According to recent statistics, 18% of undergraduate and 12% of graduate students have temporary, relapsing, or long-term disabilities. Students might have noticeable disabilities, but many disorders are “hidden.” Luckily, modern colleges have many resources that allow people with disabilities to attend classes and thrive in their academic life. This guide will focus on the advice that can help students with disabilities successfully navigate their higher education.
The $330 billion corporate training market is enormous, fragmented, and complex. For years it was dominated by Learning Management Systems (LMS) and content providers, each pioneered in the early 2000s. These systems served well, but the needs of employees and organizations moved ahead.
Today companies want not only a place to find and administer learning, they want a “Learning Platform” that creates mastery. And this market, that of “Learning Delivery Platforms,” is far more complex than you think. Let me put it straight: video-based chapter by chapter courses don’t teach you much. Companies want a solution that is expert-led, engaging, includes assignments and coaching, and connects employees to experts and peers.
Well there’s a new breed of platforms focused in this area, and I call them Capability Academy systems.
These are platforms explicitly to bring together expert teachers, AI-enabled collaboration, assignments, and coaching to drive mastery. They can train thousands of people in small cohorts, offering hands-on support for technical or PowerSkills topics. And the results are striking: these vendors achieve 90% completion rates and netPromoter scores above 60 (far above traditional content libraries).
The guide is packed with tools that can meet so many of your needs as a teacher, and many of them are already well established and widely used. But every January, we like to choose six that we think deserve a little extra attention. Most are not actually brand-new to the world, but each one has something special about it. So here we go!
6 Google Scholar Tips From Its Co-Creator— from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang Google Scholar can be a great tool for teachers and their students. Here’s how to get the most out of it.
Excerpt:
Anurag Acharya co-created Google Scholar in 2004. The Google engineer and former professor of computer science at the University of California at Santa Barbara was inspired to create the free search tool after being frustrated by being unable to access research articles as a student at the Kharagpur campus of the Indian Institute of Technology.
Today, Acharya is head of Google Scholar and an authority on how the scholarly search engine can best be used by teachers and their students. He offers these tips and best practices for teachers to use and share with their students.
Teaching: A Path to L&D aims to provide free guidance to teachers looking to move into the world of Learning and Development, specifically Instructional Design. Check out our website at www.teachlearndev.org for free coaching, webinars, and resources to help you on your journey!
Here’s the list of sources: https://t.co/fJd4rh8kLy. The larger resource area at https://t.co/bN7CReGIEC has sample ChatGPT essays, strategies for mitigating harm, and questions for teachers to ask as well as a listserv.
— Anna Mills, amills@mastodon.oeru.org, she/her (@EnglishOER) January 11, 2023
Microsoft is reportedly eyeing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the startup that created the viral chatbot ChatGPT, and is planning to integrate it into Office products and Bing search.The tech giant has already invested at least $1 billion into OpenAI. Some of these features might be rolling out as early as March, according to The Information.
This is a big deal. If successful, it will bring powerful AI tools to the masses.So what would ChatGPT-powered Microsoft products look like? We asked Microsoft and OpenAI. Neither was willing to answer our questions on how they plan to integrate AI-powered products into Microsoft’s tools, even though work must be well underway to do so. However, we do know enough to make some informed, intelligent guesses. Hint: it’s probably good news if, like me, you find creating PowerPoint presentations and answering emails boring.
I have maintained for several years, including a book ‘AI for Learning’, that AI is the technology of the age and will change everything. This is unfolding as we speak but it is interesting to ask who the winners are likely to be.
People who have heard of GPT-3 / ChatGPT, and are vaguely following the advances in machine learning, large language models, and image generators. Also people who care about making the web a flourishing social and intellectual space.
That dark forest is about to expand. Large Language Models (LLMs) that can instantly generate coherent swaths of human-like text have just joined the party.
It is in this uncertain climate that Hassabis agrees to a rare interview, to issue a stark warning about his growing concerns. “I would advocate not moving fast and breaking things.”
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“When it comes to very powerful technologies—and obviously AI is going to be one of the most powerful ever—we need to be careful,” he says. “Not everybody is thinking about those things. It’s like experimentalists, many of whom don’t realize they’re holding dangerous material.” Worse still, Hassabis points out, we are the guinea pigs.
Demis Hassabis
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Hassabis says these efforts are just the beginning. He and his colleagues have been working toward a much grander ambition: creating artificial general intelligence, or AGI, by building machines that can think, learn, and be set to solve humanity’s toughest problems.Today’s AI is narrow, brittle, and often not very intelligent at all. But AGI, Hassabis believes, will be an “epoch-defining” technology—like the harnessing of electricity—that will change the very fabric of human life. If he’s right, it could earn him a place in history that would relegate the namesakes of his meeting rooms to mere footnotes.
But with AI’s promise also comes peril.In recent months, researchers building an AI system to design new drugs revealed that their tool could be easily repurposed to make deadly new chemicals. A separate AI model trained to spew out toxic hate speech went viral, exemplifying the risk to vulnerable communities online. And inside AI labs around the world, policy experts were grappling with near-term questions like what to do when an AI has the potential to be commandeered by rogue states to mount widespread hacking campaigns or infer state-level nuclear secrets.
Headteachers and university lecturers have expressed concerns that ChatGPT, which can provide convincing human-sounding answers to exam questions, could spark a wave of cheating in homework and exam coursework.
Now, the bot’s makers, San Francisco-based OpenAI, are trying to counter the risk by “watermarking” the bot’s output and making plagiarism easier to spot.
Students need now, more than ever, to understand how to navigate a world in which artificial intelligence is increasingly woven into everyday life. It’s a world that they, ultimately, will shape.
We hail from two professional fields that have an outsize interest in this debate. Joanne is a veteran journalist and editor deeply concerned about the potential for plagiarism and misinformation. Rebecca is a public health expert focused on artificial intelligence, who champions equitable adoption of new technologies.
We are also mother and daughter. Our dinner-table conversations have become a microcosm of the argument around ChatGPT, weighing its very real dangers against its equally real promise. Yet we both firmly believe that a blanket ban is a missed opportunity.
ChatGPT: Threat or Menace? — from insidehighered.com by Steven Mintz Are fears about generative AI warranted?
The rapid pace of change is driven by a “perfect storm” of factors, including the falling cost of computing power, the rise of data-driven decision-making, and the increasing availability of new technologies. “The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent,”concluded Andrew Doxsey, co-founder of Libra Incentix, in an interview. “Unlike previous technological revolutions, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is evolving exponentially rather than linearly. Furthermore, it disrupts almost every industry worldwide.”
An updated version of the AI chatbot ChatGPT was recently released to the public.
I got the chatbot to write cover letters for real jobs and asked hiring managers what they thought.
The managers said they would’ve given me a call but that the letters lacked personality.
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I mentor a young lad with poor literacy skills who is starting a landscaping business. He struggles to communicate with clients in a professional manner.
I created a GPT3-powered Gmail account to which he sends a message. It responds with the text to send to the client. pic.twitter.com/nlFX9Yx6wR
In the latter part of 2022 and continuing into the new year, multiple challenges have emerged to threaten law firm profitability, including falling demand and productivity, rising expenses, changing client preferences, and economic turmoil.
Indeed, one key metric — profits-per-equity partner (PPEP) — is down for the first time since 2009, which occurred during the last global financial crisis.
The idea that the space in which you do something, affects the thing you do is the basic premise behind active learning classrooms (ALCs).
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The biggest message I get from this study is that in order to have success with active learning classrooms, you can’t just build them — they have to be introduced as part of an ecosystem that touches almost all parts of the daily function of a university: faculty teaching, faculty development and support, facilities, and the Registrar’s Office to name a few. Without that ecosystem before you build an ALC, it seems hard to have success with students after it’s built. You’re more likely to have an expensive showcase that looks good but ultimately does not fulfill its main purpose: Promoting and amplifying active learning, and moving the culture of a campus toward active engagement in the classroom.
From DSC: Thank you Robert for your article/posting here! And thank you for being one of the few faculty members who:
Regularly share information out on LinkedIn, Twitter, and your blog (something that is all too rare for faculty members throughout higher education)
Took a sabbatical to go work at a company that designs and develops numerous options for implementing active learning setups throughout the worlds of higher education, K12 education, and the corporate world as well. You are taking your skills to help contribute to the corporate world, while learning things out in the corporate world, and then taking these learnings back into the world of higher education.
This presupposes something controversial: That the institution will take a stand on the issue that there is a preferred way to teach, namely active learning, and that the institution will be moving toward making active learning the default pedagogy at the institution. Putting this stake in the ground, and then investing not only in facilities but in professional development and faculty incentives to make it happen, again calls for vigorous, sustained leadership — at the top, and especially by the teaching/learning center director.
He said: “This is not simply a U.S. issue or a legal services issue. It is a global one.
“Any economic downturn will inevitably also hit the legal services sector. However many international law firms have practice areas that are both cyclical and counter-cyclical, so those differing components of the practice become busier to support that which is less so.
“We all hope that any downturn is short lived. Everyone has been through a lot these past few years, no business wants to have to restructure at this stage.”
Speaking of legal-related items, also see:
DoNotPay will pay any lawyer or person $1,000,000 with an upcoming case in front of the United States Supreme Court to wear AirPods and let our robot lawyer argue the case by repeating exactly what it says. (1/2)
It’s fascinating to see what GPT-3 can do and the possibilities are in some cases nothing short of mind blowing. But before you plan your early 2023 implementation, you may want to exercise a bit of caution. When it comes to using AI in a production environment – i.e., serving real customers with real expectations – you need solutions that deliver reliable results that you can explain to your clients … and potentially to a lot of other stakeholders, including courts and regulatory authorities.
Maybe in 2023 you can also try this line: ‘Dear client / court / regulator, we know it’s hard to believe, but a lot of the time you can rely on what we tell you.’
NOTE: Artificial Lawyer and its Founder are now on sabbatical during 2023, returning in 2024.
From DSC: My guess is that they are pursuing some serious, new opportunities involving using AI within the legaltech realm. Time will tell.
Will Law Schools Respond to ‘U.S. News’ Changes?— from .insidehighered.com by Scott Jaschik Reactions were muted or critical to a series of ways the magazine said it would improve its rankings.
Excerpt:
U.S. News & World Reportannounced Monday that it would change how it ranks law schools in response to the decision by many top law schools to no longer participate in the ranking process. However, it is unclear whether the changes will lead law schools to accept (or even participate in) the new process.
AI legal assistant will help defendant fight a speeding case in court — from newscientist.com by Matthew Sparkes (behind paywall) In February, an AI from DoNotPay is set to tell a defendant exactly what to say and when during an entire court case. It is likely to be the first ever case defended by an artificial intelligence
Also relevant/see:
Over Christmas, @DoNotPay managed to create an AI deepfake clone of my voice. Then, with GPT, we got the bot to phone up Wells Fargo and successfully overturn some wire fees.
This is the perfect use case for AI. Nobody has time to argue on the phone about $12!
Joshua Browder, founder and chief executive of “robot lawyer” app DoNotPay, revealed last week he had created a bot based on the large language model to help people save money on their internet bill.
From DSC:
Check out the items below. As with most technologies, there are likely going to be plusses & minuses regarding the use of AI in digital video, communications, arts, and music.
DC: What?!? Wow. I should have seen this coming. I can see positives & negatives here. Virtual meetings could become a bit more creative/fun. But apps could be a bit scarier in some instances, such as with #telelegal.
The Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) is committed to advancing teaching excellence, social justice and diversity. SALT is a community of progressive law teachers, law school administrators, librarians, academic support experts, students and affiliates. SALT has been working for more than 40 years to improve the legal profession, the law academy and expand the power of law to under-served communities. SALT engages in work within and beyond the law school to advance social justice.
DC: What if there was a “remote learning channel” for every college/university classroom? A remote learner would have to pay a small flat fee to audit or drop into the class.
For people who have used virtual primary care, the vast majority of them (94%) are satisfied with their experience, and nearly four in five (79%) say it has allowed them to take charge of their health.The study included findings around familiarity and experience with virtual primary care, virtual primary care and chronic conditions, current health and practices, and more.
As digital health technology continues to advance and the healthcare industry evolves, many Americans want the ability to utilize more digital methods when it comes to managing their health, according to a study recently released by Elevance Health — formerly Anthem, Inc. Elevance Health commissioned to conduct an online study of over 5,000 US adults age 18+ around virtual primary care.
GPT Takes the Bar Exam — from papers.ssrn.com by Michael James Bommarito and Daniel Martin Katz; with thanks to Gabe Teninbaum for his tweet on this
Excerpt from the Abstract (emphasis DSC):
While our ability to interpret these results is limited by nascent scientific understanding of LLMs and the proprietary nature of GPT, we believe that these results strongly suggest that an LLM will pass the MBE component of the Bar Exam in the near future.
WASHINGTON—The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) announced today that it is awarding 33 Technology Initiative Grants (TIG) to 29 legal services providers totaling $4,679,135. These organizations will use the funds to leverage technology in delivering high-quality legal assistance to low-income Americans.
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Grant recipients have used this funding to enhance cybersecurity, build educational platforms, strengthen program capacity and support the work of pro bono attorneys. Successful TIG projects are often replicated by organizations around the country, creating wide-reaching impacts.
Stephen Younger argues against nonlawyer ownership on the grounds that it would threaten the independence of the legal profession and would not solve the access to justice crisis. In contrast, Ralph Baxter offers a pro-reform perspective, arguing that reforms are necessary to meaningfully address the access to justice crisis—and that state bar association inaction on these issues constitutes a dereliction of duty.
In part one of this two-part IAALS blog series, we explored Younger’s argument in “The Pitfalls and False Promises of Nonlawyer Ownership of Law Firms.” This piece details Baxter’s opposing perspective as set out in “Dereliction of Duty: State-Bar Inaction in Response to America’s Access-to-Justice Crisis.”
In the meantime, looking back on the top legal technology news stories is a great way to identify key trends that hint at what’s to come for lawyers and their clients in 2023 and beyond.
Attorneys and their client are looking for a more secure, more familiar, more intuitive, more efficient virtual environment than the mass-market videoconference platforms that were hastily deployed during the pandemic.
Eighty-eight percent of lawyers responding to a recent American Bar Association survey said they prefer the use of remote depositions in their practices. Another 93% supported the use of remote technologies for all pretrial hearings.
The survey results are further evidence of the rapid and profound transition toward wider use of remote technologies in the legal profession. .
