Tag: higher education
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New Head space course: AI for academics
Announcing an upcoming Head space introductory course on generative AI for academics.
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Navigating AI challenges: How universities can stay relevant in the age of AI
The 2024 Work Trend Index report reveals widespread AI adoption in the workplace, posing significant challenges for universities. Higher education institutions must rapidly adapt curricula, train faculty, and emphasise AI skills to remain relevant. Failure to do so could lead to obsolescence, reduced enrollment, and competition from alternative education providers in the AI-driven job market.
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Eureka Labs: An AI+Education company
The first, to my knowledge, AI-first educational institution announced.
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Weekly digest 25
A weekly collection of things I found interesting, thought-provoking, or inspiring. It’s almost always about higher education, mostly technology, and usually AI-related.
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Students completing obsolete assignments
“Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will want to accomplish more than they did before, and also want answers about what AI means for their future learning paths. Schools…
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What OpenAI did
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/what-openai-did With universal free access, the educational value of AI skyrockets (and that doesn’t count voice and vision, which I will discuss shortly). On the other hand, the Homework Apocalypse will reach its final stages. GPT-4 can do almost all the homework on Earth. And it writes much better than GPT-3.5, with a lot more…
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Integrating AI in higher education needs a culture shift
Integrating AI into higher education requires a questioning of assumptions, and a re-evaluation of attitudes, behaviours, and beliefs. In short, it requires a change in culture.
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Link: Crisis in Higher Ed & Why Universities Still Matter
https://a16z.com/podcast/crisis-in-higher-ed-why-universities-still-matter-with-marc-ben/ In this one-on-one conversation, Marc and Ben tackle the university system – what has certainly been a hot topic that’s been dominating the news over the past few months. As Marc states at the top of the episode, universities matter tremendously to our world, but they’re currently in a state of crisis. Together, Ben…
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An AI-first approach to higher education in the UK
http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2024/01/ai-university.html Donald Clark proposes a vision for an AI-first university, tackling the pressing need for high-quality, low-cost online education in the UK. Here’s a distilled list of 25 transformative ideas, drawing inspiration from other successful educational models: I couldn’t agree more. For me, AI has the potential to massively scale personal learning, and for that…
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On the ethics concerns around requiring students to use AI
Note: I wrote this over the course of a busy day full of meetings. At the end of the day I just wanted to get it out there. I’m not sure that I’m fully on board with the arguments, but the thing that I love about blogs is that it doesn’t matter. So these are…
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Workshopping AI in higher education with students
I’m thinking about contributing to a workshop activity that involves students working on practical issues related to the implementation of AI-based services in higher education. Here are some ideas that I think might be worth exploring.
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Link: AI Pedagogy Project
https://aipedagogy.org/ The AI Pedagogy Project (by metaLAB at Harvard) provides educators with a collection of resources in 3 parts: The project aims to encourage creative and critical engagement with AI in education through assignments and materials inspired by the humanities. There is also a collection of sample assignments (see below) from educators to spark informed…
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Compress a PhD+experience into 3-6 months
https://www.quantumleap.education/joinus/founding_learning_engineer.html “Quantum Leap is building the world’s best system for rapidly acquiring expertise. Our first courses will be on large language models and AI safety, for which we’re aiming to compress a PhD and several years’ experience into 3-6 months using accelerated learning methods developed by the US military.” Whether you agree that it’s possible…
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Assessment reform is fine. Education reform is better.
I’m seeing plenty of calls for institutions to reform their assessments in the face of generative AI (see here, for example). Which is fine, I suppose. Nothing wrong with assessment reform. But changing assessment practices without reforming the system in which it operates is just painting over the cracks. Or to put it more crudely,…
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AI and expertise in professional education – ADAPT conference
At the 2023 ADAPT physiotherapy conference, I discussed the impact of generative AI on physiotherapy education, emphasising how it challenges the traditional role of universities in professional training by offering accessible and personalised expertise. The presentation highlighted AI’s potential to democratise learning, enhance project-based education, and create affordable learning alternatives outside formal degree programs. I…
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AI-first educational institutions
In a previous post I mentioned in passing the idea that universities, if they want to remain relevant, will need to adopt an AI-first position for everything they do. Soon, AI will be embedded in everything, from preparing course materials, to developing assessments, to budget allocation. And email. It will be a huge part of…
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When an unstoppable force meets an immovable object
TL;DR (generated by Claude, lightly edited by me). The rise of abundant expertise in the form of generative AI questions the university monopoly on expertise provision and validation. Leadership in the creative deployment of AI for learning, teaching, and assessment will require a change in mindset and a shift towards a new paradigm, which universities…
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Book – Higher Education for Good
I recently came across Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures, an openly licensed book co-edited by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin. I haven’t read any of the book (yet) but it looks interesting. From the editors: The book sets out to confront, consider, and reimagine the challenges and opportunities of higher education in…
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Link: YouTube begins verifying videos by UK doctors…
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/youtube-bbc-britons-more-brits-b2407715.html “YouTube added a new seal of approval to accounts run by licensed doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other health practitioners or organisations who have passed stringent verification checks to fight misinformation.” At what point will “Verified by YouTube” (or Google, or Microsoft) be more valuable than getting your degree from a prestigious university? And then,…