Online: Trending Now
Unique biweekly insights and news review from Ray Schroeder, Senior Fellow at UPCEA.
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…
ChatGPT-4o Shows ‘Friendly’ Behavior
The app initiates personalized conversations and offers responses without a prompt. This signals a shift toward agentic AI, where models act more like colleagues. Perhaps this was merely a move to increase engagement with the OpenAI GPT-4o app. Or perhaps this model of AI is getting a boost in using contextual knowledge. Then again, OpenAI reported…
A Near Future Vision of AI in Higher Ed
The state-of-art of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) is changing at lightning speed. Advances come by the hour, not just by the day. How might this play out in higher ed? As Senior Fellow at UPCEA, the online and professional education association, and Professor Emeritus from the University of Illinois Springfield, I am fortunate to…
AI is Already Advancing Higher Education
The potential for Generative AI (GenAI) to further advance, enhance, and expand higher education in the future is enormous. Meanwhile, few realize how AI already is improving what we do today in a myriad of ways. Let me begin by noting that I have used GenAI tools to assist in ideation and the search for…
Upskilling, Reskilling, or Retiring: Responding to the Advent of AI
The anticipated replacement of human workers with Generative AI (GenAI) apps has begun. Earlier this year IBM announced about 8,000 layoffs amid an AI-powered initiative. As reported by Byte magazine, Cisco is among a group of other tech companies that most recently announced layoffs: “Despite tech conglomerate Cisco posting $10.3 billion in profits last year,…
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.