5 AI-Driven Healthcare Trends and Solutions in 2023 — from hitconsultant.net by Dmitrii Evstiukhin

Excerpt:

Healthcare enterprises are quickly embracing artificial intelligence solutions to mitigate loss, streamline operations, improve efficiency, and enhance customer service.

Learn about the latest trends and solutions in healthcare AI, obstacles to AI adoption, and how artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming standards of patient care in 2023.

 

ANALYSIS: ‘Microcredentials’ poised to disrupt higher ed as degrees lose relevance to employers — from campusreform.org by Shelby Kearns; with thanks to Ray Schroeder on LinkedIn for this resource

Key points:

  • Survey respondents are demonstrating confidence in microcredentials–online training programs that take no more than six months to complete–as four-year degree programs often overlook job training.
  • ‘Grade inflation and efforts to help everyone … attend college make it harder for employers to differentiate among applicants.’
 


Also relevant/see:


Learning Designers will have to adapt or die. 10 ways to UPSKILL to AI…. — from donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com by Donald Clark

Learning Designers need to upskill


From Ethan Mollick on LinkedIn:

Take a look at this simulated negotiation, with grading and feedback. Prompt: “I want to do deliberate practice about how to conduct negotiations. You will be my negotiation teacher. You will simulate a detailed scenario in which I have to engage in a negotiation. You will fill the role of one party, I will fill the role of the other. You will ask for my response to in each step of the scenario and wait until you receive it. After getting my response, you will give me details of what the other party does and says. You will grade my response and give me detailed feedback about what to do better using the science of negotiation. You will give me a harder scenario if I do well, and an easier one if I fail.”

Samples from Bing Creative mode and ChatGPT-4 (3.5, the free version, does not work as well)


I’m having a blast with ChatGPT – it’s testing ME! — from by Mark Mrohs
Using ChatGPT as an agent for asynchronous active learning

I have been experimenting with possible ways to incorporate interactions with ChatGPT into instruction. And I’m blown away. I want to show you some of what I’ve come up with.

 

VR & robotics could be the future of medical training — from vrscout.com by Kyle Melnick
FundamentalVR is partnering with Haply Robotics to provide more realistic VR surgical simulations.

VR & Robotics Could Be The Future Of Medical Training

Also relevant/see:

 

Canva’s New AI Wonder Tools — from wondertools.substack.com  by Jeremy Caplan
A magic eraser, a branding kit, AI presentations, and more new features

Excerpt:

Canva launched a bunch of new features at a live event viewed by 1.5 million people globally. The Australian company is no longer an upstart. 125 million people use it monthly, including 13 million paid subscribers yielding $1.4 billion in revenue. Canva’s increasingly competing with Adobe to help people create eye-catching visuals. Here are its most useful new tricks.

 

The Secret to Great Learning Design? Focus on Problems, not Solutions — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman
What a recent resurgence of research into problem-based learning has taught us about the value & impact of problem-based approaches

Excerpts:

Problem-based learning is an instructional approach that engages students in active, collaborative, and self-directed learning by exploring complex, real-world problems (rather than sitting and listening to a stage on the stage).

In a Problem-based learning scenario, students work in small groups and, under the guidance of a facilitator or instructor, identify, research, and analyse a problem before proposing and evaluating potential solutions and reaching a resolution.

Here are five of the most interesting research projects published on problem-based learning in the last few months:

 

How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide — from oneusefulthing.substack.com by Ethan Mollick
People often ask me how to use AI. Here’s an overview with lots of links.

Excerpts:

We live in an era of practical AI, but many people haven’t yet experienced it, or, if they have, they might have wondered what the big deal is. Thus, this guide. It is a modified version of one I put out for my students earlier in the year, but a lot has changed. It is an overview of ways to get AI to do practical things.

I want to try to show you some of why AI is powerful, in ways both exciting and anxiety-producing.

The Six Large Language Models


Also see Ethan’s posting:

Power and Weirdness: How to Use Bing AI
Bing AI is a huge leap over ChatGPT, but you have to learn its quirks


 

Teaching: What You Can Learn From Students About ChatGPT — from chronicle.com by Beth McMurtrie

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Like a lot of you, I have been wondering how students are reacting to the rapid launch of generative AI tools. And I wanted to point you to creative ways in which professors and teaching experts have helped involve them in research and policymaking.

At Kalamazoo College, Autumn Hostetter, a psychology professor, and six of her students surveyed faculty members and students to determine whether they could detect an AI-written essay, and what they thought of the ethics of using various AI tools in writing. You can read their research paper here.

Next, participants were asked about a range of scenarios, such as using Grammarly, using AI to make an outline for a paper, using AI to write a section of a paper, looking up a concept on Google and copying it directly into a paper, and using AI to write an entire paper. As expected, commonly used tools like Grammarly were considered the most ethical, while writing a paper entirely with AI was considered the least. But researchers found variation in how people approached the in-between scenarios. Perhaps most interesting: Students and faculty members shared very similar views with each scenario.

 


Also relevant/see:

This Was Written By a Human: A Real Educator’s Thoughts on Teaching in the Age of ChatGPT — from er.educause.edu educause.org by Jered Borup
The well-founded concerns surrounding ChatGPT shouldn’t distract us from considering how it might be useful.


 

 

From DSC:
After seeing this…

…I wondered:

  • Could GPT-4 create the “Choir Practice” app mentioned below?
    (Choir Practice was an idea for an app for people who want to rehearse their parts at home)
  • Could GPT-4 be used to extract audio/parts from a musical score and post the parts separately for people to download/practice their individual parts?

This line of thought reminded me of this posting that I did back on 10/27/2010 entitled, “For those institutions (or individuals) who might want to make a few million.”

Choir Practice -- an app for people who want to rehearse at home

And I want to say that when I went back to look at this posting, I was a bit ashamed of myself. I’d like to apologize for the times when I’ve been too excited about something and exaggerated/hyped an idea up on this Learning Ecosystems blog. For example, I used the words millions of dollars in the title…and that probably wouldn’t be the case these days. (But with inflation being what it is, heh…who knows!? Maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on myself.) I just had choirs in mind when I posted the idea…and there aren’t as many choirs around these days.  🙂

 

The above Tweet links to:

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter — from futureoflife.org
We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.



However, the letter has since received heavy backlash, as there seems to be no verification in signing it. Yann LeCun from Meta denied signing the letter and completely disagreed with the premise. (source)


In Sudden Alarm, Tech Doyens Call for a Pause on ChatGPT — from wired.com by Will Knight (behind paywall)
Tech luminaries, renowned scientists, and Elon Musk warn of an “out-of-control race” to develop and deploy ever-more-powerful AI systems.


 

Building a bridge to justice from the other side — from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong
Our professional-centric approach to resolving unmet legal needs hasn’t worked. Maybe it’s time we empowered the people who are already there.

An enormous and intricate bridge with parts of it bending down and part of it bending up -- creating a criss-cross pattern

Excerpts:

Given all that, I think it’s time we tried demand-side approach instead — one that doesn’t require us to licence and deploy more legal services professionals, but instead focuses on and empowers those who are already dealing with people’s unmet and unrecognized legal needs.

So if we’re not looking for legal professionals, who are we looking for? If we take a user-centred, needs-focused approach, we’ll find ourselves looking for someone who’s familiar to and trusted by the vulnerable people with unmet legal needs, who’s walked with them, earned their confidence over time — “someone who looks like them, understands their situation, and are trusted members of their community.”

These individuals are already present in the lives of people with unmet legal needs. They’re community activists, librarians, hospital employees, teachers, social workers, homeless advocates, therapists, food bank employees, members of a religious order, financial counsellors, mental health clinic staffers, juvenile case workers, and many others.

 

When It Comes to College Closures, the Sky Is Never Going to Fall — from chronicle.com by Lee Gardner
Are you tired of reading nearly annual predictions of a looming wave of colleges shutting down? Not nearly as tired as one Chronicle reporter.

Excerpts:

I’ve learned a lot of things about how colleges work in the last 10 years, including that they die hard. They make new appeals to students and alumni. They scrimp. They raise their tuition-discount rate yet again. They limp along with budget deficits, sometimes for years. They make withdrawals from their endowments. They sell off assets. They look for partnerships, mergers, and buyers, although sometimes when it’s far too late.

I could be wrong, of course, and there may be a giant wave of college closures rearing somewhere on the horizon. But I can guarantee you that there are dozens of institutions in danger of quietly slipping toward a gradual end as you read this.

Also highly relevant here/see:

Contingent faculty jobs are still the standard, AAUP report finds — from highereddive.com by Laura Spitalniak

Dive Brief:

  • Colleges are continuing to increase their reliance on faculty positions that lack pathways to tenure, according to a new report from the American Association of University Professors. Over two-thirds of faculty members, 68%, held contingent positions in fall 2021, compared to about 47% in fall 1987.
  • Part-time work is also becoming more common. Almost half of faculty, 48%, taught part time in fall 2021, up from 33% in fall 1987. Less than 1% of all part-time faculty positions are tenured or tenure-track, according to AAUP.
  • Both of these factors are cutting into the number of available tenured positions, the report said. Fewer than 1 in 4 faculty members, 24%, held tenured full-time positions in fall 2021. That number fell from 39% in fall 1987.

Americans Are Losing Faith in College Education, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds — from wsj.com by Douglas Belkin (behind a firewall)
Confidence in value of a degree plummeted among women and senior citizens during pandemic

Excerpt:

A majority of Americans don’t think a college degree is worth the cost, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, a new low in confidence in what has long been a hallmark of the American dream.

The survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, found that 56% of Americans think earning a four-year degree is a bad bet compared with 42% who retain faith in the credential.

Skepticism is strongest among people ages 18-34, and people with college degrees are among those whose opinions have soured the most, portending a profound shift for higher education in the years ahead.
 

Isaiah 53:5-6

But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

 

ChatGPT: Student insights are necessary to help universities plan for the future — from theconversation.com by Alpha Abebe and Fenella Amarasinghe

Excerpt:

In the race to get ahead of new technologies, are we forgetting about the perspectives of the most important stakeholders within our post-secondary institutions: the students?

Leaving students out of early discussions and decision-making processes is almost always a recipe for ill-fitting, ineffective and/or damaging approaches. The mantra “nothing for us without us” comes to mind here.

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian