GetSetUp, a virtual learning platform for older adults, recently released its 2025 Active Aging Report, which found older adults eager to learn, connect and take charge of their health and independence. But digital literacy remains a barrier — and an opportunity — for health providers and others, they said. The report shares insights gleaned from a national survey that GetSetUp conducted in 2024 among 465 older adults to explore digital confidence and technology adoption, health habits and wellness priorities, financial concerns and work readiness, emotional well-being and social connectedness, and attitudes toward aging in place.
Monday, December 8, 2025
AI is coming for your job, here’s the one move you need to make to stay employable and relevant in the job market - Manu Kaushik, Economic Times
Hart, who previously served as a technical advisor to Jeff Bezos at Amazon and took over as president and CEO of Coursera in February 2025, told CNBC Make It that students need to go beyond traditional degrees to stay viable in a rapidly changing employment landscape. “The advice that I give to my sons... is one of the best things that you can do is to augment your university degree with micro credentials specifically,” he said according to CNBC website. Micro credentials, short, targeted courses that certify specific skills, are gaining traction as companies deploy AI to handle more tasks traditionally assigned to junior employees. Hart said these add-ons are becoming critical as firms increasingly cite AI when laying off workers. Amazon cut 14,000 jobs this year as it doubled down on AI development. Salesforce eliminated 4,000 customer support roles, saying AI can handle roughly 40 percent of tasks performed at the company.
Restrictive policies manifest in US, Canada enrolment drop - Nathan M Greenfield, University World News
In this year’s Global Enrolment Benchmark Survey (GEBS), American colleges reported a 6% decline in international undergraduates, erasing the 6% increase in the 2024 GEBS. The 19% decline in masters students, by far the largest category of international students in the country, enrolled in the 201 American universities reporting, was more than three times the size of last year’s decline. Canadian numbers can be compared to a snowball going downhill. After last year’s decline of 27% for undergraduates reported in last year’s GEBS, Canadian universities reported a further 36% decline, making a cumulative decline since 2023 of 53%. The 35% decline in international graduate students follows on last year’s reported decline of 30%.
Sunday, December 7, 2025
Colleges Are Closing. Who Might Be Next? How machine learning can fill data gaps and help forecast the future - Robert Kelchen, Dubravka Ritter & Douglas Webber, Education Next
These simulations point to the precarious potential situation facing postsecondary education in the coming years, especially if the demographic cliff materializes in a moderate to severe fashion. While some of the estimated increases might seem small at the national level, they would be significant for the handful of localities predicted to experience college closures in a given year. It is important to reiterate that most institutions that close are somewhat smaller than average, with the median closed school enrolling a student body of about 1,389 full-time equivalent students several years prior to closure. That said, for institutions located in small towns, these colleges are still one of the largest employers in the region. This means that many (if not all) of these additional predicted closures are likely to be at the sorts of local institutions that are significant economic engines and act as community anchors.
How will AI transform teaching and learning at universities? - NAXN — nic newman, Medium
Robots will replace teachers by 2027. That’s the bold claim British education expert Anthony Seldon made in 2018. He may have been the first to put a date on it, but plenty of others are doubling down on the principle, such as Bill Gates, who believes that AI-powered chatbots will become as good as any human tutor, and Khan Academy’s founder Sal Khan, who opened his 2023 Ted Talk by arguing ‘we’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen’. When ChatGPT made its public debut two years ago, the CEO of OpenAI predicted that it ‘will eclipse the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the Internet revolution all put together’.
Bridging pedagogy and technology: a generative AI and IoT approach to transformative English language education - Zhongjie Li, Nature
English as a Second Language (ESL) education faces momentous challenges including restricted personalized feedback and scalability constraints in large classrooms. This study developed and assessed an innovative AI-driven oral assessment tool that incorporates generative artificial intelligence with Internet of Things (IoT) technology to make over adaptive learning environments for individual learners. The research used a mixed-methods strategy, developing the tool using datasets of L2Arctic and Libri-speech, also assessing it through both qualitative human validation including ESL teachers and metrics of quantitative performance. Key indicators of performance constituted learning rate optimization, model accuracy and proportion balancing of dataset. The results have demonstrated that the G-ASR AI tool has gained 94.7% precision accuracy on datasets of native speaker and 86.6% on datasets of non-native speaker, with optimum performance by self-correction feedback and 60% AI to 40% ratio of teacher interaction. Human validation crosswise 24 ESL teachers and 240 students discovered large effect sizes (Cohen’s d > 1.6) crossways learning outcomes, specifically self-regulation abilities (d = 2.14) and metacognitive knowledge (d = 1.98).
Saturday, December 6, 2025
AI is coming for your work, expert warns university staff - Nic Mitchell, University World News
With management consultants predicting that up to one-third of work done today will be automated in the next five years – and universities under pressure to cut costs and do more with less – artificial intelligence offers a cheaper and more efficient way to keep higher education institutions running smoothly, claims an international higher education strategy expert. Instead of trying to fight to protect traditional roles and jobs, Dr Ant Bagshaw, deputy chief executive of the Australian Public Policy Institute in Canberra, Australia, urges universities to embrace the unstoppable march of generative AI and accept that it is “more harmful to keep people in jobs that could be done better by robots”.
Micro-credentials: From lifelong learning to lifelong recognition - Karen MacGregor
Today’s story about micro-credentials is really about their recognition, says Simone Ravaioli, a leading global credentials expert. “If we spent the last 30 years working on learning, the next 30-plus years will be focused on recognition. In a sense, the narrative is shifting from lifelong learning to lifelong recognition.” Ravaioli was speaking at a University World News-ABET webinar on “Recognising micro-credentials: Lessons from the world’s best”, held on 20 November. It was the fourth in a series of webinars that are combining high-level thinking with hands-on advice that will help people to navigate higher education in a time of change and uncertainty.
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20251128100209342
The Cambrian Explosion of Micro-Credentials - Bryan Penprase, Forbes
Higher education stands at an inflection point. Traditional four-year degrees often disappoint employers seeking graduates with job-ready skills, and students are eagerly seeking more flexible academic programs requiring less time and money. New micro-credentials offerings from top tech companies and universities are filling this gap – providing modular, flexible, and low-cost alternatives to the traditional college degree. The proliferation of thousands of these new programs around the world has created something of a “Cambrian explosion” of academic programs, analogous to the time in geologic history when billions of new life forms 530 million years ago.
Friday, December 5, 2025
Poll: In a dramatic shift, Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost - Ben Kamisar, NBC
Americans have grown sour on one of the longtime key ingredients of the American dream. Almost two-thirds of registered voters say that a four-year college degree isn’t worth the cost, according to a new NBC News poll, a dramatic decline over the last decade. Just 33% agree a four-year college degree is “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime,” while 63% agree more with the concept that it’s “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.”
Change is changing: How to meet the challenge of radical reinvention - McKinsey
The core task of leadership is managing change—seeing new realities and driving adaptation. To reinvent the organization, leaders must rethink traditional tools and master a more complex level of change. When change becomes “everything, everywhere, all at once,” it’s not surprising that employees feel worn out. The average employee now experiences ten planned change programs a year, a fivefold increase from a decade ago.1 At the same time, engagement and health measures have fallen, support for change programs has dropped, and employee disconnect with leaders has grown (Exhibit 1). But the pace of change is not going to slow down; in fact, it is likely to accelerate. Driven by geopolitical, societal, technological, and financial shifts, the changes hitting most companies today are far reaching, often creating ripple effects that bring even more change.
University of Utah launches ChatGPT Edu campuswide - Logan Stefanich, KSL
The University of Utah last week launched OpenAI's ChatGPT Edu - a version of the AI tool specifically designed for higher education and securely deployed for university use - across its campus community. Parashar said he sees the rollout impacting many aspects of what students, staff and faculty do at the U. "I think people will be very creative in how they use it in whatever they do. The idea here is to help them amplify (and) accelerate what they do. Whether they are students using it to aid their educational processes, professors using it to help them teach, administrators using it to be able to automate a lot of the processes that they have and their workflows, (or) researchers using it to do research to be able to complement other tools that they use in exploring literature or doing things like that," Parashar said.
Thursday, December 4, 2025
OpenAI Unveils Group Chats to Bring People Into the Same Conversation - IBL News
OpenAI is rolling out the group chats feature globally, allowing people to collaborate with ChatGPT in a single shared conversation. Up to 20 people can participate in a group chat. The company’s goal is to make ChatGPT more social by turning it into a shared space for collaboration and interaction with others. Friends, family members, and co-workers can share space to plan, make decisions, or work through ideas and content together. Group chats are separate from private conversations, and users’ personal ChatGPT memory is not shared. To start a group chat, the user taps the people icon in the top right corner of any new or existing chat. When adding someone to an existing chat, ChatGPT creates a copy of the conversation as a new group chat, keeping the original conversation separate. Users can invite others by sharing a link with one to twenty people, and anyone in the group can share that link to bring others in.
Morgan State could one day run entirely on AI - Ellie Wolfe, The Banner
Grading assignments. Advising students. Sorting through important files. These tasks, and countless more, might not have to be done by employees at Morgan State University anymore. That’s thanks to Obsidian, a new secure artificial intelligence system created by leaders at the Northeast Baltimore university. “The university will learn from itself,” said Timothy Summers, Morgan State’s vice president for information technology and chief information officer. “It’ll adapt in real time and make smarter decisions at every level.”
Exploring trust in generative AI for higher education institutions: a systematic literature review focused on educators - Ana Lelescu, et al; Nature
Although Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) offers transformative opportunities for higher education, its adoption by educators remains limited, primarily due to trust concerns. This systematic literature review aims to synthesise peer-reviewed research conducted between 2019 and August 2024 on the factors influencing educators’ trust in GenAI within higher education institutions. Using PRISMA 2020 guidelines, this study identified 37 articles at the intersection of trust factors, technology adoption, and GenAI impact in higher education from educators’ perspectives. Our analysis reveals that existing AI trust frameworks fail to capture the pedagogical and institutional dimensions specific to higher education contexts. We propose a new conceptual model focused on three dimensions affecting educators’ trust: (1) individual factors (demographics, pedagogical beliefs, sense of control, and emotional experience), (2) institutional strategies (leadership support, policies, and training support), and (3) the socio-ethical context of their interaction. Our findings reveal a significant gap in institutional leadership support, whereas professional development and training were the most frequently mentioned strategies.
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
Oregon State’s new AI fundamentals microcredentials prepare learners for an AI-driven future - Tyler Hansen, Educational Ventures Oregon State
Oregon State University is turning artificial intelligence breakthroughs into accessible, short-form learning opportunities through the launch of its AI fundamentals microcredentials, a new collection of interdisciplinary credentials available to all OSU students and learners everywhere. These offerings bridge Oregon State’s strengths in research, applied learning and ethics, empowering learners to understand, question and apply AI in a subject of interest in ways that are technically sound and socially responsible.
Agentic AI explained: When machines don’t just chat, but act - McKinsey
Three McKinsey experts explain how agentic AI could reshape workflows, decision-making, and how humans and machines collaborate. Agentic AI - the latest wave of artificial intelligence—doesn’t just generate text or code. It takes action. Whereas early large language models (LLMs) could answer questions or summarize information, agentic systems can now perform complex tasks independently, autonomously trigger workflows, and collaborate with other agents. These new capabilities mark an important milestone in AI’s evolution—one that, according to McKinsey senior fellow Michael Chui, could see it fade into the background of everyday life, much like the internet has. “Maybe within 12 or 24 months we’re actually going to stop talking about AI, and not because it won’t exist anymore,” Chui says. “It’ll just be a capability that we expect machines to do.”
A leader’s guide to the future of learning at work - McKinsey
The race to embrace AI in the corporate world means that people at all levels of an organization urgently need to build new tech skills and knowledge. In turn, many companies are accelerating their learning and development programs to help executives and employees keep up with the pace of change. This dynamic landscape presents an opportunity for chief learning officers (CLOs) to reimagine the future of learning in the workplace. This week, we look at how CLOs can help organizations make learning a more fundamental part of the work experience and create cultures of continuous development.
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
How AI and data analytics are transforming higher education in 2025 - AZ Big Media
Artificial intelligence is reshaping how universities teach, assess, and operate. Imagine a classroom where every student receives personalized lessons, where educators can predict challenges before exams, and where every academic decision is driven by data. For decades, higher education relied on intuition and tradition. But as digital learning expands, institutions are turning to AI and data analytics to make education more efficient, inclusive, and results-driven. These technologies aren’t replacing educators; they’re empowering them to teach smarter and support students in new, impactful ways.
AI is changing job roles in higher education - Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar, Sunday Guardian
Today, most universities handle a huge amount of data. They use it to manage student admissions, exam processes, academic records, degree checks, and official reports. Artificial Intelligence has become an essential component of the higher education system over the last few years. The 2024 Times Higher Education survey found that nearly 60% of university professors now use AI tools in their work. UNESCO recently said AI is “changing how teachers teach faster than any education reform in decades.” We should now ask: Will Indian universities watch this change happen, or will they help shape the future of AI-enabled education nationwide? The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 seeks to expand access, strengthen research, support internationalisation, and create world-class institutions. However, we can achieve these goals only when our universities and colleges prepare for AI-integrated academic work. Those who adapt will thrive. Those who resist will fall behind.
The more that people use AI, the more likely they are to overestimate their own abilities - Drew Turney Live Science
Researchers found that AI flattens the bell curve of a common principle in human psychology, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, giving us all the illusion of competence. When asked to evaluate how good we are at something, we tend to get that estimation completely wrong. It's a universal human tendency, with the effect seen most strongly in those with lower levels of ability. Called the Dunning-Kruger effect, after the psychologists who first studied it, this phenomenon means people who aren't very good at a given task are overconfident, while people with high ability tend to underestimate their skills. It's often revealed by cognitive tests — which contain problems to assess attention, decision-making, judgment and language.
But now, scientists at Finland's Aalto University (together with collaborators in Germany and Canada) have found that using artificial intelligence (AI) all but removes the Dunning-Kruger effect — in fact, it almost reverses it.
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