and expanded it to help my fellow teachers embrace the advancements AI brings to education.
According to Accessibility.com, at least 2,387 web accessibility lawsuits were filed in 2022. Those lawsuits were either filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or California’s Unruh Act; any violation of the ADA is considered a violation of the Unruh Act.
While the plaintiffs cited a variety of issues, multimedia accessibility is a common point of concern. In 2015, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) and other plaintiffs settled a lawsuit with Netflix, which cited a lack of captions for certain featured movies and TV shows.
That prompts an interesting question: Does the ADA require captions for internet videos — and if so, how can businesses make sure that they’re compliant?
Rachel Kapp, M.Ed., BCET, and Stephanie Pitts, M.Ed., BCET welcome back College Learning Disability Specialist Elizabeth Hamblet to discuss her new book 7 Steps to College Success: A Pathway for Students with Disabilities. She discusses the origin story of the book and the disconnect between what college disability services can do for learners and what learners and parents expect. She talks about reading this book when the learner is in 8th grade because of the specific impact it can have on parent and learner decisions on course selection. Elizabeth discusses how parents and learners can get surprised in the college disability process. Elizabeth talks about the critical importance of non-academic skills and how the drive for success in high school can stand in the way of independence necessary for college success.
If you’re interested in accessible digital design, pay attention to Apple. The company seems to approach accessibility from the perspective of users with disabilities.
Apple’s messaging treats accessibility as a fundamental design principle: Accessibility must be built into digital systems from the start, not tacked on as an afterthought. In other words, they take an accessibility-first mindset, and their commitment seems consistent.
The company’s track record continued in May 2023, when Apple announced its latest suite of accessibility features to launch later that year. One of these features, Assistive Access for iPhone and iPad, holds valuable lessons that web designers can apply to their own work.
Here’s what Apple accomplished with Assistive Access, plus a few ways web designers can achieve similar goals.
But a recent survey of contingent faculty reveals the more uncertain situation most adjuncts find themselves in. A third of respondents earn less than $25,000 a year, falling below federal poverty guidelines for a family of four. Fewer than half receive university-provided health insurance, with nearly 20 percent on Medicaid.
In a stinging irony, many tenured faculty teach courses on equity and social justice, where students learn about oppression engendered by privilege. Yet just down the hall, someone else with the same level of education is teaching a similar course for vastly less pay and with little or no benefits.
Generative AI has taken the world by storm since OpenAI launched ChatGPT-3 in November 2022. Generative AI is characterized by its capacity to generate human-like content based on deep learning models in response to prompts. There is a wealth of opinions about how this will impact higher education spanning from the need to limit the use in the protection of higher education to embracing the tool as a means to improve higher education. In this webinar session, speakers from different regions shared their views and perspectives and discuss how Generative AI will transform higher education. What are the challenges to be addressed and which opportunities can be pursued to improve the quality of higher education? Watch the webinar and learn about the uncertainties, tensions, and opportunities triggered by Generative AI.
Trust and Transparency Are Key Factors When Using AI in Academia — from by Dr. Andrew Lang Much can be learned from embracing artificial intelligence in the teaching and learning process. Here, two professors share their experiences using ChatGPT freely in the classroom.
The AI-Education Divide— from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Philippa Hardman How the rise of AI has reinforced inequity in education (and what we need to do to reverse it) .
Ever since the Supreme Court announced last year that it would rule on two cases involving affirmative action in college admissions, the world of higher education has been anxiously awaiting a decision. Most experts predicted the court would eventually forbid the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions, and colleges and advocates have been scrambling to prepare for that new world.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court met those expectations, ruling that the consideration of race in college admissions is unconstitutional.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that race-conscious admissions practices at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are unconstitutional, shattering decades of legal precedent and upending the recruitment and enrollment landscape for years to come.
The Supreme Court on Thursday held that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, a historic ruling that rolls back decades of precedent and will force a dramatic change in how the nation’s private and public universities select their students.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down colleges’ use of race-conscious admissions nationwide, ruling in a pair of closely watched cases that the practice is racially discriminatory.
Writing for the court’s majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that policies that claim to consider an applicant’s race as one factor among many are in fact violating the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Coursera’s Global Skills Report for 2023 — from coursera.org Benchmark talent and transform your workforce with skill development and career readiness insights drawn from 124M+ learners.
Excerpt:
Uncover global skill trends
See how millions of registered learners in 100 countries are strengthening critical business, technology, and data science skills.
Their most recognisable role is to partner with faculty and provide them with inspiration, expertise and support in their teaching. But a broader role is emerging at institutional level- helping create a culture where people value talking about teaching and more generally, fostering a culture of continuous learning. In this respect, CTLs act as agents of change, aiming to influence the organizational (learning) environment.
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CTLs are part of an ecosystem, internally and externally, and they have the potential to play a very important role, that of a network node. Internally, this can mean connecting various silos within the university, a much needed task, while externally it implies establishing collaboration flows with other CTLs that can in turn lead to broader inter-university collaboration. Making use of the full potential of this role can make a big difference for the success of a CTL.
Speaking of Teaching & Learning Centers, also see:
7 Questions on Engaging Faculty in Digital Accessibility — from campustechnology.com by Rhea Kelly We asked the Technical College System of Georgia’s accessibility champions how they help instructors create a more inclusive learning experience for all students.
Higher ed may appear less impacted on the surface. But a small yet critical cohort of students and families has been heavily affected – students and parents who take out private student loans. Private student loans are a small piece of the overall student loan puzzle, representing roughly 8% of outstanding student debt (~$146.9 billion) according to a March 2023 analysis from Federal Student Aid.
… Private student loans have gotten way more expensive With that context in mind, it’s worth analyzing how the rise in interest rates has impacted borrowing costs for families. The numbers are staggering. As the Fed has hiked interest rates, private loan borrowing costs have more than doubled since November of 2021. The average interest rate on a 10-year private student loan has jumped from a low of 3.3% in November 2021 to 7% at the end of May 2023. Interest rates for 5-year private loans have skyrocketed even faster, jumping from a low of 2.4% all the way to 8.70% across the same period. .
Tuesday, June 6, 2023 – Far too often, individuals in higher education don’t understand the nuances of how accreditors operate and the role they play in supporting—or constraining—institutions. Jeff and Michael welcome Barbara Brittingham, former president of the New England Commission on Higher Education, to give the history of accreditation, break down how accrediting agencies operate, show how they compare to one another, and delve into how they might evolve in the future with an eye toward how these organizations impact institutional transformation and support learners in achieving their education and career goals. This episode is made possible with support from Ascendium Education Group, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Course Hero. .
On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, host Amrit Ahluwalia was joined by Rich Novak to evaluate the changes in higher education over the past decade, and the opportunities ahead for continuing education. .
Partnering With Higher Education I believe that companies can gain a competitive edge in hiring and retention by establishing long-term partnerships with educators, universities and other pedagogically-driven institutions. However, it is crucial to design these partnerships with scale and replication in mind in order to avoid high costs and low adoption rates that can result in failure.
Establishing a successful partnership will also require companies and universities to determine and agree on the skill-based outcomes they aim to achieve. They will have to find effective ways to share data, develop timelines and measure success for both parties.
This is a shift from traditional partnerships, which often focus on research and innovation initiatives. With this, intellectual property was the outcome of the collaboration. Instead, in a reskilling partnership, in-demand skills are the outcome. .
EDUCAUSE and WCET QuickPoll Results: Current Trends in Microcredential Design and Delivery — from er.educause.edu by Jenay Robert Microcredentialing programs remain nascent at many institutions, but interest continues to grow. As the demand for flexible learning experiences increases, stakeholders might find renewed interest in and uses for microcredentials.
