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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  • Data Analytics in Higher Education - Sam Koslowsky, Machine Learning Times
    Universities confront many of the same marketing challenges as corporations. While businesses need to attract potential customers, universities need to entice prospective students. A prospect needs to be converted to a customer, while a potential student needs to enroll at the university. Once you are an active customer, the business needs to maintain and grow […]
  • Opinion: AI gives higher education opportunity to adapt - Brian Ray, Patricia Stoddard Dare and Joanne Goodell, Crain's Cleveland
    These AI systems offer new opportunities for educators to create sophisticated curricula tailored to individual student abilities and interests. At the same time, the powerful capabilities of LLM models challenge traditional teaching methods by allowing students to quickly complete assignments from research papers to computer code with little or no original effort. Orienting toward “authentic […]
  • Gemini 2.0: Our latest, most capable AI model yet - Google Blog
    Today, we’re announcing Gemini 2.0 — our most capable AI model yet, designed for the agentic era. Gemini 2.0 has new capabilities, like multimodal output with native image generation and audio output, and native use of tools including Google Search and Maps. We’re releasing an experimental version of Gemini 2.0 Flash, our workhorse model with […]
  • AI's Quantum Leap - Wes Roth, YouTube
    Willow is a state-of-the-art quantum chip that has achieved two major milestones. First, it can reduce errors exponentially as it scales up, a key challenge in quantum error correction. Second, it performed a standard benchmark computation in under 5 minutes that would take one of today's fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years. This accomplishment is known […]
  • Enterprise technology’s next chapter: Four gen AI shifts that will reshape business technology - James Kaplan, et al; McKinsey
    Our recent discussions with tech leaders across industries suggest that four emerging shifts are on the horizon as a result of gen AI, each with implications for how tech leaders will run their organizations. These include new patterns of work, architectural foundations, and organizational and cost structures that change both how teams interact with AI […]
  • Google unveils ‘mindboggling’ quantum computing chip - Robert Booth, the Guardian
    It measures just 4cm squared but it possesses almost inconceivable speed. Google has built a computing chip that takes just five minutes to complete tasks that would take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for some of the world’s fastest conventional computers to complete. That’s 10 septillion years, a number that far exceeds the age of our known universe and has […]
  • This is too easy – I just used Sora for the first time and it blew my mind - Lance Ulanoff, Tech Radar
    Sora, OpenAI's new AI video generation platform, which finally launched on Monday, is a surprisingly rich platform that offers simple tools for almost instantly generating shockingly realistic-looking videos. Even in my all-too-brief hands-on, I could see that Sora is about to change everything about video creation. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and company were wrapping up […]
  • How Are New AI Tools Changing ‘Learning Analytics’? - Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge
    For years educators have been trying to glean lessons about learners and the learning process from the data traces that students leave with every click in a digital textbook, learning management system or other online learning tool. It’s an approach known as “learning analytics.” These days, proponents of learning analytics are exploring how the advent […]
  • OpenAI wants to pair online courses with chatbots - Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch
    If OpenAI has its way, the next online course you take might have a chatbot component. Speaking at a fireside on Monday hosted by Coeus Collective, Siya Raj Purohit, a member of OpenAI's go-to-market team for education, said that OpenAI might explore ways to let e-learning instructors create custom "GPTs" that tie into online curriculums. […]
  • Semester Without End: An Idea Resurrected - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
    More than two decades ago, I advocated enabling students to follow the evolving developments and topics in the classes I taught through news blogs. I called the concept “semester without end.” Now, OpenAI is suggesting that custom GPTs be created to accompany classes, facilitating learning during the semester, extending learning on the topic “and let[ting] […]
  • College closures could increase sharply in the face of the demographic cliff - Ben Unglesbee, Highered Dive
    Researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia unveiled a new model that can predict college closures and the most at-risk institutions with a relatively high degree of accuracy, according to a recently released paper. The team forecast that in a worst-case scenario for the higher education sector — an abrupt 15% decline overall in […]
  • Sam Altman FINALLY Reveals the Truth About "the AGI moment", Elon Musk Lawsuit and Microsoft Rift - Wes Roth, YouTube
    Timeline for Artificial Superintelligence (ASI): Altman believes that ASI is surprisingly close, possibly within a few thousand days, and that we will have systems by 2025 that will shock even skeptics. Scaling Laws and AI Progress: Altman dismissed concerns about AI progress hitting a wall, stating that there are multiple frontiers for improvement, including compute, […]
  • "SOCRATIC AI by Google DeepMind Just BROKE LIMITS – Learning TOO FAST"- AI Revolution
    DeepMind is revolutionizing the field of AI with its innovative projects. They're developing "personality agents" that can analyze and understand human behavior with impressive accuracy, potentially transforming fields like mental health, marketing, and robotics. Another groundbreaking project, Socratic learning, allows AI systems to learn and evolve independently through self-play and the creation of new "language […]
  • No letup in financial pressure on colleges in 2025, Fitch says - Ben Unglesbee, Higher Ed Dive
    A declining body of first-year students, uncertain international enrollment and high costs are weighing on many institutions, the ratings agency said. In a Tuesday report, the credit rating agency said “uneven enrollment dynamics, rising competitive pressures and continuing margin pressures will challenge credit factors across the sector.” Added to those challenges are flat public funding, […]
  • Predictions 2025: Insights for Online & Professional Education - UPCEA
    As we look toward 2025, the landscape of higher education is poised for significant transformation driven by technological advancements, shifting demographics, and evolving economic realities. This series of predictions from UPCEA’s team of experts highlights key trends that will shape institutions and student experiences alike. From the rise of outsourcing in C-suite roles to the […]
  • The Manifesto for Teaching and Learning in a Time of Generative AI: A Critical Collective Stance to Better Navigate the Future -Aras Bozkurt, et al; Open Praxis
    This manifesto critically examines the unfolding integration of Generative AI (GenAI), chatbots, and algorithms into higher education, using a collective and thoughtful approach to navigate the future of teaching and learning. GenAI, while celebrated for its potential to personalize learning, enhance efficiency, and expand educational accessibility, is far from a neutral tool. Algorithms now shape […]
  • 5 behaviors that demonstrate highly effective leadership - Shirley Davis, Fast Company
    I’m a big believer that leaders are the thermostat in any organization—meaning they have the power to set the right temperature and create the right environment for how things are done and how people are treated. Here are five behaviors that matter the most for leaders to demonstrate accountability and make a real impact on […]
  • Micro-credentials create job-ready graduates: Report - Telangana Today
    India is leading the global shift toward skill-based education with 95 per cent of higher education leaders in the country agreeing that micro-credentials strengthen students’ career outcomes, according to Coursera’s Micro-Credentials Impact Report 2024 – India Edition. The micro-credentials are a certification of assessed learning that is additional, alternate, complementary or a formal component of […]
  • Alibaba researchers unveil Marco-o1, an LLM with advanced reasoning capabilities - Ben Dickson, Venture Beat
    Building on the success of o1 and the concept of LRMs, researchers at Alibaba have introduced Marco-o1, which enhances reasoning capabilities and tackles problems with open-ended solutions where clear standards and quantifiable rewards are absent. OpenAI o1 uses “inference-time scaling” to improve the model’s reasoning ability by giving it “time to think.” Basically, the model […]
  • The Evolution of Robots: The Blurring Lines Between People and Machines - Thomas Frey, Futurist Speaker
    As we delve into this future, the implications are profound. The ability to download one’s “personhood” into an advanced AI robot could redefine our concepts of mortality, identity, and continuity of life. Such a transfer would not only preserve an individual’s consciousness in a form that could potentially outlive the physical body but also enable […]

Other Curated News: 

News from UPCEA: 

Morning Education: HEA for the ‘Contemporary Learner’ (Politico)

Three online and higher education organizations offered recommendations to Congress today on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The Online Learning Consortium, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association and the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies write that a reauthorization of the law grounded…

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UPCEA And OLC Form Coalition To Advance The Interests Of Non-Traditional Learners

WASHINGTON, DC, and NEWBURYPORT, MA, Sept. 24, 2015 — The University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA) and the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) have formed a coalition to advance the interests of non-traditional (sometimes called “contemporary”) learners and the programs that support them. This partnership comes at a time of great…

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