Online: Trending Now
Unique biweekly insights and news review from Ray Schroeder, Senior Fellow at UPCEA.
A Few Recent Developments That Shine a Light on the Path of AI in Higher Ed
As I write this at the dawn of 2025, I believe a scan of a few of the most recent developments in generative AI in higher education helps to illuminate the path this technology will take in the coming year. I publish a number of daily news update blogs for UPCEA, the Online and Professional…
Semester Without End: An Idea Resurrected
It was more than two decades ago that I was advocating the concept of enabling students to continue to follow the evolving developments and topics in the classes I taught through news blogs offered to support the learning in class. I called the concept, “Semester without End.” Now, OpenAI is suggesting that custom GPTs be…
Higher Education in 2025: AGI Agents to Displace People
The new year may bring a host of virtual assistants and administrative staff to higher education. They will begin as assistants to humans, then over time they will evolve into autonomous AI staff members. The winds of change in our field are rapidly converging, as we discussed in the previous edition of “Online: Trending Now.” The…
Winds of Change in Higher Ed to Become a Hurricane in 2025
A number of factors are converging to create a huge storm of change in higher education this coming year. Generative AI (GenAI) advances, massive federal policy shifts, broad societal economic changes, and the demographic cliff combine to create uncertainty today and change tomorrow. What are the changes we can predict today, and how can we…
Here Come the AI Agents!
Anthropic last month took the lead in providing early access to basic AI agents for the masses. This is a huge leap forward from the chatbots that have dominated early Generative AI (GenAI) up until today. Anthropic offers the new function that enables its Sonnet version to control your computer. “Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the…
Embodied AI
We may be just months away from an influx of embodied AI robots (EAI). Those are, in many cases, humanoid bots powered by autonomous AI. Generative AI (GenAI) continues to advance with reasoning power, competing with Ph.D.-level knowledge in math and several of the science fields. We are beginning to see autonomous agents that can…
Ray Schroeder is Professor Emeritus, Associate Vice Chancellor for Online Learning at the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) and Senior Fellow at UPCEA. Each year, Ray publishes and presents nationally on emerging topics in online and technology-enhanced learning. Ray’s social media publications daily reach more than 12,000 professionals. He is the inaugural recipient of the A. Frank Mayadas Online Leadership Award, recipient of the University of Illinois Distinguished Service Award, the United States Distance Learning Association Hall of Fame Award, and the American Journal of Distance Education/University of Wisconsin Wedemeyer Excellence in Distance Education Award 2016.