School districts will begin to offer microschool options. With 65% of K-12 parents backing school choice, school districts will realize that in order to stay competitive and meet the needs of students and parents, adopting and offering innovative learning models is key. One of the shifts the industry can expect to see in the coming years is school districts offering mircoschool options within the district itself. While historically independent learning institutions, microschools will be adopted within school districts that are responsive to this need for choice and evolving learning needs of students.
—Carlos Bortoni, Principal, Industry Advisor, K-12 Education, Qualtrics
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In 2023, educators nationwide will benefit from the most recent wave of edtech consolidation. The various services and products acquired by consolidators over the last year or two will be integrated into increasingly comprehensive platforms offering instructional content, assessments, and classroom tools all in one place. As this occurs, the power and effectiveness of those edtech resources will grow as they begin to work in concert with each other seamlessly. The combination of these resources will empower administrators, teachers, families, and students to better leverage edtech’s ability to improve learning.
–Kelli Campbell, President, Discovery Education
From DSC: Vision is key here…not just data. If data provided all of the answers, being an effective, impactful leader/administrator would be far easier.
AI legal assistant will help defendant fight a speeding case in court — from newscientist.com by Matthew Sparkes (behind paywall) In February, an AI from DoNotPay is set to tell a defendant exactly what to say and when during an entire court case. It is likely to be the first ever case defended by an artificial intelligence
Also relevant/see:
Over Christmas, @DoNotPay managed to create an AI deepfake clone of my voice. Then, with GPT, we got the bot to phone up Wells Fargo and successfully overturn some wire fees.
This is the perfect use case for AI. Nobody has time to argue on the phone about $12!
Joshua Browder, founder and chief executive of “robot lawyer” app DoNotPay, revealed last week he had created a bot based on the large language model to help people save money on their internet bill.
From DSC:
Check out the items below. As with most technologies, there are likely going to be plusses & minuses regarding the use of AI in digital video, communications, arts, and music.
DC: What?!? Wow. I should have seen this coming. I can see positives & negatives here. Virtual meetings could become a bit more creative/fun. But apps could be a bit scarier in some instances, such as with #telelegal.
For people who have used virtual primary care, the vast majority of them (94%) are satisfied with their experience, and nearly four in five (79%) say it has allowed them to take charge of their health.The study included findings around familiarity and experience with virtual primary care, virtual primary care and chronic conditions, current health and practices, and more.
As digital health technology continues to advance and the healthcare industry evolves, many Americans want the ability to utilize more digital methods when it comes to managing their health, according to a study recently released by Elevance Health — formerly Anthem, Inc. Elevance Health commissioned to conduct an online study of over 5,000 US adults age 18+ around virtual primary care.
From DSC: Our son recently took a 3-day intensive course on the Business of Acting. It was offered by the folks at “My College Audition” — and importantly, the course was not offered by the university where he is currently working on a BFA in Acting. By the way, aspiring performing arts students may find this site very beneficial/helpful as well. (Example blog posting here.)
The course was actually three hours of learning on a Sunday night, a Monday night, and a Tuesday night from 6-9pm.
He learned things that he mentioned have not been taught in his undergrad program (at least not so far). When I asked him what he liked most about the course, he said:
These people are out there doing this (DSC insert: To me, this sounds like the use of adjunct faculty in higher ed)
There were 9 speakers in the 9 hours of classtime
They relayed plenty of resources that were very helpful and practical. He’s looking forward to pursuing these leads further.
He didn’t like that there were no discussion avenues/forums available. And as a paying parent, I didn’t like that we had to pay for yet another course and content that he wasn’t getting at his university. It may be that the university that he’s studying at will offer such a course later in the curriculum. But after two years of college experience, he hasn’t come across anything this practical and he is eagerly seeking out this type of practical/future-focused information. In fact, it’s critical to him staying with acting…or not. He needs this information sooner in his program.
It made me reflect on the place of adjunct faculty within higher education — folks who are out there “doing” what they are teaching about. They tend to be more up-to-date in their real-world knowledge. Sabbaticals are helpful in this regard for full-time faculty, but they don’t come around nearly enough to keep one’s practical, career-oriented knowledgebase up-to-date.
Again, this dilemma is to be expected, given our current higher education learning ecosystem. Faculties’ plates are full. They don’t have time to pursue this kind of endeavor in addition to their daily responsibilities. Staff aren’t able to be out there “doing” these things either.
This brings me back to design thinking. We’ve got to come up with better ways of offering student-centered education, programming, and content/resources.
My son walked away shaking his head a bit regarding his current university. At a time when students and families are questioning the return on their investments in traditional institutions of higher education, this issue needs to be taken very seriously.
Also potentially relevant for some of the performing arts students out there:
From DSC:
Check this confluence of emerging technologies out!
Natural language interfaces have truly arrived. Here’s ChatARKit: an open source demo using #chatgpt to create experiences in #arkit. How does it work? Read on. (1/) pic.twitter.com/R2pYKS5RBq
How to spot AI-generated text— from technologyreview.com by Melissa Heikkilä The internet is increasingly awash with text written by AI software. We need new tools to detect it.
Excerpt:
This sentence was written by an AI—or was it? OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT, presents us with a problem: How will we know whether what we read online is written by a human or a machine? …
“If you have enough text, a really easy cue is the word ‘the’ occurs too many times,” says Daphne Ippolito, a senior research scientist at Google Brain, the company’s research unit for deep learning.
…
“A typo in the text is actually a really good indicator that it was human-written,” she adds.
As we near the end of 2022, it’s a great time to look back at some of the top technologies that have emerged this year. From AI and virtual reality to renewable energy and biotechnology, there have been a number of exciting developments that have the potential to shape the future in a big way. Here are some of the top technologies that have emerged in 2022:
Some use cases of the convergence of AI and 5G are:
Metaverse: AI is a key technology that helps bring Metaverse to life and now with the addition of 5G, streaming experiences would become enjoyable and maintaining connectivity without any disruption of external factors like geographical locations would be eliminated.
Digital assistants in the form of chatbots and virtual avatars: Digital assistants today use AI to replicate the human brain and converse with people in human language by understanding intent. With 5G the speed at which the speech is converted to text will improve drastically.
Education: AI and 5G are helping bring education to students’ doorstep through virtual reality and is making this available, efficiently as in real-world classrooms. Solving queries is possible quickly without any restrictions. Betty in Archie Comics attending her classes virtually is a reality due to these technologies.
Healthcare: AI and 5G in healthcare are proliferating an accurate diagnosis of diseases, real-time monitoring, and quick treatment facilities. This has become possible with the right use of data- collection, transmission, and analysis.
Automotive: AI and 5G together is making vehicles smarter and reducing the risk of mishaps on roads by employing various data-powered safety and driving efficiency measures in vehicles.
What I do take away from these surveys however, is that the majority of AI experts take the prospect of very powerful AI technology seriously. It is not the case that AI researchers dismiss extremely powerful AI as mere fantasy.
The huge majority thinks that in the coming decades there is an even chance that we will see AI technology which will have a transformative impact on our world. While some have long timelines, many think it is possible that we have very little time before these technologies arrive. Across the three surveys more than half think that there is a 50% chance that a human-level AI would be developed before some point in the 2060s, a time well within the lifetime of today’s young people.
Three reasons why NLP will go mainstream in healthcare in 2023 — from healthcareitnews.com by Bill Siwicki A natural language processing expert explains why he feels the technology’s kinks have been ironed out, its ROI has been proven and the timing is right for healthcare to take advantage of information-extraction tools.
13 tech predictions for 2023 — from enterprisersproject.com by Katie Sanders What can you expect in the world of IT next year? Business and IT leaders share their thoughts
Until now, AI has operated almost exclusively in the cloud. But increasingly diverse streams of data are being generated around the clock from sensors at the edge. These require real-time inference, which is leading more AI deployments to move to edge computing.
For airports, stores, hospitals and more, AI brings advanced efficiency, automation and even cost reduction, which is why edge AI adoption accelerated last year.
In 2023, expect to see a similarly challenging environment, which will drive the following edge AI trends.
Digital transformation: 5 trends to watch in 2023 — from enterprisersproject.com by Ritish Reddy As enterprises continue to digitally transform, IT leaders must look toward the future. Expect to see these trends in 2023
Imagine my delight when co-founder of Coursera Daphne Koehler came into my office in 2012 to explain the radical concept behind her new business. What if you could Partner with the World’s best universities and professors to provide FREE online courses? Like other successful FREEMIUM models, you monetize the platform downstream by creating massive network effects and convert a small percentage to paying customers (we had invested in other successful FREEMIUM models such as Facebook, Twitter, Spotify and Snap, so why wouldn’t that work here?)
…
… Today, over 113 million learners from around the world access the platform to gain knowledge, to earn certificates and get diplomas from the top universities.
The Coursera ride has been amazing for most of the past decade, with over 100 million students, 200 universities and 5000 courses on the platform. And while the vast majority of the students on Coursera don’t pay a dime, the company has built a business with over $500 million in revenue and nearly a $2 billion market cap today.
Estimates are for the company to do $520 million in revenue in 2022, up from $415 million in 2021 and estimated $623 million in 2023. Coursera is losing money currently but has $424 million in cash and could turn profitable if it prioritized that and sells at 1.3x 2023 sales.
On average, 37% of the top 20 skills requested for the average U.S. job have changed since 2016.
Excerpt: By analyzing hundreds of millions of recent U.S. job postings, the Burning Glass Institute and the Business–Higher Education Forum (BHEF) identified four of the fastest-growing, highest-demand emerging skill sets:
Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
Cloud Computing
Product Management
Social Media
These four skill sets serve as a laboratory for understanding what business and education leaders can do to prepare workers and students for skills disruption. To illustrate how programs can help learners and workers acquire essential skills, this report includes profiles of recent innovations from the BHEF network.
The future belongs to those who seek to understand, anticipate, and harness the power of emerging skills, rather than maintain a posture of reaction/response. … The prospect of helping all those who are challenged by skill disruption hinges on the readiness of business and higher education to engage in understanding and planning for skill disruption over the long term.
From DSC: “On average, 37% of the top 20 skills requested for the average U.S. job have changed since 2016.” That’s what I’m talking about when I talk about the exponential pace of change. It’s hard to deal with. Our institutions of education are not used to this pace of change. Our legal system isn’t used to this pace of change. And there are other industries struggling to keep up.
Should the pace of change be an element of our design when we think about using Design Thinking to create a new lifelong learning ecosystem?
ChatGPT, Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence in Education — from ditchthattextbook.com by Matt Miller AI just stormed into the classroom with the emergence of ChatGPT. How do we teach now that it exists? How can we use it? Here are some ideas.
Excerpt: Now, we’re wondering …
What is ChatGPT? And, more broadly, what are chatbots and AI?
How is this going to impact education?
How can I teach tomorrow knowing that this exists?
Can I use this as a tool for teaching and learning?
Should we block it through the school internet filter — or try to ban it?
The tech world is abuzz over ChatGPT, a chat bot that is said to be the most advanced ever made.
It can create poems, songs, and even computer code. It convincingly constructed a passage of text on how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR, in the voice of the King James Bible.
As a PhD microbiologist, I devised a 10-question quiz that would be appropriate as a final exam for college-level microbiology students. ChatGPT blew it away.
On the one hand, yes, ChatGPT is capable of producing prose that looks convincing. But on the other hand, what it means to be convincing depends on context. The kind of prose you might find engaging and even startling in the context of a generative encounter with an AI suddenly seems just terrible in the context of a professional essay published in a magazine such as The Atlantic. And, as Warner’s comments clarify, the writing you might find persuasive as a teacher (or marketing manager or lawyer or journalist or whatever else) might have been so by virtue of position rather than meaning: The essay was extant and competent; the report was in your inbox on time; the newspaper article communicated apparent facts that you were able to accept or reject.
These lines of demarcation—the lines between when a tool can do all of a job, some of it, or none of it—are both constantly moving and critical to watch. Because they define knowledge work and point to the future of work. We need to be teaching people how to do the kinds of knowledge work that computers can’t do well and are not likely to be able to do well in the near future. Much has been written about the economic implications to the AI revolution, some of which are problematic for the employment market. But we can put too much emphasis on that part. Learning about artificial intelligence can be a means for exploring, appreciating, and refining natural intelligence. These tools are fun. I learn from using them. Those two statements are connected.
Google is planning to create a new AI feature for its Search engine, one that would rival the recently released and controversial ChatGPT from OpenAI. The company revealed this after a recent Google executive meeting that involved the likes of its CEO Sundar Pichai and AI head, Jeff Dean, that talked about the technology that the internet company already has, soon for development.
Employees from the Mountain View giant were concerned that it was behind the current AI trends to the likes of OpenAI despite already having a similar technology laying around.
And more focused on the business/vocational/corporate training worlds:
There are a lot of knowledge management, enterprise learning and enterprise search products on the market today, but what Sana believes it has struck on uniquely is a platform that combines all three to work together: a knowledge management-meets-enterprise-search-meets-e-learning platform.
Three sources briefed on OpenAI’s recent pitch to investors said the organization expects $200 million in revenue next year and $1 billion by 2024.
The forecast, first reported by Reuters, represents how some in Silicon Valley are betting the underlying technology will go far beyond splashy and sometimes flawed public demos.
“We’re going to see advances in 2023 that people two years ago would have expected in 2033. It’s going to be extremely important not just for Microsoft’s future, but for everyone’s future,” he said in an interview this week.
Therefore, when adopting mobile AR to improve job performance, L&D professionals need to shift their mindset from offering training with AR alone to offering performance support with AR in the middle of the workflow.
The learning director from a supply chain industry pointed out that “70 percent of the information needed to build performance support systems already exists. The problem is it is all over the place and is available on different systems.”
It is the learning and development professional’s job to design a solution with the capability of the technology and present it in a way that most benefits the end users.
All participants revealed that mobile AR adoption in L&D is still new, but growing rapidly. L&D professionals face many opportunities and challenges. Understanding the benefits, challenges and opportunities of mobile AR used in the workplace is imperative.
A brief insert from DSC: Augmented Reality (AR) is about to hit the mainstream in the next 1-3 years. It will connect the physical world with the digital world in powerful, helpful ways (and likely in negative ways as well). I think it will be far bigger and more commonly used than Virtual Reality (VR). (By the way, I’m also including Mixed Reality (MR) within the greater AR domain.) With Artificial Intelligence (AI) making strides in object recognition, AR could be huge.
Learning & Development groups should ask for funding soon — or develop proposals for future funding as the new hardware and software products mature — in order to upskill at least some members of their groups in the near future.
As within Teaching & Learning Centers within higher education, L&D groups need to practice what they preach — and be sure to train their own people as well.
For years, the importance of building demonstrable skills has been growing. The research is clear: skills acquired through work experience increase lifetime earnings. Yet, a massive shift in how learners, educators, and employers think about skills is just beginning.
Three subtrends set the stage for a massive inflection point in how we think about skills…
Learning will be the only constant throughout a career. Success in the modern workforce is learning experiences to build skills, and the best way to build skills is to do real-world projects.
Below is a sampling of organizations and companies pushing the boundaries. Some of these are established players with mature businesses and tested business models.
The fastest-growing skills are digital skills
The top ten overall fastest-growing skills are digital skills. The ongoing evolution of technology means employers are regularly seeking new digital competencies from potential hires while also reskilling existing workers.
The fastest-growing digital skills are changing more significantly than the fastest-growing human skills
The top ten digital skills vary significantly from last year—only two have carried over year-on-year: data visualization and user experience. The human skills in demand remain steadier, suggesting an evergreen demand for skills like change management and communication.
In the last quarter of 2022, edtech layoffs have hit venture-backed businesses including but not limited to BloomTech, Vedantu, Teachmint, Reforge, Coursera, Unacademy, Byju’s, Udacity and Brainly. Executive shifts include Quizlet CEO stepping down, Degreed’s CEO stepping aside for the founder’s return, and Invact Metaversity’s co-founder leaving after irreconcilable differences with his co-founder.
Class, an edtech company that neared unicorn status only 10 months after launching its Zoom School alternative, also conducted layoffs this year. The company raised a total of $146 million in known venture funding to date, including a SoftBank Vision Fund II check. CEO and founder Michael Chasen did not respond to a request for comment
The e-mail sent to staff was even more direct. “The truth is the layoffs in our sector are widespread for a reason,” Amir Nathoo, the co-founder of edtech unicorn Outschool, wrote in an email sent to staff. “The funding atmosphere has been dramatically impacted by the anticipation of a recession, higher interest rates and an increased need to show [return on investment] to investors.”
Addendum on 12/15/22 — and focuses on India:
Will Edtech See a Paradigm Shift In 2023? — from entrepreneur.com by S. Shanthi Higher education, phygital models, vernacular learning, re-skilling, up-skilling are some of the trends that are expected to stay attractive
