Stanford Online Launches Immersive Learning Studio — from campustechnology.com by Matt Jones

Key Takeaways

  • Stanford Online celebrated its 30th anniversary by launching a new immersive learning studio that combines VR, AR, and AI technologies to create more engaging and personalized educational experiences.
  • The studio provides faculty with advanced production tools — including a 4K LED wall, cinematic cameras, AI-enabled workflows, and extensive editing and storage infrastructure — to develop innovative learning content at scale.
  • University leaders see the studio as a major step toward expanding faculty-led, research-based education globally, leveraging AI and immersive technologies to reach learners in ways previously not possible.
 

From DSC:
I used to be able to bring up Firefly on the web and use it “free” of charge — I didn’t have to go purchase tokens or credits. (I was actually paying for the Adobe Creative Cloud Pro suite of tools…so it wasn’t really free.)

But the other day I was trying to figure out what the latest pricing is at Adobe with that suite of tools and the use of credits for AI-based features. They say Adobe Creative Cloud Pro users get 4000 credits a month. Well, I have that suite and I’m still getting prompted to purchase credits. Firefly for individuals runs from $9.99 (2,000 credits/month) to $139.91 per month (50,000 credits per month). Not inexpensive, right? Below are other items along these lines.


The Era of Affordable AI Is Over. What Comes Next? — from builtin.com by Ameya Kanitkar
AI providers are shifting to usage-based billing for their services. AI fluency is more important now than ever to make the most of your tools to avoid unnecessary spending.

Summary: The era of cheap, flat-rate AI is ending as providers shift to usage-based billing. Every prompt now carries a direct cost, turning casual use into major budget risks, as seen when Uber depleted its 2026 AI budget in four months. Leaders must now track real-time value and token efficiency.

For a brief window, companies had access to the most transformative technology in a generation at the cost of a streaming subscription. Tools like ChatGPT put AI within reach of anyone with a browser and time for experimentation, while GitHub Copilot came in at just $10 a month, with token costs remaining relatively low. In the beginning, experimentation felt cost-effective, easy and relatively low-risk. 

But that era is ending, and the bill is coming due faster than a lot of enterprise leaders anticipated. 


The Fable of AI in Education — from downes.ca by Stephen Downes
Marc Watkins, Rhetorica, Jun 17, 2026

Tokenomics will be a hot topic of discussion on university campuses because, as Marc Watkins notes in this article, there is no realistic path forward to providing all students with access to advanced AI.


From this posting on LinkedIn.com from Dr. Nick Jackson:

And now there is a third layer emerging. Institutions are waking up to a systems-level question they are likely not remotely prepared for. Who pays for AI? How are budgets managed when there are unclear token consumption pricing models? How is AI procured? Who decides what tools get used and by whom and who gets access and at what level?

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Two years ago, AI broke assessment. Now, it’s helping us to reinvent it. — from linkedin.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman


Also from Dr. Hardman, see:


A new study shows AI helped deliver 1.5 years of maths progress in 8 weeks — here’s how. — from linkedin.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman

…a new study shows AI helped deliver 1.5 years of maths progress in 8 weeks — here’s how.

Google DeepMind just shared the results of a randomised trial involving 1,763 students. Half used Gemini’s “Guided Learning” to learn maths; half didn’t.

The result: the group working with AI gained the equivalent of 1.2 to 1.7 years of extra progress compared to those who didn’t.

It’s tempting to read this as “Gemini’s Guided Learning mode works!” But the key point here is that Gemini didn’t work alone….

Look closer, and what made the difference wasn’t just the tech — it was a great teacher making expert use of it.

 

Why Students Aren’t All In on AI—And What They Want From Colleges — from insidehighered.com by  Colleen Flaherty
New Student Voice data reveal students are embracing AI as a learning tool while worrying about dependence, career disruption and inconsistent institutional responses.

Read on for six takeaways from the survey and additional insights—including how institutions can start to close the gap between students’ optimism about AI as a learning tool and their faith in their colleges’ ability to help them navigate change.

Takeaway 1: More students are using AI than ever for coursework, while a significant share—20 percent—remain resisters.

Takeaway 2: “Worried about dependence” is the most common student stance on AI.

Takeaway 3: A majority of all students expect AI to somewhat (39 percent) or very (16 percent) negatively impact their career prospects.

Takeaway 4: Just one in 10 students says that their institution is handling AI’s rise very well, in a thoughtful and proactive way.

…and more >>

 

 


Rethinking Learning Design in Elementary Schools — from edcircuit.com
Why K–5 leaders must redesign—not just adopt—technology to restore attention, deepen thinking, and align AI with how children actually learn

Rethinking learning design in elementary schools is critical as screen time and AI reshape attention, thinking, and student engagement.

Designing for Thinking, Not Just Doing
At its core, learning design must shift from task completion to thinking development.

This requires creating environments where students:

  • Spend time processing ideas
  • Work through confusion without immediate answers
  • Build persistence through challenge

It also requires clarity around the role of technology.

Technology should:

  • Extend thinking
  • Provide meaningful feedback
  • Support exploration

It should not:

  • Replace effort
  • Short-circuit reasoning
  • Eliminate productive struggle

The goal is not to reduce technology use.

It is to ensure that students remain the ones doing the thinking.


Should We Integrate AI into Our Teaching?: Evidence-Based Guidelines for Deciding When AI Belongs — from Faculty Focus by Norman Eng, EdD

Four Questions for Deciding Whether to Use AI

Question 1: Will this AI tool help students use, recall, and demonstrate understanding of core disciplinary content?
Question 2: Will this AI tool require students to apply their learning to a new context?
Question 3: Will this AI tool support—not replace—independent, evidence-based reasoning?
Question 4: Will this AI integration preserve meaningful human interaction?


 

Christian: Could this be a part of our future learning ecosystems?


From DSC:
Could this be a part of our future learning ecosystems? Education as a personalized content feed.


Coursera wants users to learn through shorter, faster content  — from digitaltrends.com by Moinak Pal
Coursera wants online learning to feel more like TikTok
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Online learning platform Coursera is taking a page straight out of TikTok’s playbook. The company has launched a new AI-powered feed designed to serve short-form educational content in a scrollable, personalized format, signaling a major shift in how digital learning platforms may try to keep users engaged.

The feature introduces bite-sized video lessons, clips, and explainers curated through artificial intelligence based on a user’s interests, learning habits, career goals, and previous course activity. Instead of committing to hour-long lectures or full certification programs upfront, users can now discover short educational snippets designed to make learning feel more casual, accessible, and addictive.

Users scroll through a feed of short educational videos and AI-curated learning moments covering topics ranging from coding and business to AI, productivity, data science, and personal development.

 

Pinpoint, Explained — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan
A guide to Google’s free tool, now open to all


.Jeremy prompted ChatGPT to generate illustrations in his post.

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Learn about Pinpoint— from support.google.com

Pinpoint is an AI-powered research platform designed to help journalists and academics analyze large collections of documents. With Pinpoint, you can:

  • Analyze massive collections: Easily search, filter, transcribe and organize thousands of documents, including PDFs, images, and audio files.
  • Leverage generative AI: Use Gemini’s capabilities to answer research questions together with supporting evidence found in your documents.
  • Foster collaborative research: share your work with colleagues and tackle large scale projects as a team. You can also publicly share – supporting community-driven research.

For assistance with Pinpoint, please consult our Community Forum or you can contact our support team.

 

4 Strategies For Teaching With AI Effectively — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
Health sciences professor Humberto López Castillo urges students to use AI to help with science research, but never to lose sight of the human element.

Castillo, a trained pediatrician and professor in the Department of Health Sciences, has also seen students use AI in creative ways to promote public health understanding, and as a research tool. For one project, Castillo asks students to explain health concepts from class to non-experts, and since he started encouraging students to use AI, he’s seen the projects get better. Students have created health-themed board games and Hamilton-style rap songs. Others have designed AI to aid in health research in ways that wouldn’t be possible without the technology.

This compassionate and student-centered approach to AI use is part of why Castillo was named Superhuman (formerly Grammarly’s) 2026 Educator of the Year.
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“You are the one who’s responsible for that writing,” Castillo tells his students. “Your name is the only name that’s going to be among the published authors, so you are the one who needs to verify those sources.”

He adds that rather than being a drawback, allowing students to make these types of mistakes with AI use in the college setting has value.

“It is a teaching opportunity,” Castillo says. “This is the moment to make those mistakes.”

 

Inside the latest global research on school cellphone bans — from hechingerreport.org by Jill Barshay
First wave of studies raises questions about other digital distractions and cellphones at home

But the first wave of rigorous research on those policies — including two major U.S. studies — does not point neatly in one direction. Some studies have found modest academic gains from cellphone restrictions. Others have found little to no effect on test scores, even when student phone use dropped sharply. Some studies suggest benefits for low-achieving students, others for girls, and still others for boys. In some places, attendance or student well-being improved. In others, they didn’t.

The scientific process can be messy. Cultural differences may explain why the bans are more effective in some places than others. But almost any education reform will get different results in different places, even within a single country. And the current confusion may also stem from how difficult it is to study cellphone bans in the real world.

Ideally, researchers would randomly assign some students to surrender their phones while others kept them, and then measure the effect on academic performance — the equivalent of a clinical trial for an education policy. But those experiments are difficult to enforce in schools, and so far only one study, conducted among college students in India, has attempted a randomized controlled trial. It produced a notably strong improvement in course grades for lower achieving students.

Instead, most studies rely on rougher real world comparisons that capture only partial effects of cellphone restrictions.

 

I Was a University AI Czar. I’m Not Equipped to Teach in the Age of AI. — from jgellers.substack.com by Josh Gellers, PhD

The reason that I claim I am not well-suited to thrive as an instructor in the age of AI is because both AI Enthusiasts and AI Resisters put a lot of thought and energy into completely redesigning their classes in response to AI. This is the one takeaway that I don’t think the Exhausted Majority has fully accepted yet—to excel as a teacher in this AI era, you need to totally revise how you teach and how you assess what students learn in your classes.

I can say this much—whatever solution our industry comes up with, it’s likely to emerge from teaching and learning centers. Contrary to what Paul Schofield  wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education, pedagogy experts are the best hope we have to equip today’s faculty with the tools required to succeed in this uncertain educational environment. As I always tell my students, “I was trained for 7 years to become a researcher and 2 days to become a teacher.” The idea that only disciplinary experts know how to teach and have nothing to learn from so-called “nonscholars” is so laughable that one has to wonder whether an AI agent jokingly wrote that sad opinion piece to troll the whole academe.

Also from Dr. Gellers, see:

The Worst AI Policy in Higher Ed
How Berkeley Law Boalt-ed From Expertise in Favor of Abstinence

Last week, one of the top law schools in the United States, the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, released its final policy on artificial intelligence, effective summer 2026. In the span of a breezy 1.5 pages, the school outlined the challenge AI poses to legal education and how it plans to address this problem. Despite these intentions, this AI policy is, in my estimation, the worst AI policy in higher education I have seen.


From AI Tutors to AI Study Mates— from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman
New research reveals how AI can enable real learning — not just productivity gains


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The point isn’t that AI is inherently bad for learning — it’s that the meta-analyses showing that LLMs improve assignment and performance scores are measuring the wrong thing. They’re measuring performance with the AI present, not learning that persists once it’s gone.

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From DSC:
Notice that when an AI-based learning system can remember what you’ve worked on and how you are doing — where you are struggling or doing well — it can have a positive impact on your longer-term learning. That, to me, is where long-term based learner profiles come in.

Later in the article, Dr. Hardman points out that “if we want to deliver AI tooling which supports substantive learning, we need to intentionally create a new category of AI tool for ‘learning at work’ which prioritises learning and development over productivity.” While I agree with that, I do wonder if businesses will care, so long as the work gets done and gets done well. But this calls into mind the word “experience” — something that traditionally has been hard fought to get in the corporate world. But the corporate realm often doesn’t like to pay for experience (beyond key AI-based jobs) when they perceive it’s getting too expensive. Ask all those 50 and over who had or have a target on their backs.

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LinkedIn Grad’s Guide 2026: Starting your career in the AI era — from linkedin.com by Gianna Prudente
To help you head off in the right direction, we’ve identified where those starting their careers are finding opportunity, based on data from millions of LinkedIn member profiles.

While all of this is happening, colleges are still catching up. Many students are graduating without having spent much time learning how AI actually fits into day-to-day work — even as employers seek out those exact skills.

“Colleges are moving into an era of, we’ll let the faculty decide, which leads to a very uneven experience for students because some faculty are really into AI and other faculty are not,” says Jeff Selingo, a higher education strategist. “Employers are the same; they don’t really know how to act around early careers.”

Taken together, new grads are entering a uniquely challenging environment: fewer traditional entry points, slower turnover and a workplace that’s evolving faster than the systems preparing people for it.

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I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment — from theguardian.com by Micah Nathan
The problem wasn’t just the perfectly polished, yet mediocre prose. It’s what’s lost when we surrender the struggle to translate thought into words

For a few moments, all was quiet except the classroom’s ticking radiators. Then, a teary-eyed confession: one of the ostensible authors said she only used AI because she was scared of looking stupid, of being criticized for bad writing. She said she loved writing stories and hated having used AI. But she couldn’t stop herself, recounting a sequence similar to an addict’s descent: at first she fed her story into AI for a grammar check, it suggested line edits and she accepted, then it asked if she wanted structural edits, then it offered to rewrite the entire piece.

The other would-be author admitted he had never written a short story before and he had an idea but didn’t know where to start. I asked him why he didn’t reach out to me for help. He shrugged.

One of the other students raised her hand, saying she didn’t understand why it was bad for AI to write stories as long as the stories are based on their ideas. More students spoke: one wanted to know how using AI was any different from using a human editor. Another wanted me to answer why, at a university that launched one of the world’s first AI research programs in 1959, were we even having this debate? Isn’t AI meant to make everyone’s life easier? Less stressful? Isn’t the point of AI to free humans from the tedium of rote tasks?

The conversation that followed their confessions was one of the most productive teaching moments of my eight years at MIT. Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. 


This $10K AI School Promises to Future-Proof Your Career — from builtin.com by Matthew Urwin
Khan Academy, TED and ETS are starting a new program to equip students and professionals with the skills to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven economy. Here’s what you need to know.

Summary: The Khan TED Institute is a higher-education program that will teach students and workers how to use AI through interactive learning. The program’s AI-centric curriculum is an unproven approach, though, casting doubt on whether it will actually improve learning outcomes and career prospects.


 

Want Students to Build a Healthier Relationship With Technology? Start With The Arts — from techlearning.com by Adrianna Marshall
Arts classrooms demonstrate what technology integration at its best can look like

But at a moment defined by rapid AI adoption and ongoing debates about screen time, the argument for protecting and investing in arts education needs to take on a new tone. The arts continue to be one of the most effective places in school for students to build healthier, more intentional relationships with technology.

In short, in the age of AI, we need the arts more than ever.

Digital composition software, notation tools, and recording platforms allow students to experiment, revise, and refine their ideas in ways that would have been far more time-consuming a decade ago. Students can layer tracks, hear immediate playback, annotate their own scores, and collaborate across devices. The same is true in other contexts besides music; in visual arts, for instance, a variety of digital drawing and painting platforms enable students to practice with new mediums, styles, and techniques without having to worry about supplies or messes. But in either case, the core intellectual work of looking and listening critically, understanding structure, and making aesthetic choices remains entirely human and part of the learning.


From DSC:
I agree. At one of my previous positions, I spent 10 years supervising a digital studio — helping professors and students use a variety of applications to create things. The applications were from Adobe, Apple, and a variety of smaller vendors. The deliverables could be graphics, edited soundtracks, music, videos, flyers, posters, collages, edited photographs, presentations, websites, and more. I longed for people to discover the power of multimedia to communicate their messages, tell stories, stir emotion, powerfully engage themselves (and others), and unleash their creativity.

There were several obstacles to our digital studio being more impactful at that institution. It was under the IT department, not the academic side of the house. It was in the basement of the library, where few students and faculty traveled. During those years, it was highly uncommon for faculty members to require multimedia-based assignments — so many students had to WANT to develop these skills on their own time. The majority of students didn’t see the value in developing the types of digital skills that we were trying to build…or they didn’t have the time.


Also relevant/see:


 

This $10K AI School Promises to Future-Proof Your Career — from builtin.com by Matthew Urwin
Khan Academy, TED and ETS are starting a new program to equip students and professionals with the skills to thrive in an increasingly AI-driven economy. Here’s what you need to know.

Summary: The Khan TED Institute is a higher-education program that will teach students and workers how to use AI through interactive learning. The program’s AI-centric curriculum is an unproven approach, though, casting doubt on whether it will actually improve learning outcomes and career prospects.

Higher education might be on the verge of a radical overhaul to bring it up to speed in the age of artificial intelligence. At the TED2026 conference, Khan Academy, TED and ETS announced that they’re partnering to establish the Khan TED Institute — a new program that reorients the college curriculum around AI. By joining forces, the education technology trio aims to develop an alternative to traditional universities that better tracks student progress, teaches more relevant skills and provides a more personalized learning experience.

Accessibility is another major tenet of the Khan TED Institute. Its virtual nature allows anyone with an internet connection to participate in the program and makes it easier for students to move at their preferred pace. And because its curriculum prioritizes competency over course credits, advanced learners can complete the program in a shorter period. Time isn’t the only thing students can save on, either: The Institute promises a bachelor’s degree for less than $10,000, offering a much more affordable alternative to the typical four-year degree. 


 

From DSC:
Faculty senates don’t do well with this pace of change. But to their credit, few organizations can begin to deal with this pace of change.

 

Let AI Interview You — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan & Jay Dixit
A smarter way to get past the blank page

There’s nothing wrong with using AI to get answers to your questions. But there’s another mode of interacting with AI that many people never consider — one I find much more useful for my creative process.

Here’s what I do instead: I flip the script and let the AI ask the questions. Instead of prompting AI, I get the AI to prompt me.

 

Why Sal Khan’s AI revolution hasn’t happened yet, according to Sal Khan — from chalkbeat.org by Matt Barnum

Three years ago, as Khan Academy founder Sal Khan rolled out an AI-powered tutoring chatbot, he predicted a revolution in learning.

So far, the revolution hasn’t happened, he acknowledges.

“For a lot of students, it was a non-event,” Khan told me recently about his eponymous chatbot, Khanmigo. “They just didn’t use it much.”

Khan gives this analogy: Imagine he walked into a class, sat in the back of the room, and waited for students to seek out help. “Some will; most won’t,” he said. That’s been the experience with AI tutoring, he said. It doesn’t necessarily make students motivated to learn or fill in gaps in knowledge needed to ask questions.

“AI is going to help,” said Khan of this reimagined Khan Academy. “But I think our biggest lever is really investing in the human systems.”

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian