Online and Professional Continuing Education News
See below for a listing of curated news articles of the day brought to you by Ray Schroeder, Senior Fellow at UPCEA.
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- Developing and Evaluating the Fidelity of Virtual Reality-Artificial Intelligence (VR-AI) - April Tan, Michael C. Dorneich, Elena Cotos, Frontiers in Virtual Reality (provisionally accepted)This study develops and evaluates a Virtual Reality-Artificial Intelligence (VR-AI) learning environment designed to facilitate the socio-rhetorical socialization of graduate students. Academic discourse socialization is crucial, yet traditional classroom instruction often lacks authentic socialization opportunities, limiting students' exposure to their disciplinary communities. To address this gap, this study integrates genre and situated learning theories to […]
- The Socratic Explainer - NotionThis prompt turns AI into a patient, seasoned learning companion who guides users to their own “aha!” moments through purposeful questions, analogies, and interactive back-and-forth conversation. Rather than simply giving answers, the system begins every topic by surfacing the learner’s starting point, frustrations, and real-life relevance. The conversation is built layer by layer: first probing […]
- Seizing the agentic AI advantage - McKinsey\At the heart of this paradox is an imbalance between “horizontal” (enterprise-wide) copilots and chatbots—which have scaled quickly but deliver diffuse, hard-to-measure gains—and more transformative “vertical” (function-specific) use cases—about 90 percent of which remain stuck in pilot mode. AI agents offer a way to break out of the gen AI paradox. That’s because agents have […]
- Chief AI Officer: Higher Ed’s New Leadership Role - Abby Sourwine, Government TechnologyThose stepping up to fill education’s new C-suite role say it's more than just understanding IT — it requires communication and skill-building across disciplines and comfort levels, and flexibility to create a road map. As the education sector continues to adapt to artificial intelligence, a new role is quietly emerging: the chief AI officer (CAIO). […]
- Closing the gender gap in engineering for a digital-first future - McKinseyJune 23 celebrated the contributions of women in engineering and brings attention to the ongoing gender gap in STEM fields. “To succeed in this digital-first future, both women and men need to be technologists.” However, write McKinsey’s Kweilin Ellingrud, Lareina Yee, and María del Mar Martínez, “The challenge is especially acute for women, who continue […]
- $1.5M partnership with AI company will offer USC students, faculty free access - Alexa Jurado, the State“The campuswide adoption of secure enterprise AI technology puts USC on the leading edge of higher education institutions,” Brice Bible, USC’s vice president for information technology and chief information officer, said in a news release. “This initiative will not only make our students more employable, but it will allow for much greater innovation in the […]
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI can rival someone with a PhD—just weeks after saying it’s ready for entry-level jobs. So what’s left for grads? - Preston Fore, FortuneEarlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that the technology can already perform the tasks equal to that of an entry-level employee. Now, in a podcast posted just last week, the ChatGPT mastermind went even further—saying AI can even perform tasks typically expected of the smartest grads with a doctorate. “In some sense AIs […]
- "Seriously, What Is 'Superintelligence'? - Uncanny Valley Podcast, WiredThe podcast episode "Seriously, What Is 'Superintelligence'?" from WIRED's Uncanny Valley explores Meta's recent strategic shift in artificial intelligence, focusing on its investment in Scale AI and the creation of a superintelligence AI research lab. The hosts discuss Meta's efforts to compete with industry leaders like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google by aggressively acquiring talent and […]
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says ‘We Are Heading Towards a World Where AI Will Just Have Unbelievable Context on Your Life’ - Caleb Naysmith, BarchartAltman described the feature as a “real surprising level up,” saying, “Now that the computer knows a lot of context on me, and if I ask it a question with only a small number of words, it knows enough about the rest of my life to be pretty confident in what I want it to […]
- How to turn AI into your own research assistant with this free Google tool - Lance Whitney, ZDnetAs the name implies, Learn About is more than just a way to get a quick answer to a question. Instead, it's a teaching tool that invites you to dive more deeply into your chosen topic. With Learn About, you can submit a text prompt, a PDF, or an image file to kick off your […]
- The IAIER at NCCU x OpenAI Academy Summit: HBCUs Leading the Future- NC Central UniversityHosted by the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Research (IAIER) at North Carolina Central University in collaboration with OpenAI Academy, the IAIER x OpenAI Academy Summit: HBCUs Leading the Future is a first-of-its-kind national event convening students, faculty, and professionals from Historically Black Colleges and Universities to explore real-world applications of artificial intelligence. Through […]
- Teaching at a Small Private College? Take our Advice - Terri Ward, Jennifer Suriano, and Julie Cuccio-Slichko, Faculty FocusHere is our message: Take heed if you are a faculty member in educator preparation. We, the authors of this article, shared the same experience of college closure and loss of employment. However, we saw it through three different lenses: Jenni was an early tenure-track Assistant Professor; Julie was an Assistant Professor applying for rank […]
- What do students want from AI-assisted teaching? - Omar Merlo &Nai Li, Times Higher EducationWhat do students want from AI-assisted teaching? - Omar Merlo &Nai Li, Times Higher EducationEducators tend to agree that we need to embrace AI as a tool for learning. However, there is still an open question about how academics and students can best harness the technology in the classroom. Through our use of AI to […]
- To employers, AI skills aren’t just for tech majors anymore: Colleges and students race to keep up with the widespread demand for AI expertise - Ariel Gilreath, Hechinger ReportAI technology is rapidly changing the labor market. Employers are increasingly posting job listings that include AI skills for positions even outside of the technology sector, such as in health care, hospitality and media. To keep up, students are increasingly looking for ways to boost their AI skills and make themselves more marketable at a […]
- How Babson College went all-in on AI in higher education - Shane O'Neill, CIOOver the past two years, US colleges have quietly integrated generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools into the classroom and behind the scenes. At Babson College, just outside Boston, the shift to AI has been anything but quiet — it’s been bold, fast, and full of purpose. Babson is certainly not the only college in the […]
- Walking, Talking, Engaging AI in Higher Ed - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher EdWe are most accustomed to writing prompts and challenging artificial intelligence to give us answers, insights, sources, video clips and creativity. Emerging now is the walking, talking AI that engages us on our level. We have front-row seats to the maturing of AI in higher education. There has been audio for a while, but now […]
- Preparing for tomorrow’s agentic workforce - Lareina Yee and Rodrigo Liang, McKinseyAs we scale up, we’re now seeing other constraints start to appear, like a lack of sufficient power for these data centers. So people are talking about nuclear power plants and other sources of energy. But then you have to figure out how to get the cooling done as well. And as you think about […]
- A.I. in the Classroom: A Brave New World? - Carl Murray, NY TimesWhile the promise of personalized A.I. tutors and campuswide integration is compelling, we must pause to consider the broader implications, especially for how students come to understand learning itself. The rush to adopt A.I. in education shouldn’t come at the expense of thoughtful consideration of how it will shape learning, relationships and long-term student development. […]
- Welcome to the "infinite workday" - Emily Peck, AxiosIt's difficult to stay focused during formal business hours. Knowledge workers are interrupted by a ping from an app — such as email, calendar or messaging — every 1.75 minutes, or 275 times, during the official eight-hour work day, finds the analysis, which looked at data from 12-month period ending February 2025. Meanwhile, as workers […]
- MIT's New AI "REWRITES ITSELF" to Improve It's Abilities: Researchers STUNNED! - Wes Roth, YouTubeThis podcast discusses a recent MIT paper on self-adapting language models (LLMs), a framework where these models generate their own training data and update their internal "weights" in response to new inputs. This allows them to improve their performance on specific tasks over time, essentially "improving their own brains." The paper introduces a concept called […]
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Next for SNHU: Game-Based Learning and Digital Badges for Middle Schoolers (Inside Higher Ed)
Southern New Hampshire University is again trying to disrupt the status quo in higher ed — this time by attempting to link middle schoolers with college degrees. The nonprofit university, which has one of the largest online enrollments in the country, announced today that it…
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