The Edtech Insiders Rundown of SXSW EDU 2024 — from edtechinsiders.substack.com by Ben Kornell, Alex Sarlin, and Sarah Morin
And more on our ASU + GSV Happy Hour, GenAI in edtech market valuations, and interviews from The Common Sense Summit.

Theme 1: The Kids Are Not Alright
This year’s SXSW EDU had something for everyone, with over a dozen “Program Tracks.” However, the one theme that truly connected the entire conference was mental health.

36 sessions were specifically tagged with mental health and wellness, but in sessions on topics ranging from literacy to edtech to civic engagement, presenters continued to come back again and again to the mental health crisis amongst teens and young adults.

Theme 2: Aye AI, Captain
Consistent with past conferences, this year leaned in on the K12 education world. As expected, one of the hottest topics for K12 was the role of AI (or lack thereof) in schools. Key takeaways included…


AI Literacy: A New Graduation Requirement and Civic Imperative — from gettingsmart.com by Tom Vander Ark and Mason Pashia

Key Points

  • There is still time to ensure that all of your students graduate with an understanding of how AI works, why it is important and how to best use it.

What would it look like to make a commitment that come graduation every senior will have at least basic AI literacy? This includes an appreciation of AI as a creation engine and learning partner but also an understanding of the risks of deepfakes and biased curation. We’re entering a time where to quote Ethan Mollick “You can’t trust anything you read or see ever again.” Whether formal or informal, it’s time to start building AI literacy.


New Alabama Education Law Represents Small But Significant Advance — from forbes.com by Jeanne Allen

Valiant Cross Academy raises the bar for young men. A young man seated in a pew is raising his hand.

More than 50 years later, across the street from the church and concerned with declining education and the pace of social change, brothers Anthony and Fred Brock founded Valiant Cross Academy, an all-male academy aimed at “helping boys of color become men of valor.”

Valiant Cross embodies King’s hopes, pursuing the dream that its students will be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, and working to ensure that they are well prepared for productive lives filled with accomplishment and purpose.

“We’re out to prove that it’s an opportunity gap, not an achievement gap” says head of school Anthony Brock. And they have. In 2022, 100 percent of Valiant seniors graduated from the academy, pursuing post-graduate options, enrolling in either four- or two-year college, or established career-training programs.


 

 

GTC March 2024 Keynote with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang


Also relevant/see:




 

Supreme Court: Bar exam will no longer be required to become attorney in Washington State — from spokesman.com by Emma Epperly

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

The bar exam will no longer be required to become a lawyer in Washington, the state Supreme Court ruled in a pair of orders Friday.

The court approved alternative ways to show competency and earn a law license after appointing a task force to examine the issue in 2020.

The Bar Licensure Task Force found that the traditional exam “disproportionally and unnecessarily blocks” marginalized groups from becoming practicing attorneys and is “at best minimally effective” for ensuring competency, according to a news release from the Washington Administrative Office of the Courts.

 

12 Books for Instructional Designers to Read This Year — from theelearningcoach.com by Connie Malamed

Over the past year, many excellent and resourceful books have crossed my desk or Kindle. I’m rounding them up here so you can find a few to expand your horizons. The list below is in alphabetical order by title.

Each book is unique, yet as a collection, they reflect some common themes and trends in Learning and Development: a focus on empathy and emotion, adopting best practices from other fields, using data for greater impact, aligning projects with organizational goals, and developing consultative skills. The authors listed here are optimistic and forward-thinking—they believe change is possible. I hope you enjoy the books.

 


[Report] Generative AI Top 150: The World’s Most Used AI Tools (Feb 2024) — from flexos.work by Daan van Rossum
FlexOS.work surveyed Generative AI platforms to reveal which get used most. While ChatGPT reigns supreme, countless AI platforms are used by millions.

As the FlexOS research study “Generative AI at Work” concluded based on a survey amongst knowledge workers, ChatGPT reigns supreme.

2. AI Tool Usage is Way Higher Than People Expect – Beating Netflix, Pinterest, Twitch.
As measured by data analysis platform Similarweb based on global web traffic tracking, the AI tools in this list generate over 3 billion monthly visits.

With 1.67 billion visits, ChatGPT represents over half of this traffic and is already bigger than Netflix, Microsoft, Pinterest, Twitch, and The New York Times.

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Artificial Intelligence Act: MEPs adopt landmark law — from europarl.europa.eu

  • Safeguards on general purpose artificial intelligence
  • Limits on the use of biometric identification systems by law enforcement
  • Bans on social scoring and AI used to manipulate or exploit user vulnerabilities
  • Right of consumers to launch complaints and receive meaningful explanations


The untargeted scraping of facial images from CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases will be banned © Alexander / Adobe Stock


A New Surge in Power Use Is Threatening U.S. Climate Goals — from nytimes.com by Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich
A boom in data centers and factories is straining electric grids and propping up fossil fuels.

Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.

Over the past year, electric utilities have nearly doubled their forecasts of how much additional power they’ll need by 2028 as they confront an unexpected explosion in the number of data centers, an abrupt resurgence in manufacturing driven by new federal laws, and millions of electric vehicles being plugged in.


OpenAI and the Fierce AI Industry Debate Over Open Source — from bloomberg.com by Rachel Metz

The tumult could seem like a distraction from the startup’s seemingly unending march toward AI advancement. But the tension, and the latest debate with Musk, illuminates a central question for OpenAI, along with the tech world at large as it’s increasingly consumed by artificial intelligence: Just how open should an AI company be?

The meaning of the word “open” in “OpenAI” seems to be a particular sticking point for both sides — something that you might think sounds, on the surface, pretty clear. But actual definitions are both complex and controversial.


Researchers develop AI-driven tool for near real-time cancer surveillance — from medicalxpress.com by Mark Alewine; via The Rundown AI
Artificial intelligence has delivered a major win for pathologists and researchers in the fight for improved cancer treatments and diagnoses.

In partnership with the National Cancer Institute, or NCI, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Louisiana State University developed a long-sequenced AI transformer capable of processing millions of pathology reports to provide experts researching cancer diagnoses and management with exponentially more accurate information on cancer reporting.


 

Doubts About Value Are Deterring College Enrollment — from insidehighered.com by Jessica Blake
Survey data suggests that prospective learners are being dissuaded from college by skepticism about whether degrees are worth the time and money.

Enrollment has been declining in higher education for more than a decade, and the most common explanations in recent years have been lingering effects of the pandemic and a looming demographic cliff expected to shrink the number of traditional-age college students. But new research suggests that public doubts about the value of a college degree are a key contributor.

The study—conducted by Edge Research, a marketing research firm, and HCM Strategists, a public policy and advocacy consulting firm with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—uses focus groups and parallel national surveys of current high school students and of adults who decided to leave college or who didn’t go at all to link the value proposition of a college degree and Americans’ behaviors after high school.

“At the end of the day, higher education has a lot of work to do to convince these audiences of its value,” said Terrell Dunn, an HCM consultant.


‘A Condemnation’: Under Mental Health Strains, Students Weigh Quitting College — from edsurge.com by Daniel Mollenkamp

When college students think about quitting, it’s most likely because of mental health strain or stress.

That’s according to the recent data from the “State of Higher Education Study,” conducted by the analytics company Gallup and the private foundation Lumina.

 

Edtech Unicorns Are Evolving Rather Than Disrupting — from bloomberg.com by Alex Webb

Consider Coursera Inc., the most prominent survivor of that early edtech hype. It’s now a public company, with a hefty $2.3 billion valuation. Finally, 12 years after it was founded — by, incidentally, another Google veteran in Andrew Ng — it’s set to report its first profit this year, according to analyst estimates. And the enterprise business is considerably more profitable, enjoying a 68% gross margin in 2023, compared to the consumer business’s 53% margin.

Figuring out the right match between training and utility is how several business schools seem to have developed successful online courses — which they are charging top dollar for. They’re in close contact with the sort of large corporations who hire their graduates, giving them a more intimate understanding of what those businesses seek.

Harvard Business School is one example. It made $74 million from online courses in fiscal 2022, the most recent year for which data is available

 

Also see:

Cognition Labs Blob

 

Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power — from washingtonpost.com by Evan Halper
AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up.

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.

A major factor behind the skyrocketing demand is the rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which is driving the construction of large warehouses of computing infrastructure that require exponentially more power than traditional data centers. AI is also part of a huge scale-up of cloud computing. Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft are scouring the nation for sites for new data centers, and many lesser-known firms are also on the hunt.


The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I. — from newyorker.com by Elizabeth Kolbert
How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy?

“There’s a fundamental mismatch between this technology and environmental sustainability,” de Vries said. Recently, the world’s most prominent A.I. cheerleader, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, voiced similar concerns, albeit with a different spin. “I think we still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,” Altman said at a public appearance in Davos. He didn’t see how these needs could be met, he went on, “without a breakthrough.” He added, “We need fusion or we need, like, radically cheaper solar plus storage, or something, at massive scale—like, a scale that no one is really planning for.”


A generative AI reset: Rewiring to turn potential into value in 2024 — from mckinsey.com by Eric Lamarre, Alex Singla, Alexander Sukharevsky, and Rodney Zemmel; via Philippa Hardman
The generative AI payoff may only come when companies do deeper organizational surgery on their business.

  • Figure out where gen AI copilots can give you a real competitive advantage
  • Upskill the talent you have but be clear about the gen-AI-specific skills you need
  • Form a centralized team to establish standards that enable responsible scaling
  • Set up the technology architecture to scale
  • Ensure data quality and focus on unstructured data to fuel your models
  • Build trust and reusability to drive adoption and scale

AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead Long live AI prompt engineering — from spectrum.ieee.org

Since ChatGPT dropped in the fall of 2022, everyone and their donkey has tried their hand at prompt engineering—finding a clever way to phrase your query to a large language model (LLM) or AI art or video generator to get the best results or sidestep protections. The Internet is replete with prompt-engineering guides, cheat sheets, and advice threads to help you get the most out of an LLM.

However, new research suggests that prompt engineering is best done by the model itself, and not by a human engineer. This has cast doubt on prompt engineering’s future—and increased suspicions that a fair portion of prompt-engineering jobs may be a passing fad, at least as the field is currently imagined.


What the birth of the spreadsheet teaches us about generative AI — from timharford.com by Tim Harford; via Sam DeBrule

There is one very clear parallel between the digital spreadsheet and generative AI: both are computer apps that collapse time. A task that might have taken hours or days can suddenly be completed in seconds. So accept for a moment the premise that the digital spreadsheet has something to teach us about generative AI. What lessons should we absorb?

It’s that pace of change that gives me pause. Ethan Mollick, author of the forthcoming book Co-Intelligence, tells me “if progress on generative AI stops now, the spreadsheet is not a bad analogy”. We’d get some dramatic shifts in the workplace, a technology that broadly empowers workers and creates good new jobs, and everything would be fine. But is it going to stop any time soon? Mollick doubts that, and so do I.


 

 

A Notre Dame Senior’s Perspective on AI in the Classroom — from learning.nd.edu — by Sarah Ochocki; via Derek Bruff on LinkedIn

At this moment, as a college student trying to navigate the messy, fast-developing, and varied world of generative AI, I feel more confused than ever. I think most of us can share that feeling. There’s no roadmap on how to use AI in education, and there aren’t the typical years of proof to show something works. However, this promising new tool is sitting in front of us, and we would be foolish to not use it or talk about it.

I’ve used it to help me understand sample code I was viewing, rather than mindlessly trying to copy what I was trying to learn from. I’ve also used it to help prepare for a debate, practicing making counterarguments to the points it came up with.

AI alone cannot teach something; there needs to be critical interaction with the responses we are given. However, this is something that is true of any form of education. I could sit in a lecture for hours a week, but if I don’t do the homework or critically engage with the material, I don’t expect to learn anything.


A Map of Generative AI for Education — from medium.com by Laurence Holt; via GSV
An update to our map of the current state-of-the-art


Last ones (for now):


Survey: K-12 Students Want More Guidance on Using AI — from govtech.com by Lauraine Langreo
Research from the nonprofit National 4-H Council found that most 9- to 17-year-olds have an idea of what AI is and what it can do, but most would like help from adults in learning how to use different AI tools.

“Preparing young people for the workforce of the future means ensuring that they have a solid understanding of these new technologies that are reshaping our world,” Jill Bramble, the president and CEO of the National 4-H Council, said in a press release.

AI School Guidance Document Toolkit, with Free Comprehensive Review — from tefanbauschard.substack.com by Stefan Bauschard and Dr. Sabba Quidwai

 

This week in 5 numbers: Another faith-based college plans to close — from by Natalie Schwartz
We’re rounding up some of our top recent stories, from Notre Dame College’s planned closure to Valparaiso’s potential academic cuts.

BY THE NUMBERS

  • 1,444
    The number of students who were enrolled at Notre Dame College in fall 2022, down 37% from 2014. The Roman Catholic college recently said it would close after the spring term, citing declining enrollment, along with rising costs and significant debt.
  • 28
    The number of academic programs that Valparaiso University may eliminate. Eric Johnson, the Indiana institution’s provost, said it offers too many majors, minors and graduate degrees in relation to its enrollment.

A couple of other items re: higher education that caught my eye were:

Universities Expect to Use More Tech in Future Classrooms—but Don’t Know How — from insidehighered.com by Lauren Coffey

University administrators see the need to implement education technology in their classrooms but are at a loss regarding how to do so, according to a new report.

The College Innovation Network released its first CIN Administrator EdTech survey today, which revealed that more than half (53 percent) of the 214 administrators surveyed do not feel extremely confident in choosing effective ed-tech products for their institutions.

“While administrators are excited about offering new ed-tech tools, they are lacking knowledge and data to help them make informed decisions that benefit students and faculty,” Omid Fotuhi, director of learning and innovation at WGU Labs, which funds the network, said in a statement.

From DSC:
I always appreciated our cross-disciplinary team at Calvin (then College). As we looked at enhancing our learning spaces, we had input from the Teaching & Learning Group, IT, A/V, the academic side of the house, and facilities. It was definitely a team-based approach. (As I think about it, it would have been helpful to have more channels for student feedback as well.)


Per Jeff Selingo:

Optionality. In my keynote, I pointed out that the academic calendar and credit hour in higher ed are like “shelf space” on the old television schedule that has been upended by streaming. In much the same way, we need similar optionality to meet the challenges of higher ed right now: in how students access learning (in-person, hybrid, online) to credentials (certificates, degrees) to how those experiences stack together for lifelong learning.

Culture in institutions. The common thread throughout the conference was how the culture of institutions (both universities and governments) need to change so our structures and practices can evolve. Too many people in higher ed right now are employing a scarcity mindset and seeing every change as a zero-sum game. If you’re not happy about the present, as many attendees suggested you’re not going to be excited about the future.

 

Accenture to acquire Udacity to build a learning platform focused on AI — from techcrunch.com by Ron Miller

Excerpt: (emphasis DSC):

Accenture announced today that it would acquire the learning platform Udacity as part of an effort to build a learning platform focused on the growing interest in AI. While the company didn’t specify how much it paid for Udacity, it also announced a $1 billion investment in building a technology learning platform it’s calling LearnVantage.

“The rise of generative AI represents one of the most transformative changes in how work gets done and is driving a growing need for enterprises to train and upskill people in cloud, data and AI as they build their digital core and reinvent their enterprises,” Kishore Durg, global lead of Accenture LearnVantage said in a statement.

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State of Higher Ed LMS Market for US and Canada: Year-End 2023 Edition — from onedtech.philhillaa.com by Phil Hill

  • The market continues to be a matter of Canvas and Brightspace winning new accounts, Anthology Bb Learn and Moodle losing accounts, with more variety for smaller institutions.
  • Canvas has further consolidated its position as the market leader in North America, with 41% of the market share. Blackboard fell from 18% of the market share to 17%. Moodle has plateaued at 16% while Brightspace increased to 16%. As a reminder, we have removed Open LMS from the Moodle market share.
  • Populi LMS (3%), Open LMS (3%), Sakai (2%), and Schoology (1%) round out the remainder of the market, with 1% of the market going to Other.
  • As always, market share is very much a story of size, type of institution (public or private), and control. The numbers above refer to the market take as a whole, but if we start to drill down to different sizes and types of institution, we get very different market dynamics.

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AI Is Becoming an Integral Part of the Instructional Design Process — from drphilippahardman.substack.com Dr. Philippa Hardman
What I learned from 150 interviews with instructional designers

1. AI already plays a central part in the instructional design process
A whopping 95.3% of the instructional designers interviewed said they use AI in their day to day work. Those who don’t use AI cite access or permission issues as the primary reason that they haven’t integrated AI into their process.

2. AI is predominantly used at the design and development stages of the instructional design process 
When mapped to the ADDIE process, the breakdown of use cases goes as follows:

  • Analysis: 5.5% of use cases
  • Design: 32.1%
  • Development: 53.2%
  • Implementation: 1.8%
  • Evaluation: 7.3%

Speaking of AI in our learning ecosystems, also see:


Will AI Use in Schools Increase Next Year? 56 Percent of Educators Say Yes — from edweek.org by Alyson Klein

The majority of educators expect use of artificial intelligence tools will increase in their school or district over the next year, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey.

Applying Multimodal AI to L&D — from learningguild.com by Sarah Clark
We’re just starting to see Multimodal AI systems hit the spotlight. Unlike the text-based and image-generation AI tools we’ve seen before, multimodal systems can absorb and generate content in multiple formats – text, image, video, audio, etc.

 

 

Talent Disrupted: College Graduates, Underemployment, and the Way Forward — from stradaeducation.org

Most people enroll in college because they believe it will help them secure a good job and open the door to economic opportunity. In “Talent Disrupted,” a new and updated version of the 2018 report, “The Permanent Detour,” Strada Institute for the Future of Work and The Burning Glass Institute show that a college degree is not always a guarantee of labor market success.

Using a combination of online career histories of tens of millions of graduates, as well as census microdata for millions of graduates, the report offers a comprehensive picture of how college graduates fare in the job market over their first decade of employment after college.

The report shows that only about half of bachelor’s degree graduates secure employment in a college-level job within a year of graduation.

Also see:

Half of College Grads Are Working Jobs That Don’t Use Their Degrees — from wsj.com by Vanessa Fuhrmans and Lindsay Ellis
Choice of major, internships and getting the right first job after graduation are critical to career paths, new data show

Roughly half of college graduates end up in jobs where their degrees aren’t needed, and that underemployment has lasting implications for workers’ earnings and career paths.

That is the key finding of a new study tracking the career paths of more than 10 million people who entered the job market over the past decade. It suggests that the number of graduates in jobs that don’t make use of their skills or credentials—52%—is greater than previously thought, and underscores the lasting importance of that first job after graduation.


 
© 2024 | Daniel Christian