What the Future of Learning Looks Like in the Era of AI — from the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan, by Sean Corp
AI & the Future of Learning Summit brings industry, education leaders together to discuss higher education’s opportunity to lead, what students need, and what partnerships are possible
As artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the nature of work and learning, speakers at the University of Michigan’s AI & the Future of Learning Summit delivered a clear message: higher education must take a leading role in defining what comes next.
One CEO of a leading educational technology company put it like this: “The only bad thing would be universities standing still.”
Universities must embrace their roles as providers of continuous, lifelong learning that evolves alongside technological change.
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This shift is already affecting early-career pathways. Employers are placing greater emphasis on experience, while traditional entry-level roles are becoming less accessible. There is often a gap between what a credential represents and the expectations of employers.
That gap is particularly evident in access to internships. Chris Parrish, co-founder and president of Podium, noted that millions of students compete for a limited number of internships each year, making it increasingly difficult to gain the experience employers demand.
“If you miss out on an internship, you’re twice as likely to be unemployed,” Parrish said.
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.
[From DSC: It’s been hard for me to get my arms around the love of Christ. He loves like no other. May I love a small fraction of the way He loves. In the period of Lent that we recently finished…as I was thinking of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, I wanted to focus on His love for us…not just His incredible courage.]
Hear, Lord, and be merciful to me;
Lord, be my help.
Psalm 31:1-3
For the director of music. A psalm of David.
1 In you, Lord, I have taken refuge;
let me never be put to shame;
deliver me in your righteousness.
2 Turn your ear to me,
come quickly to my rescue;
be my rock of refuge,
a strong fortress to save me.
3 Since you are my rock and my fortress,
for the sake of your name lead and guide me.
9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.
22 Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
23 They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
24 I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”
25 The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him;
26 it is good to wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.
More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing, new projection shows — from hechingerreport.org by Jon Marcus
As one Vermont college finishes its last semester, an estimated 442 others may be in trouble
A new estimate projects that 442 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, with a combined 670,000 students, are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next 10 years.
More than 120 institutions are at the very highest risk, according to the forecast, by Huron Consulting Group, which analyzed enrollment trends, tuition revenue, assets, debt, cash on hand and other measures. Many are, like Sterling, small and rural.
“We have too many seats. We have too many classrooms,” said Peter Stokes, a managing director at Huron. “So over the coming five to 10 years, this shakeout is going to take place.”
The Course Is Dying as the Unit of Learning — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman
Here’s why, and what’s replacing It
What the Bleeding Edge Looks like in Practice
So what does “the new stack” actually look like when organisations lean into this? Here are four real patterns already in play.
Engineering: from engine courses to in-workflow AI coaching.
Product development: from courses to craft-specific agents.
Compliance: from annual course to nudge systems.|
Enablement systems, not catalogues.
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What Are The College Degree Levels? — from teachthought.com
Overview of associate, bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral, and professional degrees: definitions, and typical length/credit requirements.
The quest to build a better AI tutor — from hechingerreport.org by Jill Barshay
Researchers make progress with an older ed tech idea: personalized practice
One promising idea has less to do with how an AI tutor explains concepts and more with what it asks students to practice next.
A team at the University of Pennsylvania, which included some AI skeptics, recently tested this approach in a study of close to 800 Taiwanese high school students learning Python programming. All the students used the same AI tutor, which was designed not to give away answers.
But there was one key difference. Half the students were randomly assigned to a fixed sequence of practice problems, progressing from easy to hard. The other half received a personalized sequence with the AI tutor continuously adjusting the difficulty of each problem based on how the student was performing and interacting with the chatbot.
The idea is based on what educators call the “zone of proximal development.” When problems are too easy, students get bored. When they’re too hard, students get frustrated. The goal is to keep students in a sweet spot: challenged, but not overwhelmed.
The researchers found that students in the personalized group did better on a final exam than students in the fixed problem group. The difference was characterized as the equivalent of 6 to 9 months of additional schooling, an eye-catching claim for an after-school online course that lasted only five months.
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To address this, Chung’s team combined a large language model with a separate machine-learning algorithm that analyzes how students interact with the online course platform — how they answer the practice questions, how many times they revise or edit their coding, and the quality of their conversations with the chatbot — and uses that information to decide which problem to serve up next.
Michigan schools may be leaning harder on subs. See your district’s shift in teaching staff. — from mlive.com by Jackie Smith
School districts across Michigan could be increasingly leaning on new and substitute teachers in the classroom, according to the latest K-12 staffing data tracked by the state.
Michigan’s Center for Educational Performance and Information updated staffing counts for districts through the current 2025-26 school year in late March, and the numbers largely confirm trends illustrated in other datasets.
The total number of teachers is on the rise ? with fewer sticking around more than a handful of years ? even as student enrollment goes down, and districts are continuing to use subs to fill in the gaps.
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From DSC:
One of our daughters obtained the credentials to teach in the elementary schools of Michigan. She was a very relational teacher and she taught at several schools over several years, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was when she taught at a school where:
- They would have to evacuate the classrooms at times if a student was going through the roof (emotion-wise)
- The students hit the principal
- The students often didn’t listen to or obey her instructions — which constantly tested her patience and drained her energy
- Many of the parents were not on the same team as the teachers — for a variety of complex reasons
- …and for other reasons as well.
The system was discouraging. It was too much to bear. So the system lost another good teacher.
Also see:
Michigan’s teacher shortage could be stabilizing, but data shows there’s a catch — from mlive.com by Jackie Smith
Michigan’s K-12 teacher workforce could be stabilizing, but schools across the state may be increasingly relying on educators working virtually or across multiple districts and those who are not fully certified, according to the latest data.
The Education Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC) at Michigan State University released its 2026 teacher shortage report earlier this month, which tracks hiring and vacancy trends, as well as what subjects are particularly impacted by fluctuations.
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Special education positions see the biggest vacancy rates
The vacancy rate for special education teachers is nearly double is nearly double the statewide average overall.According to the report, more than 5% of special ed full-time equivalent positions were vacant in fall 2024.
MSU’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative attributed at least some of that to the higher attrition from teachers that special ed positions see compared to other disciplines.
Street Artists Take On Monumental Infrastructure in ‘Impossible’ Photos — from thisiscolossal.com by Kate Mothes and Joseph Ford
Also see:
2025 Photo Awards Winner: Jonah Reenders — from booooooom.com by Jonah Reenders
5 For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all people. This has now been witnessed to at the proper time.
John (The Baptist) Testifies About Jesus
29 The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!
3 He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
4 Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
5 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.
6 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.
“Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!”
“Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!”
“…just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Jesus Predicts His Death a Third Time
17 Now Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. On the way, he took the Twelve aside and said to them, 18 “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death 19 and will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!”