My take is this: in all of the anxiety lies a crucial and long-overdue opportunity to deliver better learning experiences. Precisely because Atlas perceives the same context in the same moment as you, it can transform learning into a process aligned with core neuro-scientific principles—including active retrieval, guided attention, adaptive feedback and context-dependent memory formation.
Perhaps in Atlas we have a browser that for the first time isn’t just a portal to information, but one which can become a co-participant in active cognitive engagement—enabling iterative practice, reflective thinking, and real-time scaffolding as you move through challenges and ideas online.
With this in mind, I put together 10 use cases for Atlas for you to try for yourself.
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6. Retrieval Practice
What: Pulling information from memory drives retention better than re-reading. Why: Practice testing delivers medium-to-large effects (Adesope et al., 2017). Try: Open a document with your previous notes. Ask Atlas for a mixed activity set: “Quiz me on the Krebs cycle—give me a near-miss, high-stretch MCQ, then a fill-in-the-blank, then ask me to explain it to a teen.” Atlas uses its browser memory to generate targeted questions from your actual study materials, supporting spaced, varied retrieval.
From DSC: A quick comment. I appreciate these ideas and approaches from Katarzyna and Rita. I do think that someone is going to want to be sure that the AI models/platforms/tools are given up-to-date information and updated instructions — i.e., any new procedures, steps to take, etc. Perhaps I’m missing the boat here, but an internal AI platform is going to need to have access to up-to-date information and instructions.
While confidence in higher education has eroded and more Americans are questioning the importance of a degree, the demand for internships among college students is skyrocketing and the odds of getting an internship at a major company are now lower than getting into the Ivy League. This begs the question: are we at a point where an internship is as valuable – or perhaps more so – than a degree itself?
While concerns about degree ROI were on the rise, the value of internships and other work-integrated learning opportunities was becoming increasingly apparent. New research and analysis have shown us how valuable it is for a student to have an internship during college: it doubles the odds they have a good job waiting for them upon graduation and doubles their odds of being engaged in their work over their lifetime. Although there are some variations in those outcomes by choice of college or academic major, those variations pale in comparison to the impact of having an internship. In short, a collegiate internship experience is a more important indicator of these outcomes than alma mater or major.
Edtech firm Chegg confirmed Monday it is reducing its workforce by 45%, or 388 employees globally, and its chief executive officer is stepping down. Current CEO Nathan Schultz will be replaced effective immediately by executive chairman (and former CEO) Dan Rosensweig. The rise of AI-powered tools has dealt a massive blow to the online homework helper and led to “substantial” declines in revenue and traffic.Company shares have slipped over 10% this year. Chegg recently explored a possible sale, but ultimately decided to keep the company intact.
At the most recent NVIDIA GTC conference, held in Washington, D.C. in October 2025, CEO Jensen Huang announced major developments emphasizing the use of AI to “reindustrialize America”. This included new partnerships, expansion of the Blackwell architecture, and advancements in AI factories for robotics and science. The spring 2024 GTC conference, meanwhile, was headlined by the launch of the Blackwell GPU and significant updates to the Omniverse and robotics platforms.
During the keynote in D.C., Jensen Huang focused on American AI leadership and announced several key initiatives.
Massive Blackwell GPU deployments: The company announced an expansion of its Blackwell GPU architecture, which first launched in March 2024. Reportedly, the company has already shipped 6 million Blackwell chips, with orders for 14 million more by the end of 2025.
AI supercomputers for science: In partnership with the Department of Energy and Oracle, NVIDIA is building new AI supercomputers at Argonne National Laboratory. The largest, named “Solstice,” will deploy 100,000 Blackwell GPUs.
6G infrastructure: NVIDIA announced a partnership with Nokia to develop a U.S.-based, AI-native 6G technology stack.
AI factories for robotics: A new AI Factory Research Center in Virginia will use NVIDIA’s technology for building massive-scale data centers for AI.
Autonomous robotaxis: The company’s self-driving technology, already adopted by several carmakers, will be used by Uber for an autonomous fleet of 100,000 robotaxis starting in 2027.
Nvidia (NVDA) and Uber (UBER) on Tuesday revealed that they’re working to put together what they say will be the world’s largest network of Level 4-ready autonomous cars.
The duo will build out 100,000 vehicles beginning in 2027 using Nvidia’s Drive AGX Hyperion 10 platform and Drive AV software.
Nvidia (NVDA) stock on Tuesday rose 5% to close at a record high after the company announced a slew of product updates, partnerships, and investment initiatives at its GTC event in Washington, D.C., putting it on the doorstep of becoming the first company in history with a market value above $5 trillion.
The AI chip giant is approaching the threshold — settling at a market cap of $4.89 trillion on Tuesday — just months after becoming the first to close above $4 trillion in July.
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’sin Psychology. Every Master’s in Education. Every Associate in Nursing. Each one assessed separately. Each one facing the same pass-or-fail tests.
For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
The LORD detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him.
From DSC:
As a relevant aside, the following article made me think about some of the reasons why the LORD used parables/stories to speak to the people:
The Storytelling Approach
Sharing stories is effective because it seems to get around our defensiveness. When information is presented in a story form, people reason about it differently than if it were presented as a list of facts or a direct critique.
Here’s more of why and then how to implement it with success in your school leadership work.
1. Transportation and Distancing: Listening to a story pulls us out of a defensive mode (the “do I agree or do I disagree?” mindset) and into a thoughtful, observant framework. Being transported allows the individual to identify with others in a way that is different from experiencing the situation for themselves. It’s a third-person, objective mindset, a safe zone for people to evaluate a situation from.
2. Shifting Perspective: When individuals consider challenges from the perspective of someone who is not them, it dramatically alters their thinking. They gain the latitude and freedom to consider the available options without feeling personally attacked. That wise sage did this when he shared his story of struggling. Making it safe and helping me to see him as having an objective, difficult experience is why when I was able to take the perspective of a distanced other. It became easier to think about the situation in a wiser way and come up with a better solution.
3. Engaging Different Brain Systems: Fundamentally different pathways are triggered when processing stories compared to facts. Storytelling engages social relevance brain systems–those that help us understand what other people think and feel, such as empathy, another higher order processing mechanism.
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.
The Bull and Bear Case For the AI Bubble, Explained — from theneuron.ai by Grant Harvey AI is both a genuine technological revolution and a massive financial bubble, and the defining question is whether miraculous progress can outrun the catastrophic, multi-trillion-dollar cost required to achieve it.
This sets the stage for the defining conflict of our technological era. The narrative has split into two irreconcilable realities. In one, championed by bulls like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, we are at the dawn of “computer industry V2”—a platform shift so profound it will unlock unprecedented productivity and reshape civilization.
In the other, detailed by macro investors like Julien Garran and forensic bears like writer Ed Zitron, AI is a historically massive, circular, debt-fueled mania built on hype, propped up by a handful of insiders, and destined for a collapse that will make past busts look quaint.
This is a multi-layered conflict playing out across public stock markets, the private venture ecosystem, and the fundamental unit economics of the technology itself. To understand the future, and whether it holds a revolution, a ruinous crash, or a complex mixture of both, we must dissect every layer of the argument, from the historical parallels to the hard financial data and the technological critiques that question the very foundation of the boom.
From DSC:
I second what Grant said at the beginning of his analysis:
**The following is shared for educational purposes and is not intended to be financial advice; do your own research!
But I post this because Grant provides both sides of the argument very well.
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.
Most polled Americans, 70%, disagreed that the federal government should control “admissions, faculty hiring, and curriculum at U.S. colleges and universities to ensure they do not teach inappropriate material,” according to a survey released Wednesday by the Public Religion Research Institute.
The majority of Americans across political parties — 84% of Democrats, 75% of independents and 58% of Republicans — disagreed with federal control over these elements of college operations.
The poll’s results come as the Trump administration seeks to exert control over college workings, including in its recent offer of priority for federal research funding in exchange for making sweeping policy changes aligned with the government’s priorities.
Entrepreneurship education fosters resilience, creativity, and financial literacy—skills critical for success in an unpredictable, tech-driven world.
Programs like NFTE, Junior Achievement, and Uncharted Learning empower students by offering real-world entrepreneurial experiences and mentorship.
“Entrepreneurship is the job of the future.”
— Charles Fadel, Education for the Age of AI
This shift requires a radical re-evaluation of what we teach. Education leaders across the country are realizing that the most valuable skill we can impart is not accounting or marketing, but the entrepreneurial mindset. This mindset—built on resilience, creative problem-solving, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to pivot—is essential in startups, as an intrapreuer in big organizations, or as a citizen working for the common good.
The number of education degrees awarded in the U.S. steadily decreased in the nearly two decades between 2003-04 and 2022-23, according to a new analysis of federal data by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.
Bachelor’s degrees in education dipped from 109,622 annually to 90,710 while master’s degrees declined from 162,632 to 143,669 in that time span, AACTE said in its report on data from the U.S. Department of Education.
No matter whether you are a student or a teacher, sometimes it can be difficult to find motivation to start or complete a task. Instead, you may spend hours procrastinating with other activities and that opens an unhelpful cycle of stress and unhappiness. Stressful environments which are common in educational settings can increase the likelihood of maladaptive procrastination (1) and hamper motivation. This digest offers four resources on ways to think about and boost (self-)motivation.
From DSC: Stephen has some solid reflections and asks some excellent questions in this posting, including:
The question is: how do we optimize an AI to support learning? Will one model be enough? Or do we need different models for different learners in different scenarios?
A More Human University: The Role of AI in Learning — from er.educause.edu by Robert Placido Far from heralding the collapse of higher education, artificial intelligence offers a transformative opportunity to scale meaningful, individualized learning experiences across diverse classrooms.
The narrative surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education is often grim. We hear dire predictions of an “impending collapse,” fueled by fears of rampant cheating, the erosion of critical thinking, and the obsolescence of the human educator.Footnote1 This dystopian view, however, is a failure of imagination. It mistakes the death rattle of an outdated pedagogical model for the death of learning itself. The truth is far more hopeful: AI is not an asteroid coming for higher education. It is a catalyst that can finally empower us to solve our oldest, most intractable problem: the inability to scale deep, engaged, and truly personalized learning.
Increasing the rate of scientific progress is a core part of Anthropic’s public benefit mission.
We are focused on building the tools to allow researchers to make new discoveries – and eventually, to allow AI models to make these discoveries autonomously.
Until recently, scientists typically used Claude for individual tasks, like writing code for statistical analysis or summarizing papers. Pharmaceutical companies and others in industry also use it for tasks across the rest of their business, like sales, to fund new research. Now, our goal is to make Claude capable of supporting the entire process, from early discovery through to translation and commercialization.
To do this, we’re rolling out several improvements that aim to make Claude a better partner for those who work in the life sciences, including researchers, clinical coordinators, and regulatory affairs managers.
AI as an access tool for neurodiverse and international staff— from timeshighereducation.com by Vanessa Mar-Molinero Used transparently and ethically, GenAI can level the playing field and lower the cognitive load of repetitive tasks for admin staff, student support and teachers
Where AI helps without cutting academic corners When framed as accessibility and quality enhancement, AI can support staff to complete standard tasks with less friction. However, while it supports clarity, consistency and inclusion, generative AI (GenAI) does not replace disciplinary expertise, ethical judgement or the teacher–student relationship. These are ways it can be put to effective use:
The Sleep of Liberal Arts Produces AI — from aiedusimplified.substack.com by Lance Eaton, Ph.D. A keynote at the AI and the Liberal Arts Symposium Conference
This past weekend, I had the honor to be the keynote speaker at a really fantstistic conferece, AI and the Liberal Arts Symposium at Connecticut College. I had shared a bit about this before with my interview with Lori Looney. It was an incredible conference, thoughtfully composed with a lot of things to chew on and think about.
It was also an entirely brand new talk in a slightly different context from many of my other talks and workshops. It was something I had to build entirely from the ground up. It reminded me in some ways of last year’s “What If GenAI Is a Nothingburger”.
It was a real challenge and one I’ve been working on and off for months, trying to figure out the right balance. It’s a work I feel proud of because of the balancing act I try to navigate. So, as always, it’s here for others to read and engage with. And, of course, here is the slide deck as well (with CC license).
The Most Innovative Law Schools (2025) — from abovethelaw.com by Staci Zaretsky Forget dusty casebooks — today’s leaders in legal education are using AI, design thinking, and real-world labs to reinvent how law is taught.
“[F]rom AI labs and interdisciplinary centers to data-driven reform and bold new approaches to design and client service,” according to National Jurist’s preLaw Magazine, these are the law schools that “exemplify innovation in action.”
North Carolina Central University School of Law
Suffolk University Law School
UC Berkeley School of Law
Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law
Northeastern University School of Law
Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University
Seattle University School of Law
Case Western Reserve University School of Law
University of Miami School of Law
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University
Vanderbilt University Law School
Southwestern Law School
Click here to read short summaries of why each school made this year’s list of top innovators.
Newton delivered what may have been the most consequential keynote in the company’s history and one that signals a shift by Clio from a traditional practice management provider to a comprehensive platform that essentially does everything for the business and practice of law.
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Clio also earlier this year acquired vLex, the heavy-duty AI legal research player. The acquisition is pending regulatory approval. It is the vLex acquisition that is powering the Clio transformation that Newton described in his keynote.
vLex has a huge amount of legal data in its wheelhouse to power sophisticated legal AI research. On top of this data, vLex developed Vincent, a powerful AI tool to work with this data and enable all sorts of actions and work.
This means a couple of things. First, by acquiring vLex, Clio can now offer its customers AI legal research tools. Clio customers will no longer have to go one place for its practice management needs and a second place for its substantive legal work, like research. It makes what Clio can provide much more comprehensive and all inclusive.
Artificial intelligence will give solos and small firms “a huge advantage,” according to one legal tech consultant.
In this episode of “Adventures in Legal Tech,” host Jared Correia speaks with Ernie Svenson — aka “Ernie the Attorney” — about the psychology behind resistance to change, how law firms are positioning their AI use, the power of technology for business development, and more.
Legal ops experts can categorize legal AI platforms and software by the ability to streamline key tasks such as legal research, document processing or analysis, and drafting.
The trustworthiness and accuracy of AI hinge on the quality of its underlying data; solutions like CoCounsel Legal are grounded in authoritative, expert-verified content from Westlaw and Practical Law, unlike providers that may rely on siloed or less reliable databases.
When evaluating legal software, firms should use a framework that assesses critical factors such as integration with existing tech stacks, security, scalability, user adoption, and vendor reputation.
The Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University appointed Sean Harrington as director of the newly established AI and Legal Tech Studio, a key milestone in ASU Law’s bold initiative to reimagine legal education for the artificial intelligence era. ASU, ranked No. 1 in innovation for the 11th consecutive year, drives AI solutions that enhance teaching, enrich student training and facilitate digital transformation.
The sixth annual American Legal Technology Awards were presented on Wednesday, October 15th, at Suffolk University Law School (Boston), recognizing winners across ten categories. There were 211 nominees who were evaluated by 27 judges.
Thanks for dropping by my Learning Ecosystems blog!
My name is Daniel Christian and this blog seeks to cover the teaching and learning environments within the K-12 (including homeschooling, learning pods/micro-schools), collegiate, and corporate training spaces -- whether those environments be face-to-face, blended, hyflex, or 100% online.
Just as the organizations that we work for have their own learning ecosystems, each of us has our own learning ecosystem. We need to be very intentional about enhancing those learning ecosystems -- as we all need to be lifelong learners in order to remain marketable and employed. It's no longer about running sprints (i.e., getting a 4-year degree or going to a vocational school and then calling it quits), but rather, we are all running marathons now (i.e., we are into lifelong learning these days).
