From DSC: As I’ve long stated on the Learning from the Living [Class]Room vision, we are heading toward a new AI-empowered learning platform — where humans play a critically important role in making this new learning ecosystem work.
Along these lines, I ran into this site out on X/Twitter. We’ll see how this unfolds, but it will be an interesting space to watch.
From DSC: This future learning platform will also focus on developing skills and competencies. Along those lines, see:
Scale for Skills-First— from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain An ed-tech giant’s ambitious moves into digital credentialing and learner records.
A Digital Canvas for Skills
Instructure was a player in the skills and credentials space before its recent acquisition of Parchment, a digital transcript company. But that $800M move made many observers wonder if Instructure can develop digital records of skills that learners, colleges, and employers might actually use broadly.
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Ultimately, he says, the CLR approach will allow students to bring these various learning types into a coherent format for employers.
Instructure seeks a leadership role in working with other organizations to establish common standards for credentials and learner records, to help create consistency. The company collaborates closely with 1EdTech. And last month it helped launch the 1EdTech TrustEd Microcredential Coalition, which aims to increase quality and trust in digital credentials.
If you are an e-learning professional, you know how important it is to showcase your skills and projects to potential clients, employers, or collaborators. An e-learning portfolio is a collection of your best work that demonstrates your abilities, creativity, and experience in designing, developing, and delivering online learning solutions. But how do you create and maintain an e-learning portfolio without pitfalls? In this article, you will learn some tips and best practices to help you avoid common mistakes and make your portfolio stand out.
Speaking of career-related postings, I thought this was an interesting article:
There’s a common misconception that our résumés ought to tell a linear story, free from breaks, twists, and turns. But this assumption is not borne out in reality. Nearly three out of every four college graduates work in a field unrelated to their major. The average worker holds over a dozen jobs by their fifties. And over half of today’s college students will work jobs that don’t yet exist.
Taking a nontraditional path will force you to grapple with what matters The greatest benefit of a nontraditional path is that you have to figure out what you care about. Rather than an employer telling you what you should value, you have to do the hard work of determining what you value for yourself.
Generative AI and the future of work in America — from mckinsey.com by Kweilin Ellingrud, Saurabh Sanghvi, Gurneet Singh Dandona, Anu Madgavkar, Michael Chui, Olivia White, and Paige Hasebe
At a glance
During the pandemic (2019–22), the US labor market saw 8.6 million occupational shifts, 50 percent more than in the previous three-year period.
By 2030, activities that account for up to 30 percent of hours currently worked across the US economy could be automated—a trend accelerated by generative AI.
Federal investment to address climate and infrastructure, as well as structural shifts, will also alter labor demand.
An additional 12 million occupational transitions may be needed by 2030.
The United States will need workforce development on a far larger scale as well as more expansive hiring approaches from employers.
Employers will need to hire for skills and competencies rather than credentials, recruit from overlooked populations (such as rural workers and people with disabilities), and deliver training that keeps pace with their evolving needs.
The AI-Powered, Totally Autonomous Future of War Is Here — from wired.com by Will Knight Ships without crews. Self-directed drone swarms. How a US Navy task force is using off-the-shelf robotics and artificial intelligence to prepare for the next age of conflict.
From DSC: Hhhhmmmmm…..not good. Is anyone surprised by this? No, I didn’t think so either. That’s why the United States and China are so heated up about semiconductor chips.
The proliferation of new technologies like generative artificial intelligence is making recent graduates uneasy, a new study released Thursday found. A third of the 1,000 people who graduated in the past year said they are second-guessing their career choice, while roughly half reported questioning their workforce preparedness and feeling threatened by AI, according to the 2023 Employability Report by Cengage Group, a global education technology company.
“The workplace has changed rapidly in the last few years, and now we are witnessing a new shift asAI begins to reshape worker productivity, job requirements, hiring habits and even entire industries,” Michael Hansen, Cengage Group CEO, said in a news release.
More than half of recent graduates question whether they are properly prepared for the workforce in light of the rise of artificial intelligence, a survey finds.
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There is also more of a preference for skills training credentials. Among employers, nearly 40 percent said skills training credentials are most important, while only 19 percent ranked a college degree as most important.
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However, recent graduates did cite an issue with most higher education institutions’ ability to teach employability skills. In 2023, 43 percent of students said their degree program taught them the necessary skills for their first job, down 20 percentage points from 2022.
The news is that Instructure, one of the few public education companies and the market leader in learning management with their signature product Canvas, struck a partnership with Khan Academy to create an AI-powered tutoring and teaching assistant tool – merging Khan’s innovative instructional content and Instructure’s significant reach, scale, and data insights. The partnership and related tools will be known as Khanmigo, according to the announcement.
On brand names alone, this is a big deal. On potential impact, it could be even bigger.
How To Use AI to Write Scenarios — from christytuckerlearning.com by Christy Tucker How can you use AI to write scenarios for learning? Read this example with prompts and results using ChatGPT and Bard.
Excerpts:
So far, I have found these tools helpful in generating ideas, writing first drafts, and summarizing. They work better for general knowledge tasks than really specific topics unless I provide more details to them, which makes sense.
This post isn’t going to give you “5 magical prompts to instantly write scenarios for you” or anything like that. Instead, this is a “working out loud” post where I’ll share some prompts I have used.
DC: I’m sympathetic to those who are supposed to be making policy when what we’re dealing with continues to evolve/change so quickly. https://t.co/1KB8dSFWaO
— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) July 27, 2023
The Rise of the Talent Economy — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman How Education & Training Will Dictate the Future & Impact of AI
“Talent, more than capital, will represent the critical factor of production.” … In short, the demand for AI skills requires a significant transformation in training and education models. To bridge the global skills gap, educational institutions, online learning providers, and employers must design and deliver training programs that cater to the rapidly evolving AI-driven labor market.
To combat this problem, we modified some of our prompts this summer to try to prevent students from using AI to avoid learning. I’m sharing some of our strategies in the hope that they help you out as you adapt your course to a world of generative AI.
Use prompts that force a personal opinion.
Have students include their source(s) as an attachment.
The Rundown: A new cybercrime generative AI tool called FraudGPT is being advertised on the Dark web and Telegram channels, offering offensive capabilities like crafting spear-phishing emails and creating undetectable malware.
… Why it matters: Scammers can now look more realistic than ever before and at a larger scale. The sad truth is that the emergence of cybercrime AI tools like FraudGPT is just beginning.
From DSC: If true and if it could help build and/or contribute to cloud-based learner profiles, this could be huge.
The boom in artificial intelligence is touching nearly every industry, and eLearning is no exception. From content creation to instructional design, industry professionals and organizations are finding innovative ways to apply AI in elearning. Whether creating training modules for corporate employees or crafting educational programs, professionals are making AI part of their standard toolkit.
At Teamed, we have the privilege of working and speaking with people from all over the elearning industry including instructional designers, content developers, and organizations considering how to apply it for productivity and the benefit of learners. AI and machine learning come up frequently in these conversations. Here’s what we’ve learned and observed about AI in elearning from experts in our industry.
Why use animation in eLearning? Many people may think of animation in terms of entertainment value alone. Animation is far more valuable for its ability to engage learners, explain or illustrate ideas, and improve recall of complex relationships, such as cause and effect.
Look up these specific animation types for use in your projects:
Whiteboard animation: Not necessary to be able to draw the characters. Multiple brands.
Humans are good storytellers, and humans respond well to stories. We know this from our own experience. Not only that, people remember stories for a long time, far longer than we remember a lot of teaching. Do you recall stories that someone in your family told you? Why don’t we remember lessons from school as long or as vividly? Stories are powerful if we know how to use them. In this article I will introduce you to a way to use stories to achieve outcomes.
Any time you are designing a course, a learning experience, or just pitching an idea to your boss or an L&D stakeholder, it’s a story. Even if it does not seem like one, a successful production—whether it is an animated presentation, a virtual supporting example or other content—is based on some fundamental storytelling tactics. It doesn’t have to begin “Once Upon A Time,” it just needs to be constructed the right way for your purpose – To make it a memory.
So you think you want to hire an instructional designer. Great choice. Instructional designers are eLearning industry superheroes. They create learning experiences and develop instructional materials to make learning accessible. Whether you’re creating training modules for your employees or building online courses for students, an instructional designer is an essential member of your eLearning team.
Addendum on 6/6/23, a somewhat relevant posting:
Professional Organizations for Instructional Designers — from christytuckerlearning.com by Christy Tucker What professional organizations are useful for instructional designers? The Learning Guild, ATD, TLDC, Training Magazine Network, and LDA.
Let’s look at some ideas of how law schools could use AI tools like Khanmigo or ChatGPT to support lectures, assignments, and discussions, or use plagiarism detection software to maintain academic integrity.
In particular, we’re betting on four trends for AI and L&D.
Rapid content production
Personalized content
Detailed, continuous feedback
Learner-driven exploration
In a world where only 7 percent of the global population has a college degree, and as many as three quarters of workers don’t feel equipped to learn the digital skills their employers will need in the future, this is the conversation people need to have.
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Taken together, these trends will change the cost structure of education and give learning practitioners new superpowers. Learners of all backgrounds will be able to access quality content on any topic and receive the ongoing support they need to master new skills. Even small L&D teams will be able to create programs that have both deep and broad impact across their organizations.
Generative AI is set to play a pivotal role in the transformation of educational technologies and assisted learning. Its ability to personalize learning experiences, power intelligent tutoring systems, generate engaging content, facilitate collaboration, and assist in assessment and grading will significantly benefit both students and educators.
With today’s advancements in generative AI, that vision of personalized learning may not be far off from reality. We spoke with Dr. Kim Round, associate dean of the Western Governors University School of Education, about the potential of technologies like ChatGPT for learning, the need for AI literacy skills, why learning experience designers have a leg up on AI prompt engineering, and more. And get ready for more Star Trek references, because the parallels between AI and Sci Fi are futile to resist.
NVIDIA today introduced a wave of cutting-edge AI research that will enable developers and artists to bring their ideas to life — whether still or moving, in 2D or 3D, hyperrealistic or fantastical.
Around 20 NVIDIA Research papers advancing generative AI and neural graphics — including collaborations with over a dozen universities in the U.S., Europe and Israel — are headed to SIGGRAPH 2023, the premier computer graphics conference, taking place Aug. 6-10 in Los Angeles.
The papers include generative AI models that turn text into personalized images; inverse rendering tools that transform still images into 3D objects; neural physics models that use AI to simulate complex 3D elements with stunning realism; and neural rendering models that unlock new capabilities for generating real-time, AI-powered visual details.
Also relevant to the item from Nvidia (above), see:
This week I spent a few days at the ASU/GSV conference and ran into 7,000 educators, entrepreneurs, and corporate training people who had gone CRAZY for AI.
No, I’m not kidding. This community, which makes up people like training managers, community college leaders, educators, and policymakers is absolutely freaked out about ChatGPT, Large Language Models, and all sorts of issues with AI. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge fan of this. But the frenzy is unprecedented: this is bigger than the excitement at the launch of the i-Phone.
Second, the L&D market is about to get disrupted like never before. I had two interactive sessions with about 200 L&D leaders and I essentially heard the same thing over and over. What is going to happen to our jobs when these Generative AI tools start automatically building content, assessments, teaching guides, rubrics, videos, and simulations in seconds?
The answer is pretty clear: you’re going to get disrupted. I’m not saying that L&D teams need to worry about their careers, but it’s very clear to me they’re going to have to swim upstream in a big hurry. As with all new technologies, it’s time for learning leaders to get to know these tools, understand how they work, and start to experiment with them as fast as you can.
Speaking of the ASU+GSV Summit, see this posting from Michael Moe:
Last week, the 14th annual ASU+GSV Summit hosted over 7,000 leaders from 70+ companies well as over 900 of the world’s most innovative EdTech companies. Below are some of our favorite speeches from this year’s Summit…
High-quality tutoring is one of the most effective educational interventions we have – but we need both humans and technology for it to work. In a standing-room-only session, GSE Professor Susanna Loeb, a faculty lead at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, spoke alongside school district superintendents on the value of high-impact tutoring. The most important factors in effective tutoring, she said, are (1) the tutor has data on specific areas where the student needs support, (2) the tutor has high-quality materials and training, and (3) there is a positive, trusting relationship between the tutor and student. New technologies, including AI, can make the first and second elements much easier – but they will never be able to replace human adults in the relational piece, which is crucial to student engagement and motivation.
ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Google’s Bard—AI is infiltrating the lives of billions.
The 1% who understand it will run the world.
Here’s a list of key terms to jumpstart your learning:
Being “good at prompting” is a temporary state of affairs.The current AI systems are already very good at figuring out your intent, and they are getting better. Prompting is not going to be that important for that much longer. In fact, it already isn’t in GPT-4 and Bing. If you want to do something with AI, just ask it to help you do the thing. “I want to write a novel, what do you need to know to help me?” will get you surprisingly far.
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The best way to use AI systems is not to craft the perfect prompt, but rather to use it interactively. Try asking for something. Then ask the AI to modify or adjust its output. Work with the AI, rather than trying to issue a single command that does everything you want. The more you experiment, the better off you are. Just use the AI a lot, and it will make a big difference – a lesson my class learned as they worked with the AI to create essays.
From DSC: Agreed –> “Being “good at prompting” is a temporary state of affairs.” The User Interfaces that are/will be appearing will help greatly in this regard.
From DSC: Bizarre…at least for me in late April of 2023:
FaceTiming live with AI… This app came across the @ElunaAI Discord and I was very impressed with its responsiveness, natural expression and language, etc…
Feels like the beginning of another massive wave in consumer AI products.
The rise of AI-generated music has ignited legal and ethical debates, with record labels invoking copyright law to remove AI-generated songs from platforms like YouTube.
Tech companies like Google face a conundrum: should they take down AI-generated content, and if so, on what grounds?
Some artists, like Grimes, are embracing the change, proposing new revenue-sharing models and utilizing blockchain-based smart contracts for royalties.
The future of AI-generated music presents both challenges and opportunities, with the potential to create new platforms and genres, democratize the industry, and redefine artist compensation.
The Need for AI PD — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang Educators need training on how to effectively incorporate artificial intelligence into their teaching practice, says Lance Key, an award-winning educator.
“School never was fun for me,” he says, hoping that as an educator he could change that with his students. “I wanted to make learning fun.” This ‘learning should be fun’ philosophy is at the heart of the approach he advises educators take when it comes to AI.
At its 11th annual conference in 2023, educational company Coursera announced it is adding ChatGPT-powered interactive ed tech tools to its learning platform, including a generative AI coach for students and an AI course-building tool for teachers. It will also add machine learning-powered translation, expanded VR immersive learning experiences, and more.
Coursera Coach will give learners a ChatGPT virtual coach to answer questions, give feedback, summarize video lectures and other materials, give career advice, and prepare them for job interviews. This feature will be available in the coming months.
From DSC: Yes…it will be very interesting to see how tools and platforms interact from this time forth. The term “integration” will take a massive step forward, at least in my mind.
Last week I received a text message from a friend to check out a March 29th Campus Technology article about French AI startup, Nolej. Nolej (pronounced “Knowledge”) has developed an OpenAI-based instructional content generator for educators called NolejAI.
Access to NolejAI is through a browser. Users can upload video, audio, text documents, or a website url. NolejAI will generate an interactive micro-learning package which is a standalone digital lesson including content transcript, summaries, a glossary of terms, flashcards, and quizzes. All the lesson materials generated is based upon the uploaded materials.
From DSC: I wonder if this will turn out to be the case:
I am sure it’s only a matter of time before NolejAI or another product becomes capable of generating a standard three credit hour college course. Whether that is six months or two years, it’s likely sooner than we think.
Gamification refers to the application of gaming elements into the instructional design of a course. Here are 7 ways to incorporate gamification into your eLearning.
Artificial Intelligence is now taking the world of learning by storm. Here are 5 ways you can successfully incorporate AI in online learning.
Let’s say you’re training sales reps on handling different customer personalities. You can use this technology to diversify your branching scenarios so that trainees can also speak and not only type. This way, not only will the training become more realistic, but you’ll also be able to assess and work on additional elements, such as tone of voice, volume, speech tempo, etc.
A learning ecosystem is composed of people, tools, technologies, content, processes, culture, strategies, and any other resource that helps one learn. Learning ecosystems can be at an individual level as well as at an organizational level.
Some example components:
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) such as faculty, staff, teachers, trainers, parents, coaches, directors, and others
Fellow employees
L&D/Training professionals
Managers
Instructional Designers
Librarians
Consultants
Types of learning
Active learning
Adult learning
PreK-12 education
Training/corporate learning
Vocational learning
Experiential learning
Competency-based learning
Self-directed learning (i.e., heutagogy)
Mobile learning
Online learning
Face-to-face-based learning
Hybrid/blended learning
Hyflex-based learning
Game-based learning
XR-based learning (AR, MR, and VR)
Informal learning
Formal learning
Lifelong learning
Microlearning
Personalized/customized learning
Play-based learning
Cloud-based learning apps
Coaching & mentoring
Peer feedback
Job aids/performance tools and other on-demand content
Websites
Conferences
Professional development
Professional organizations
Social networking
Social media – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook/Meta, other
Communities of practice
Artificial Intelligence (AI) — including ChatGPT, learning agents, learner profiles,
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