Introducing Teach AI — Empowering educators to teach w/ AI & about AI [ISTE & many others]


Teach AI -- Empowering educators to teach with AI and about AI


Also relevant/see:

 
 

Verified Skills — from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain
Hunting for a common thread amid the hype around skills.

Excerpt:

The glitzy ASU+GSV gathering this week was titled “Brave New World.” But Tim Knowles wanted to talk about 1906.

That was when the organization Knowles leads, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, created the credit-hour standard. The time has arrived, argue Knowles and Amit Sevak, CEO of ETS, to move away from the Carnegie Unit and toward a new currency of education based on meaningful skills and accomplishments, demonstrated through assessment.

Our old way of training Americans for ‘good jobs’ is past its sell-by date — from workshift.opencampusmedia.org by JB Holston
We’re at a pivot point in education and workforce development. Employers in the U.S. and its allies have an opportunity to accelerate their economies by collaborating to scale new pathways to prosperity. They need to seize that opportunity, writes JB Holston, former CEO of the Greater Washington Partnership.

The country is at a pivot point. COVID’s acceleration of remote work and training; an increased dedication to inclusion, equity, and diversity since the murder of George Floyd; the inexorable pace of technological change; and America’s new, well-funded industrial policy have created an opportunity for the most significant re-set in the relationship between employers and our education systems in the last 150 years.

The old path to family-supporting career positions—which depended on large employers recruiting graduates from a small universe of ranked colleges whose education stopped with that degree—is past its sell-by date.

AI in Hiring and Evaluating Workers: What Americans Think — from pewresearch.org by Lee Rainie, Monica Anderson, Colleen McClain, Emily A. Vogels, and Risa Gelles-Watnick
62% believe artificial intelligence will have a major impact on jobholders overall in the next 20 years, but far fewer think it will greatly affect them personally. People are generally wary and uncertain of AI being used in hiring and assessing workers

Excerpt:

A new Pew Research Center survey finds crosscurrents in the public’s opinions as they look at the possible uses of AI in workplaces. Americans are wary and sometimes worried. For instance, they oppose AI use in making final hiring decisions by a 71%-7% margin, and a majority also opposes AI analysis being used in making firing decisions. Pluralities oppose AI use in reviewing job applications and in determining whether a worker should be promoted. Beyond that, majorities do not support the idea of AI systems being used to track workers’ movements while they are at work or keeping track of when office workers are at their desks.

 

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:

 

From DSC:
While I continue to try and review/pulse-check the K12 learning ecosystem, it struck me that we need new, DIRECT communication channels between educators, support staff, administrators, and legislators — and possibly others.

That is:

  • How can teachers, support staff, and administrators talk directly to legislators?
  • How can legislators communicate with teachers, support staff, and administrators?
  • Should we require relevant legislators (i.e., those individuals sponsoring bills or major changes to our k12 learning ecosystem) to go through training on how students learn?
  • What communication vehicles are present? Can they be anonymous?
  • Should there be an idea 1-800 hotline or an idea “mailbox” (digital and/or analog based)?

And what about the students themselves and/or their parents/guardians? Should they be involved as well?

 

Explore Breakthroughs in AI, Accelerated Computing, and Beyond at NVIDIA's GTC -- keynote was held on March 21 2023

Explore Breakthroughs in AI, Accelerated Computing, and Beyond at GTC — from nvidia.com
The Conference for the Era of AI and the Metaverse

 


Addendums on 3/22/23:

Generative AI for Enterprises — from nvidia.com
Custom-built for a new era of innovation and automation.

Excerpt:

Impacting virtually every industry, generative AI unlocks a new frontier of opportunities—for knowledge and creative workers—to solve today’s most important challenges. NVIDIA is powering generative AI through an impressive suite of cloud services, pre-trained foundation models, as well as cutting-edge frameworks, optimized inference engines, and APIs to bring intelligence to your enterprise applications.

NVIDIA AI Foundations is a set of cloud services that advance enterprise-level generative AI and enable customization across use cases in areas such as text (NVIDIA NeMo™), visual content (NVIDIA Picasso), and biology (NVIDIA BioNeMo™). Unleash the full potential with NeMo, Picasso, and BioNeMo cloud services, powered by NVIDIA DGX™ Cloud—the AI supercomputer.

 

Fostering sustainable learning ecosystems — from linkedin.com by Patrick Blessinger

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Learning ecosystems
As today’s global knowledge society becomes increasingly interconnected and begins to morph into a global learning society, it is likely that formal, nonformal, and informal learning will become increasingly interconnected. For instance, there has been an explosion of new self-directed e-learning platforms such as Khan Academy, Open Courseware, and YouTube, among others, that help educate billions of people around the world.

A learning ecosystem includes all the elements that contribute to a learner’s overall learning experience. The components of a learning ecosystem are numerous, including people, technology platforms, knowledge bases, culture, governance, strategy, and other internal and external elements that have an impact on learning. Therefore, moving forward, it is crucial to integrate learning across formal, nonformal, and informal learning processes and activities in a more strategic way.

Learning ecosystems -- formal, informal, and nonformal sources of learning will become more tightly integrated in the future

 

Why The Education Economy Is The Next Big Thing For The American Workforce — from fastcompany.com by Brandon Busteed
How can integrating our educational system, our employers, and our job creators affect our modern economy?

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Though the economy and education have long been topics of top concern to Americans, we haven’t created strong linkages between the two.

The topics are more like two castles with a large moat between them. Yet there is nothing more important we can do as a country than to build the world’s most effective “educonomy,” which would seamlessly integrate our educational system, our employers, and our job creators.

All told, we collected the voices of close to 1 million Americans on this subject in the past year alone. And what we’ve learned is alarming:

Student engagement in school drops precipitously from 5th grade through 12th grade. About three quarters of elementary school kids (76%) are engaged in school, while only 44% of high school kids are engaged. The longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become. If we were doing this right, the trend would be going in the exact opposite direction.

From DSC:
I appreciated the imagery of the economy and education being like two castles with a large moat between them. I, like many others, also use the term siloed to describe our various learning ecosystems — PreK-12, higher education and vocational programming, and the corporate/business world (I realize I could also include those who work in other areas such as the government, but hopefully folks get the gist of what I’m trying to say).

But here’s the most disturbing part (albeit likely not a surprise to those working within K-12 environments):

About seven in 10 K-12 teachers are not engaged in their work (69%), and as a profession, teachers are dead last among all professions Gallup studied in saying their “opinions count” at work and their “supervisors create an open and trusting environment.” We also found that teacher engagement is the most important driver of student engagement. We’ll never improve student engagement until we boost teachers’ own workplace engagement first.

Our older daughter works in an elementary school where several of the teachers left prior to Christmas and more have announced that they are leaving after this academic year. For teachers to leave halfway through the year, you know something is majorly wrong!

I think that legislators are part of the problem, as they straight-jacket teachers, principals, and administrators with all kinds of standardized testing.

Standardized testing is like a wrecking ball on our educational systems -- impacting things like our students' and teachers' sense of joy, play, wonder, and motivation

I would think that such testing dictates the pace and the content and the overall agendas out there. I don’t recall taking nearly as many standardized tests as our youth do today. Looking back, each of my teachers was engaged and seemed to be happy and enthusiastic. I don’t think that’s the case any longer. Let’s ask the teachers — not the legislators — why that is the case and what they would recommend to change things (before it’s too late).

 

The Broken Higher Education System: Addressing Stakeholder Needs for a More Adaptive Model — from educationoneducation.substack.com

Excerpt:

Higher education Chief Academic Officers (CAOs) must shift their perspective and strive to increase customer satisfaction to ensure the highest quality of educational products. A recent survey by Higher Education found that only 25% of customers were satisfied with the results higher education provided, contradicting the satisfaction differences of 99% of CAOs. Clearly, a disconnect exists between what higher education leaders deliver and what students, employers, and the changing labor market requirements are. To bridge this gap, higher education must develop products focusing on stakeholder feedback in product design, job requirements, and practical skills development.

From DSC:
So in terms of Design Thinking for reinventing lifelong learning, it seems to me that we need much more collaboration between the existing siloes. That is, we need students, educators, administrators, employers, and other stakeholders at the (re)design table. More experiments and what I call TrimTab Groups are needed.

But I think that the culture of many institutions of traditional higher education will prevent this from occurring. Many in academia shy away from (to put it politely) the world of business (even though they themselves ARE a business). I know, it’s not fair nor does it make sense. But many faculty members lean towards much more noble purposes, while never seeing the mounting gorillas of debt that they’ve heaped upon their students’/graduates’ backs. Those in academia shouldn’t be so quick to see themselves as being so incredibly different from those working in the corporate/business world.

The following quote seems appropriate to place here:


Along the lines of other items in the higher education space, see:

New Data Shows Emergency Pandemic Aid Helped Keep 18 Million Students Enrolled — from forbes.com by Edward Conroy

Excerpt:

The Department of Education (ED) has released new data showing that 18 million students were helped by emergency aid for colleges and universities throughout the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than half of which was used to provide emergency grants to students. These funds were provided through three rounds of Higher Education Emergency Relief Funds (HEERF) In total, $76.2 billion was provided, with half of those funds going to support students directly. Unusually for funding in higher education, the money was not heavily means-tested, and was distributed very quickly.

The report indicates that the funds were used for several essential purposes, including student basic needs, keeping staff employed, and helping keep students enrolled. For example, students used funds to cover things like food and housing at a time when employment was drying up for many students, ensuring that the Pandemic did not plunge students who already had limited funds deeper into basic needs insecurity.

Flagships prosper, while regionals suffer — from chronicle.com by Lee Gardner
Competition is getting fierce, and the gap is widening

Excerpts:

Some key numbers are moving in the right direction at the University of Oregon. The flagship institution enrolled 5,338 freshmen in the fall of 2022, its largest entering class ever. First-year enrollment increased 16 percent over 2021, which was also a record year. Meanwhile, Western Oregon University, a regional public institution an hour’s drive north, just outside Salem, lost nearly 7 percent of its enrollment over the same period.

In 28 states, flagships have seen enrollment rise between 2010 to 2021, while regionals have trended down, according to a Chronicle analysis of U.S. Education Department data. Across all states, enrollment at 78 public flagships rose 12.3 percent from 2010 to 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. Enrollment at 396 public regional universities slumped more than 4 percent during the same period.

Chronicle analysis of federal data showed, for example, that in Michigan, a state being hit hard by demographic shifts and with no central higher-ed authority, the flagship University of Michigan at Ann Arbor saw undergraduate enrollment rise 16 percent between 2010 and 2020. Over the same period, it fell at 11 of the state’s 12 other four-year public campuses.

 
 

Preparing Today’s Students for the Future Workforce — from rdene915.com by Rachelle Dené Poth

Excerpt:

Today’s high school students are the future of our workforce. Before long they will be in college or starting full-time jobs of their own. But how are today’s students preparing for their futures? What will the workforce look like when these students move on to the next stage of their lives?

Schools, districts, and even state education departments provide various programs for students to gain relevant work experience and gain necessary skills outside of the classroom.

What Are These Programs?
There are a number of school-based programs that support student growth through work such as…


Also relevant/see:


One Foot in the Future — from the BIG questions institute

As an excerpt from an email describing this new/free ebook, Homa Tavangar and Will Richardson write:

We need a fresh set of tools, frameworks, and lenses if we are to meet the future effectively.

With this new ebook, “One Foot in the Future,” we’re charting a different path forward, introducing readers to things like:

  • Design Fiction – A tool to help us become “archeologists of the future” and help us
  • Regenerative Learning – A lens that helps us see our work as it impacts all living things
  • Schoolpunk – A movement and a community to help imagine the future of education together.

And much more.

Our sense is that there is growing appetite to get out of the traditional school box and to design a more aspirational future. This new ebook is a great starting point for anyone who wants to do just that.

ONE FOOT IN THE FUTURE -- a free ebook from the BIG questions institute regarding new frameworks, tools, and lenses to help educators imagine what comes next

 

Brandon Busteed (emphasis DSC):

This is a Titanic moment. The iceberg is right in front of us and there just isn’t enough time to turn the massive U.S. education/higher education/employer training ship. Unless… We all go to work on work.

From DSC:
My comment on that string from Brandon was:

And I can’t help but think that part of that work involves Design Thinking…reinventing what lifelong learning looks/acts like.

 

Why Educators And Employers Must Come Together To Cross The Skills Gap — from forbes.com by Mark C. Perna

Excerpts:

Beyond the IT sector, skills gaps also exist in other areas of the economy, such as manufacturing and retail. There is a shortage of workers in the skilled trades industries, for example, which is growing more acute every year.

The other major factor in the growth of the skills gap is the aging of the Boomer generation, who are exiting the workforce—leaving open highly-skilled jobs that members of younger generations have not had the time or training to fill.

By 2030, forecasts predict that all Boomers will have left the job market—leaving some 85 million open jobs, according to a Korn Ferry study on the Global Talent Crunch. The cost? A projected $8.5 trillion in lost revenue.

Put another way, schools and employers need to team up in new ways to help provide access to members of the younger generation to gain the kinds of skills that make the skills gap a thing of the past. We need to connect the dots between school and work, because far too many people are getting lost in the middle.

And on a somewhat relevant note, also see:

General Assembly Launches Apprenticeship Solution to Help Employers Source, Deploy, and Retain Hard-to-Find Tech Talent — from finance.yahoo.com; via Paul Fain

Excerpt:

NEW YORK, Feb. 7, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — General Assembly (GA) today announced the launch of GA Apprenticeships, Powered by Interapt, a tech apprenticeship solution designed to fast-track high-potential, overlooked talent into careers in software engineering, data, and cybersecurity. In light of growing labor market challenges and ongoing skill shortages across a range of industries, this new model will provide employers with a derisked opportunity to onboard entry-level tech talent while also enabling apprentices to earn a salary as they learn alongside senior-level developers.

See Workers as Workers, Not as a College Credential — an opinion item out at nytimes.com (paywall)

In one of the richest nations on earth, the path to prosperity has narrowed significantly in recent decades — especially for those without a college education. More than 62 percent of Americans ages 25 and up do not hold bachelor’s degrees, and the earnings gapbetween those with a college education and those without one has never been wider.

 

Canary in the coal mine for coding bootcamps? — from theview.substack.com by gordonmacrae; with thanks to Mr. Ryan Craig for this resource

Excerpt:

If you run a software development bootcamp, a recent Burning Glass institute report should keep you awake at night.

The report, titled How Skills Are Disrupting Work, looks at a decade of labor market analysis and identifies how digital skill training and credentials have responded to new jobs.

Three trends stuck out to me:

  • The most future-proof skills aren’t technical
  • Demand for software development is in decline
  • One in eight postings feature just four skill sets

These three trends should sound a warning for software development bootcamps, in particular. Let’s see why, and how you can prepare to face the coming challenges.


Also relevant/see:

Issue #14: Trends in Bootcamps — from theview.substack.com by gordonmacrae

Excerpt:

Further consolidation of smaller providers seems likely to continue in 2023. A number of VC-backed providers will run out of money.

A lot of bootcamps will be available cheaply for any larger providers, or management companies. Growth will continue to be an option in the Middle East, as funding doesn’t look like drying up any time soon. And look for the larger bootcamps to expand into hire-train-deploy, apprenticeships or licensing.

As Alberto pointed out this week, it’s hard for bootcamps to sustain the growth trajectory VC’s expect. But there are other options available.


 

What is college for? Gov. Shapiro raises the question. Higher ed leaders are listening. — from The Philadelphia Inquirer by Will Bunch; with thanks to Ray Schroeder out on LinkedIn for the resource
Pa.’s new governor Josh Shapiro’s first move was to question the need of a college diploma as a job credential. U.S. universities, pay attention.

Excerpt:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — What is college actually for?

No one expected this to be the initial question raised by Pennsylvania’s new governor, Josh Shapiro, in his first full day on the job. While he may not have stated it explicitly, this was the essence of the Democrat’s very first executive order, which opened up some 92% of job listings in state government — about 65,000 in all — to applicants who don’t have a four-year college degree.

In branding degree requirements for many jobs as “arbitrary” and declaring “there are many different pathways to success,” the Keystone State’s new chief executive was tugging at the shaky Jenga block that has undergirded the appalling rise of a $1.75 trillion student debt bomb in the U.S. and led, arguably, to a college/non-college divide driving our nation’s bitter politics. The notion is this: You can’t make it in 21st-century America without that most expensive piece of sheepskin: the college diploma.

So the $64,000 question (OK, $80,000 … for one year on some elite private campuses) is this: If you don’t need the credential, do you actually need college?

Something is clearly gained by giving America’s young people more career options that won’t contribute to that $1.75 trillion college debt bomb. But are we talking enough about what could be lost in a new system that not only devalues the university but also seems to ratify a dubious idea — that higher education is almost solely about careerism, and not the wider knowledge and critical-thinking skills that come from liberal arts learning?

From DSC:
To me — and to many other parents and families — it all boils down to the price tag of obtaining a liberal arts education. It’s one thing to get a liberal arts education at $5K per year. It’s another thing when the pricetag runs at $40K and above (per year)! Most people ARE FORCED to question the ROI of a liberal arts education. They simply have to.

On a relevant tangent here…many inside the academy have traditionally looked with disdain at the corporate world. The thinking went something like this:

Business! Ha! We are not a business! Students are not customers. Don’t ever compare us to the corporate world.

Having spent half of my career in the corporate world, I do not subscribe to that perspective. In fact, I’d like to ask those who still hold this point of view:
  • Where else can you pay tens of thousands of dollars for something and not be treated as a customer?! Don’t you typically expect value on your own purchases and positive returns on your investments?
  • How will you collaborate with the corporate world if you look upon them with disdain?!

But now that colleges and universities enrollments are not doing so well, perhaps there will be more openness to change and towards developing more impactful collaborations.

 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian