Biggest barrier to skill development is cost, survey finds - Laura Ascione, eCampus News

 Employees worry that digital credentials may be costly to obtain, but working while earning a credential is particularly important to career changers. These were some of the global findings from a new study administered by Morning Consult and commissioned by IBM, based on more than 14,000 interviews of students, people seeking new jobs, and people seeking to change careers located across 13 countries. Respondents also cited concerns that career options may not be available to them. These findings contrast with market data that employers are investing in the reskilling of their current workforce to keep pace with rapid advances in technology and stay relevant in the modern, digital economy. “Technology training can have a transformational effect on a person’s life,” said Justina Nixon-Saintil, IBM Chief Impact Officer. 

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2023/03/15/biggest-barrier-to-skill-development-is-cost-survey-finds/

Building a Microcredential Program Framework to Meet the Needs of a Changing Academic Landscape - Justin Louder, Campus Technology

 From curriculum to technology concerns, consider these essentials for creating alternative education opportunities at your institution.  Call them badges, short courses, certificates, microcredentials or nanodegrees, but no matter the name, these short, focused academic programs are a higher education hot topic. Just as learners are looking to reskill or upskill in the face of the changing employment market, institutions are looking for new education pathways to counteract shrinking traditional enrollment numbers. Short microcredential programs allow students to gain new skills without committing to a full degree program and they are an avenue for institutions looking to increase enrollment, boost revenue, and most importantly meet the needs of today's learner.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2023/03/15/building-a-microcredential-program-framework-to-meet-the-needs-of-a-changing-academic-landscape.aspx

6 Ways Higher Education is Celebrating Women’s History Month - Peggy Bresnick, Fierce Education

Higher education institutions are celebrating Women’s History Month with diverse and innovative programs and events that recognize accomplishments by women in every area of life and look at and look at barriers women continue to face – and discuss ways to overcome obstacles. Here are some of the ways colleges and universities are honoring Women’s History Month in March 2023.

https://www.fierceeducation.com/leadership/6-ways-higher-education-celebrating-womens-history-month

Higher education accountability: Measuring costs, benefits, and financial value - Katharine Meyer, Brookings

The U.S. Department of Education recently requested feedback on a policy proposal to create a list of “low-financial-value” higher education programs. The Department hopes the list will highlight programs that do not provide substantial financial benefits to students relative to the costs incurred, in hopes of (1) steering students away from those programs and (2) applying pressure on institutions on the list to improve the value of those programs—either on the cost or the benefit side. 

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2023/03/14/higher-education-accountability-measuring-costs-benefits-and-financial-value/

How does ChatGPT work? - David Gewirtz, ZD Net

 ChatGPT, by contrast, provides a response based on the context and intent behind a user's question. You can't, for example, ask Google to write a story or ask Wolfram Alpha to write a code module, but ChatGPT can do these sorts of things. Fundamentally, Google's power is the ability to do enormous database lookups and provide a series of matches. Wolfram Alpha's power is the ability to parse data-related questions and perform calculations based on those questions. ChatGPT's power is the ability to parse queries and produce fully-fleshed out answers and results based on most of the world's digitally-accessible text-based information -- at least information that existed as of its time of training prior to 2021.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-does-chatgpt-work/

Seven steps for successfully introducing adaptive learning - Times Higher Education

Personalising a student’s learning is a complex enough task at the best of times, but when large groups of students are involved it becomes even more challenging. Fortunately, nowadays, there are several adaptive platforms - including Realize It and CogBooks - that, through data analytics and interaction with the content, allow teachers to generate learning paths that adjust to the learning needs of each student. Here, we will share how to successfully implement an adaptive learning strategy, based on what we have learned from doing so in a pilot across four face-to-face courses with 32 professors and 700 students.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/seven-steps-successfully-introducing-adaptive-learning

How to make ChatGPT provide sources and citations - David Gewirtz, ZD Net

Ask ChatGPT to provide sources: This is where a bit of prompt engineering comes in. A good starting point is with this query: Please provide sources for the previous answer. I've found that this often provides offline sources, books, papers, etc. The problem with offline sources is you can't check their veracity. But it's a starting point. A better query is this: Please provide URL sources - This specifically tells ChatGPT that you want clickable links to sources. You can also tweak this up by asking for a specific quantity of sources, although your mileage may vary in terms of how many you get back: Please provide 10 URL sources.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-make-chatgpt-provide-sources-and-citations/

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Foxx? - Katherine Knott, Inside Higher Ed

The longtime Republican congresswoman sees an opportunity to finally reauthorize the Higher Education Act of 1965 in her second stint as leader of the House education committee and is pledging oversight of the Biden administration. Representative Virginia Foxx is planning to leverage the decline in public perception of higher education to usher in a new era of stronger accountability for the nation’s colleges and universities in her role as chairwoman of the House education committee. This is “exactly the right time” to reauthorize the Higher Education Act of 1965, Foxx said in a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed. The last reauthorization was in 2008, and the law is supposed to be renewed every five years. 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/03/09/foxx-back-charge-pledges-oversight-stronger-accountability

Online Learning Technologies: 5 Transformative Trends - Matthew Lynch, TechEdvocate

The use of online learning technologies is becoming more popular each year. These tools can be used to help students learn in a more efficient and effective way. Here are five transformative trends that are happening with online learning technologies:

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/online-learning-technologies-5-transformative-trends/

3 ways higher ed can reduce the workforce skills gap - Laura Ascione, eCampus News

Many of today’s workplace-based issues arise from a failure to view postsecondary education from a holistic standpoint, says Amrit Ahluwalia, senior director of content and strategic insights at Modern Campus. “These gaps exist because different education providers tend to focus strongly on specific learning outcomes, instead of thinking holistically about a learner’s journey,” Ahluwalia said. “Individuals typically enroll in education programs to get the skills they need to be successful at work. But they also need a pathway or plan that’s going to help them continue to advance and grow over the course of their career. For universities, this means ensuring students are learning critical soft skills—but also how to apply them in real world scenarios. For colleges and bootcamps, it means ensuring students are building the soft skills they will need over the long term while helping them develop technical competencies that are in-demand right now.”

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2023/02/22/3-ways-higher-ed-can-reduce-the-workforce-skills-gap/

How to gain buy-in for digital course materials - Raj Kaji, eCampus News

The COVID-19 pandemic may be remembered as a breakthrough moment for the acceptance of digital course materials. A new survey shows that the share of faculty members who agreed that “students learn better from print materials than they do from digital” has fallen to 33 percent, down from 43 percent just two years ago. Indeed, as college campuses closed across the country and learning went remote, the use of online textbooks and other technologies sharply rose, while the use of traditional print textbooks decreased. By the fall of 2020, spending on digital course materials had risen by 23 percent.  Even so, the adoption of digital course materials — and faculty views around their impact — remains mixed.

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2023/03/06/gain-buy-in-digital-course-materials/

Could nearly half of cybersecurity leaders leave their roles by 2025? - Laura Ascione, eCampus News

By 2025, nearly half of cybersecurity leaders will change jobs, 25 percent for different roles entirely due to multiple work-related stressors, according to new predictions by Gartner, Inc.  “Cybersecurity professionals are facing unsustainable levels of stress,” said Deepti Gopal, Director Analyst, Gartner. “CISOs are on the defense, with the only possible outcomes that they don’t get hacked or they do. The psychological impact of this directly affects decision quality and the performance of cybersecurity leaders and their teams.”

https://www.ecampusnews.com/2023/03/08/could-nearly-half-of-cybersecurity-leaders-leave-their-roles-by-2025/

The Emphasis of Workforce Readiness in Higher Education - Sallie Kay Janes, Modern Campus

With the talent gap in the industry continuing to grow, the need for workforce education has never been greater. Institutions have to reshape their programming and processes to adapt to this workforce readiness framework. On this episode, Sallie Kay Janes, Associate Vice Chancellor of Continuing and Professional Development at San Jacinto College, discusses the evolution of non-credit programming and how to create a connection between the credit and non-credit sides of the institution.

https://moderncampus.com/podcast/episode-eightyseven.html

You Don’t Have to Know How to Code AI; You Have to Learn How to Use It - Wally Boston

Ignore AI at your risk. In many ways, my quick acceptance and learning of pc-based spreadsheets accelerated my career. The tools allowed me to turnaround work faster and be assigned to engagements that allowed me to showcase my financial acumen. I also learned about computers; after all, the first Apples and PCs required you to take them apart and swap out items for increased memory, new processors, new hard drives, etc. I think we are poised for a similar awakening with large language model AI systems.  I read three articles related to AI use in education this week. [by Paul LaBlanc, Ray Schroeder, Sal Khan] I’ll provide a few summaries of each and a conclusion at the end.

https://wallyboston.com/you-dont-have-to-know-how-to-code-ai-you-have-to-learn-how-to-use-it/

AI inventions: Policy options and a path forward - John Villasenor, Brookings

In a law review article published in late February in the Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal, I propose that AI inventions should be patentable under a broadened view of conception, with inventorship attributed to the people who use AI tools as extensions of their mind. In the article, I provide four options for addressing AI inventions. The first is to deem them unpatentable on the grounds that patenting them would require listing a non-human inventor in violation of the Patent Act. As I explained in an August 2022 TechTank post, the Federal Circuit’s decision that month in Thaler v. Vidal made clear that the definition in the Patent Act of “inventor” requires that inventors be human. Therefore, under current patent law, naming AI systems as inventors isn’t possible. But that shouldn’t be the end of the story. After all, AI has enormous potential in relation to inventions, and U.S. patent policy should provide a mechanism to harness the power of AI to enhance innovation.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2023/03/06/ai-inventions-policy-options-and-a-path-forward/

Sally Helgesen shares tools for achieving workplace inclusion - Christine Y. Chen, McKinsey

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Christine Y. Chen chats with Sally Helgesen about her new book, Rising Together: How We Can Bridge Divides and Create a More Inclusive Workplace (Hachette Book Group, February 2023). In this follow-up to her book How Women Rise, Helgesen expands on her call for workplace inclusion by sharing the behavioral and communication tools everyone can adopt to effectively connect across cultural barriers. An edited version of the conversation follows.

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/author-talks-sally-helgesen-shares-tools-for-achieving-workplace-inclusion

More skills are needed to help AI plug skills gaps - Joe McKendrick, ZDnet

AI is potentially a powerful tool for keeping talent on board and engaged. But talent is needed to make things happen. Artificial intelligence -- and related forms of high-level automation and analytics -- have become the tool of choice for helping businesses plug their ever-persistent talent gaps. The catch is, however, businesses are struggling to find the skills necessary to identify, build, and deploy the AI and automation needed to resolve their skills shortages. AI is potentially a powerful tool for keeping talent on board and engaged, For example, Kshitij Dayal senior VP at Legion points to AI-driven capabilities, such as AI-powered workforce management and demand forecasting, scheduling agility through better workforce management, and, importantly, fostering a positive work environment by increasing knowledgeability about employee wants and needs. Automating tasks with AI, or augmenting human labor, means greater productivity across the board. Acute skills shortages are better addressed, while workers and managers can concentrate on higher-level tasks. 

https://www.zdnet.com/article/more-skills-needed-to-help-ai-plug-skills-gaps/

Chat with Any PDF - ChatPDF.com

This is the age of the AI revolution! Intelligence will be free and ubiquitous soon, restructuring our society and enabling new possibilities of interaction. With ChatPDF, your documents are becoming intelligent! Just talk to your PDF file as if it were a human with perfect understanding of the content.It works great to quickly extract information from large PDF files. Try talking to manuals, essays, legal contracts, books or research papers. ChatPDF can not yet understand images in PDFs and might struggle with questions that require understanding more than a few paragraphs at the same time. The PDF is analyzed first to create a semantic index of every paragraph. When asking a question the relevant paragraphs are presented to the ChatGPT API. Your data is saved in a secure cloud storage and deleted after 7 days.

https://www.chatpdf.com/

The Enduring Grip of the Gender Pay Gap - RAKESH KOCHHAR, Pew Research

The gender pay gap – the difference between the earnings of men and women – has barely closed in the United States in the past two decades. In 2022, American women typically earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. That was about the same as in 2002, when they earned 80 cents to the dollar. The slow pace at which the gender pay gap has narrowed this century contrasts sharply with the progress in the preceding two decades: In 1982, women earned just 65 cents to each dollar earned by men.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-enduring-grip-of-the-gender-pay-gap/

K-12 enrollment lagged projections by 2% in 2021, revealing college pipeline cracks - Rick Seltzer, Higher Ed Dive

The number of students in public K-12 schools in fall 2021 fell 2% below projected levels, meaning about 833,000 fewer seats were filled and a higher education sector already bracing for an enrollment cliff now faces heightened risks. Reports of students struggling in class amid the COVID-19 pandemic could also foreshadow the number of high school graduates falling more sharply after 2025 than was previously expected, according to a new report from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. 

https://www.highereddive.com/news/WICHE-K12-enrollment-lagged-pandemic-college-pipleline/643899/

7 ways ChatGPT can help you hack your productivity - Chris Smith, BGR

Generative AI is still in its infancy, as ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing-ChatGPT are far from complete, finished products that can act as full-time virtual assistants. The chatbots make mistakes and behave erratically if you know which buttons to push to trigger them. But while the companies will fix all of the accuracy and “personality” issues, you can still use ChatGPT and similar products to get things done. The chatbot can help improve your productivity. The following tricks might help you speed up some of the tasks you must handle regularly. Moreover, these tricks will teach you to think outside of the box and try to apply the ChatGP power to different daily routines.

https://bgr.com/tech/7-ways-chatgpt-can-help-you-hack-your-productivity/

Experts predict how AI will energize cybersecurity in 2023 and beyond - Louis Columbus, Venture Beat

Attackers are using ChatGPT to refine malware, personalize phishing emails and fine-tune algorithms designed to steal privileged access credentials. As Shishir Singh, CTO of cybersecurity at BlackBerry notes: “It’s been well documented that people with malicious intent are testing the waters, but over this year, we expect to see hackers get a much better handle on how to use ChatGPT successfully for nefarious purposes; whether as a tool to write better mutable malware or as an enabler to bolster their ‘skillset.’ Both cyber pros and hackers will continue to look into how they can utilize it best. Time will tell who’s more effective.”

https://venturebeat.com/security/experts-predict-how-ai-will-energize-cybersecurity-in-2023-and-beyond/

We need graduates who can take new approaches to problems - Nita Temmerman, University World News

The challenges facing graduates now and into the future are complex. There are social, cultural, economic and environmental demands that will call for graduates who can confidently apply critical reasoning and creative thinking to these challenges. These are the types of graduates needed, namely those who help to advance society positively – graduates who have practised creative thinking and can question, take a new approach to existing problems, and trial and evaluate new concepts and ideas. And universities will need to respond accordingly. A quote attributed to Einstein sums up these principles well: “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20230224100857341

Why higher ed needs to get on board with micro-credentials - Alcino Donadel, University Business

With alternative and non-degree credentials becoming ever more appealing to employers, colleges and universities are in the perfect position to corner the market.  A new study focusing on employers’ perspectives on micro-credentials reveals that while a strong majority of them believe it boosts a prospective hire’s value, not enough colleges and universities are capitalizing on it.  More than 70% of respondents agreed that job applicants with non-degree or alternative credentials have increased the past two years and those hires helped their organization fill an existing skill gap (74%) and improved the quality of their workforce (73%). It’s no wonder, then, that 71% affirmed that their organization is becoming more accepting of non-degree or alternative credentials in lieu of traditional four-year degrees.

https://universitybusiness.com/why-higher-ed-needs-to-get-on-board-with-micro-credentials/

How Americans view emerging uses of artificial intelligence, including programs to generate text or art - CARY FUNK, ALEC TYSON AND BRIAN KENNEDY, Pew Research

A new Pew Research Center survey explores public views on nine specific AI applications that are currently in use or in the advanced stages of development, with implications for fields ranging from agriculture and medicine to news reporting and the visual arts. While public awareness of these AI applications is limited, the survey finds that Americans make clear distinctions about the value they see from these developments.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/02/22/how-americans-view-emerging-uses-of-artificial-intelligence-including-programs-to-generate-text-or-art/

Generative AI Is Coming For the Lawyers - Chris Stokel-Walker, Wired

The rise of AI and its potential to disrupt the legal industry has been forecast multiple times before. But the rise of the latest wave of generative AI tools, with ChatGPT at its forefront, has those within the industry more convinced than ever. “I think it is the beginning of a paradigm shift,” says Wakeling. “I think this technology is very suitable for the legal industry.” Generative AI is having a cultural and commercial moment, being touted as the future of search, sparking legal disputes over copyright, and causing panic in schools and universities. The technology, which uses large datasets to learn to generate pictures or text that appear natural, could be a good fit for the legal industry, which relies heavily on standardized documents and precedents.

https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-generative-ai-is-coming-for-the-lawyers/

Employers value microcredentials but don’t know how to assess their quality - Natalie Schwartz, Higher Ed Dive

Although a majority of surveyed employers say they value alternative credentials, many also harbor concerns over assessing the quality of education and understanding the skills and competencies they represent. That’s according to a recent survey of 510 employers from the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, also known as UPCEA, and Collegis Education, a technology services provider for colleges. Despite their concerns, 23% of respondents said the greatest benefit alternative credentials provide are giving workers real-world experience.

https://www.highereddive.com/news/employers-microcredentials-alternative-credentials-quality/643340/

How DAOs Could Bring Organizational Trust and Transparency - Kevin Werbach, Wharton Business Daily

Decentralized autonomous organizations -- DAOs -- hold much promise, but practitioners and governments must be aware of risks, says Wharton’s Kevin Werbach, co-author of a DAO Toolkit that was released at this year’s World Economic Forum.  “There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of these DAOs that have been created with many billions of dollars of digital assets in their treasuries,” Werbach noted during a recent interview with the Wharton Business Daily radio show on SiriusXM. “It raises all kinds of fascinating questions about what it means to have an organization that’s decentralized and is on a blockchain, where people may never meet each other, where they try and govern it using votes based on tokens.”

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/wharton-business-daily-podcast/how-daos-could-bring-organizational-trust-and-transparency/

Can online oral exams prevent cheating? - Temesgen Kifle , Anthony Jacobs, Times Higher Ed

Considering the fairness issues with online proctoring technologies, some teachers opt to use online oral exams to deter cheating and verify student identity. In this article, we share our experience with an online oral exam that was used as student-identity-verified assessment (Siva) last year and lessons we learned.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/can-online-oral-exams-prevent-cheating

15 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Said People Who Know What They're Talking About Don't Need PowerPoint. Research Shows He Was Right - Jeff Haden, Inc.

Every week, he gathered his executive team to kick around ideas without a formal agenda. Every Wednesday afternoon, he did the same with Apple's marketing and advertising team. No presentations. No slide shows. No formal agendas. As Isaacson quotes Jobs: "I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint."

https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/15-years-ago-steve-jobs-said-people-who-know-what-theyre-talking-about-dont-need-powerpoint-research-shows-he-was-right.html

Why universities need to understand the value of carers - Amy Zile, Rebecca Sanderson and Rachel Spacey, University World News

Students with caring responsibilities may be less able to engage with their institutions in the way that universities would like, but little attention is paid to how the students themselves would like to engage and why. Asynchronous learning can provide freedom to focus on family, self and care – all things that are natural human desires and responsibilities to balance. Students who provide care are preposterously under-represented in university processes, policies and decisions, and this is not for a lack of ideas, experiences or feedback they would like to share.

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20230214074542959