learning ecosystem

Tips on how to use Claude’s “Reading & Learning Mode” [Saidul Islam]

On 11/06/2026, in adjunct faculty, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, colleges, community colleges, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, digital learning, education, education technology, emerging technologies, experimentation, faculty/staff, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, liberal arts, library / librarians, personalized/customized learning, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, skills, tools, vendors, by Daniel Christian

From Training Providers to System Shapers [Mehedintu & Almlie]

On 11/05/2026, in adult learning, communities of practice, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, culture, leadership, learning ecosystem, podcasting, strategy, training / L&D, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Episode 66: From Training Providers to System Shapers — from jessalmlie.com by Lavinia Mehedintu and Jess Almlie

Lavinia Mehedintu, founder of Offbeat and author of L&D Rewired, joins Jess to explore L&D’s shift from training providers to system shapers. They discuss how an organizational system shapes performance, and how L&D can influence those conditions. They also tackle the infamous request for L&D to “Create a learning culture.” What does that actually mean, and how can we examine the system to uncover what’s helping people learn and what’s getting in their way

Jess and Lavinia Discuss

What it means for L&D to think and work as system shapers.
Questions that uncover the real problem behind a training request.
How processes, tools, incentives, and feedback influence performance.
Ways to contribute when the solution falls outside L&D’s authority.
Using facilitation skills to help stakeholders work through business challenges.
Identifying what defines, enables, and blocks a learning culture.
Recognizing progress beyond positive training feedback.
Building courage and finding creative solutions in any system.

Beyond Click-Next: When, How & Why to Build Learning Games with AI [Hardman]

On 11/05/2026, in adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, educational games / serious games, instructional design, intelligent systems, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, productivity / tips and tricks, training / L&D, trends, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Beyond Click-Next: When, How & Why to Build Learning Games with AI — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman
Aka, how to innovate the learning experience & improve outcomes with game design

When L&D teams first started using AI regularly, the question I got asked most was: “How can I use AI to make more courses and more content, more quickly?” In 2026, content creation is still the number one use of AI in L&D (Taylor and Vinauskait?, 2026), but the questions L&D teams are asking are starting to change.

This year, in my day-to-day work and on my bootcamp, one question has come up more than any other: “How do I use AI to make the learning experience more dynamic, active and experiential?” Our focus is shifting from using AI to produce content to using AI to innovate the learner’s experience.

This seems to be part of a broader trend.

AI can improve performance, but did anyone learn? [Rodrigues]

On 10/27/2026, in adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, career development, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, digital learning, emerging technologies, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, instructional design, learning, learning ecosystem, research, society, training / L&D, United States, workplace, by Daniel Christian

AI can improve performance, but did anyone learn? — from chieflearningofficer.com by Alexandre Rodrigues
Better AI-assisted performance does not always mean better learning. Here’s what L&D leaders can do about it.

A randomized field experiment involving thousands of knowledge workers found measurable productivity benefits from generative AI, including faster document completion. But productivity and learning are not the same outcome.

As organizations integrate AI more deeply into everyday work, L&D may need to confront an uncomfortable possibility: Employees can become better at producing results without becoming proportionally better at producing those results independently. Performance is visible. Learning is harder to see.

L&D researchers have long distinguished between performance during practice and learning that persists after practice. As Nicholas Soderstrom and Robert Bjork observed, what people do successfully while training is not always a reliable indicator of what they will retain or transfer later.

That distinction becomes particularly consequential in AI-enabled workplaces.

We’re Waiting Too Long to Talk to Kids About Their Futures (Julie Lammers, Britebound) — from thehumanist.xyz by Julie Lammers and Allison Dulin Salisbury
“By eighth grade, kids are already ruling out careers they’ve never had a chance to explore.”

Per Allison:

Julie Lammers, who leads Britebound, makes a compelling case for starting career exploration in middle school for precisely this reason. The goal isn’t to get a 12-year-old to choose a profession, but to help them discover possibilities they might otherwise never consider, while they’re still forming their sense of who they are and what they’re capable of.

I love the implication of this argument. If we care about preserving choice, we should start career exploration earlier, not later. Done well, it could be one of the most powerful ways to expand opportunity for young people whose circumstances might otherwise define the limits of their ambition.

Julie and I talked about what this looks like in practice, why career navigation should be a skill we develop rather than only a service we deliver, and what young people themselves are telling Britebound about the support they want. It’s a conversation that challenged some of my assumptions about when and how we should prepare kids for their futures.

Also from Allison, check out:

[Special Report] AI Could Radically Accelerate How We Learn About Learning — from thehumanist.xyz by Allison Dulin Salisbury and Mandy McLean
AI is making a virtual laboratory for human learning possible, opening the door to testing ideas we could never afford or safely attempt with actual students.

Recent advances in AI raise the possibility of building something education has never really had: a virtual laboratory for learning.

At the center of this possibility are synthetic students—AI models designed to simulate aspects of how real students behave and, eventually, how they learn. Researchers could test hundreds of ways to teach a concept, give feedback, or sequence a curriculum and identify the most promising approaches for different kinds of learners. Developers could try out a new assessment or AI tutor on thousands of simulated students before putting it in front of real ones. Districts could stress-test AI products for safety and begin to understand which tools might work for whom and under what circumstances.

True, this could make running education studies faster and cheaper. But change the cost of experimentation enough and you change what gets experimented on. The promise of synthetic students is that researchers could ask more questions, test more ambitious ideas, explore edge cases, and discard failures before spending years and millions of dollars studying them with actual students.

The Faculty Bargain Of 2040: What Should The University And Its Faculty Owe One Another? — from forbes.com by David Rosowsky

What if we stopped reforming the existing faculty career for a moment? What if we started over?

Suppose we were designing the faculty career today for the university of 2040, starting with a blank sheet of paper. There would be no rigid departmental affiliations, ranks, tenure systems, promotion policies, or inherited assumptions. We could keep anything that still made sense. But nothing would be presumed necessary simply because it has been around for decades.

What would we build?

When machines can increasingly perform parts of the work that once consumed enormous amounts of human time, the scarce attributes may shift toward judgment, curiosity, creativity, disciplinary depth, the ability to frame consequential questions, the capacity to connect ideas across fields, and the ability to know when a machine is wrong.

That is not an argument for fewer faculty. It may be an argument for different faculty – and for a faculty employment system capable of recognizing those important (even desirable) differences.

The fourth annual AI in L&D report [Taylor & Vinauskaite]

On 10/19/2026, in adult learning, analytics, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, career development, communications, communities of practice, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, data related items, emerging technologies, experimentation, Google, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, interactivity, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, multimedia, Open AI, personalized/customized learning, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, skills, tools, training / L&D, UK, United States, vendors, workplace, by Daniel Christian

In case it’s helpful, here is Donald’s posting on LinkedIn

What Can School Leaders Do to Support a Struggling Teacher? [Shultz]

On 10/16/2026, in education, ideas, instructional design, K-12 related, leadership, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, strategy, student-related, teachers, United States, by Daniel Christian

What Can School Leaders Do to Support a Struggling Teacher? — from edutopia.org by Alex Shultz
Teachers often feel alone facing an issue in the classroom, and maintaining lots of points of contact can help them open the door to offers of support.

All educators encounter struggles, no matter how far along they are in their careers. They might have difficulty communicating with families or clearing their inboxes. They might be disorganized. They might have a persistent classroom issue that they struggle to manage. Or they might be dealing with distracting personal-life complications. The tough part is getting teachers to acknowledge that they’re struggling, which requires strong relationships and sufficient face time with school leaders before issues arise. The alternative is having teachers who aren’t comfortable admitting they need assistance.

Recently, I spoke with four school leaders—two principals and two assistant principals—about how they forge institutional trust, keep an eye out for teachers in need of a hand, and deliver advice and action steps without isolating or aggravating anyone.

New tests show that AI can design like an expert Instructional Designer: so what next? [Hardman]

On 10/16/2026, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, education, education technology, emerging technologies, faculty/staff, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, generational differences, Google, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, IT in HE, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, Open AI, tools, United States, universities, vendors, vision/possibilities, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Here is Phillipa’s posting on LinkedIn.

Light Bulb Moments from 100 Episodes — from intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com by Derek Bruff

Per Derek:

Welcome to the 100th episode of Intentional Teaching! I am very excited to reach this milestone, and I am deeply grateful to all my guests and all my listeners for making this possible. I learn so much from my guests, and I’m thrilled to know that folks out there appreciate the interviews and the show.

In this 100th episode, I take a look back at some of the light bulb moments I’ve had interviewing guests over the last four years. What quotes and ideas and examples have really stuck with me and informed my work?

My hope is that you’ll find these moments interesting and perhaps useful to your work in higher education, and that this clip show might interest you in digging into the podcast archives and listening to some older episodes.

Anthropic released a law student plugin. It’s designed to act as a tutor, but it will brief cases, build outlines, predict exam questions based on sample exams, and many other skills.
I’ll show you how to install it in the comments. You should expect your students are using this. You should probably use it for your footnotes.

— Paul Weitzel (@IThinkIAgree) October 13, 2026

The Reinvention of Liberal Arts Colleges — from educationnext.org by Jon Marcus; via Ryan Craig
To remain relevant amid evolving attitudes toward higher education, Brandeis University and institutions like it are redefining their purpose

By the fall, the university will have reorganized itself into four new schools that bring together existing professional programs in areas such as business, technology, and public policy with liberal arts disciplines including history, biology, philosophy, and sociology. Before the first semester starts, each arriving student will be assigned not only an academic adviser, but also a career counselor. And in what has become the most prominent symbol of the strategy, graduates will leave with “career-competency” transcripts alongside their conventional ones, listing what skills they have learned that employers value, from communicating and writing to proficiency with AI. This second transcript also will include internships and jobs students have held as well as microcredentials, which the university now gives them a chance to earn, at no additional cost, in digital-knowledge-economy subjects such as data analytics and statistical analysis.

Let’s record the durable skills. Let’s record the life skills. Let’s record the career skills.” That way, employers will understand exactly what students have been taught to do—as will students themselves.

…
The liberal arts are in a quiet crisis of their own. The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the liberal arts—generally defined as a broad education offering majors in humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and math—fell to a 30-year low in 2024, the latest period for which data are available, according to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. That was 30 percent below the peak in 2012. Students have instead been choosing majors in subjects they consider tied directly to careers, including business, management, and health professions.

New: Essential Resources for Special Education [edutopia.org]

On 10/13/2026, in assistive technologies, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), education, engagement / engaging students, instructional design, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, parents/guardians, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, student-related, teachers, tools, United States, vendors, youth, by Daniel Christian

New: Essential Resources for Special Education — from edutopia.org

We’ve gathered advice for teachers on managing student accommodations, navigating IEPs, and much more, as well as ideas for administrators on how to support teachers in this work.

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Online Course Video Statistics — from markstudios.com by Mark Santos

“Every figure on this page links to the organization that produced it, and each was re-checked against that source before publishing. How many people take online courses, how big the platforms are, how long course videos actually hold attention, how many learners finish, what the money looks like, and which popular online course statistics do not survive being traced to their origin.”
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Learning Ecosystems

From Training Providers to System Shapers [Mehedintu & Almlie]

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