Professional, Continuing, and Online Education Update by UPCEA
Daily updates of news, research and trends by UPCEA
Click on the URL at the end of posting to visit the relevant article or website mentioned in the post.
Friday, May 1, 2026
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities - Sarah Perez, TechCrunch
College Students Are More Polarized Than Ever. Can AI Help? - Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed
This is the fastest-growing job for young workers, LinkedIn says - Mary Cunningham, CBS News
As the rise of artificial intelligence stirs anxiety over the technology taking people's jobs, AI is also opening pathways to new careers, according to LinkedIn. The fastest-growing job title for young workers on the networking platform is "AI engineer," a recent report from the company found. LinkedIn analyzed millions of member profiles to determine the number of entry-level workers hired over the last three years and the roles they were hired to fill. "It's measuring momentum for these job titles," said Kory Kantenga, the head of economics, Americas, at LinkedIn. "Companies are just gorging on AI talent."
Thursday, April 30, 2026
AI fears drive some young adults to grad school — ‘people shelter in higher education,’ expert says - Jessica Dickler, CNBC
Learn essential AI skills - Google Skills Lab
Students are speeding through their online degrees in weeks, alarming educators - Todd Wallack, Washington Post
It takes most college students at least four years to earn a bachelor’s degree. Christie Williams finished in three months. The North Carolina human resources executive spent two months racking up credits through web tutorials after work in 2024, then raced through 11 online classes at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in four weeks. Later that year, she went back to earn her master’s — in just five weeks. The two degrees cost a total of just over $4,000. Many U.S. schools have been experimenting with ways to speed up traditional college programs to reduce the burgeoning cost and help students move into the workforce faster. Some offer three-year bachelor’s programs, reducing the number of credits needed for a diploma by one quarter. Many more allow students to enroll in college classes while still in high school.But the breakneck pace of the fastest online programs concerns some academics, who say there is a big difference in what students can learn in weeks or months compared with three or more years.
Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Is Your AI Ethical, Human-Centered and Pro-Social? - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
Rewired 2.0: How leading companies are (still) winning with AI - McKinsey
Provost's office funds 24 transformative initiatives - Rob Schweers, Iowa State University
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
New microcredentials launched to meet workforce and adult learner needs - University of Southern Indiana
As AI pushes students to reconsider majors, universities struggle to adapt - Lexi Lonas Cochran, the Hill
Nation’s first Online J.D. Program graduates share special camaraderie at St. Mary’s Law - Nathaniel Miller, St. Mary's University
Monday, April 27, 2026
How a master's in AI can prepare you to lead in business - Chloë Lane, GMAC
We have months left... in the Wake of Mythos and Glasswing Response - Wes Roth, YouTube
The emergence of Anthropic’s Mythos model marks a significant shift in the AI landscape, particularly regarding cybersecurity. As Wes Roth details, the model possesses an "emergent" ability to autonomously identify and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in codebases that were previously thought to be secure. This creates a dangerous asymmetry: while AI can now find flaws at a massive scale for a fraction of the cost—roughly $50 in compute for a complex exploit—our human-led capacity to patch and harden these systems has not increased at the same velocity. The resulting "break stuff" era suggests that the traditional equilibrium of the cybersecurity arms race has been disrupted, leaving global digital infrastructure potentially vulnerable. In response to these risks, the primary recommendation is a shift toward rigorous digital hygiene and "hardened" security measures. With the potential for AI-driven exploits to compromise entire operating systems or cloud services, users are encouraged to maintain air-gapped, physical backups of their most critical data and transition to hardware-based security keys. [Summary provided in part by Gemini 3 Fast]
Students are becoming AI fluent. Universities aren’t. - James L. Norrie, University Business
Friday, April 24, 2026
Economists Starting to Admit They May Have Been Wrong About AI Never Replacing Human Jobs: They're taking it seriously - Joe Wilkins, Futurism
As a sweeping economics paper by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Forecasting Research Institute (FRI), and numerous top universities found, that attitude may be shifting. As time goes on, top economic experts are increasingly factoring extreme AI disruption into their models. Yet acknowledging a possibility and accepting its inevitable are two very different things — and as the complicated range of sentiments makes clear, an AI jobs apocalypse is still far from certain. The study is a tour-de-force of economic forecasting that surveyed 69 economists, 52 AI specialists, and 38 “superforecasters,” a term for consistently accurate analysts who play the role of “Dune’s” Mentats in the economics world. It found that all three groups expect “significant” progress on AI in the years to come. Forebodingly, the groups all agreed that, as a rule, faster AI progress means lower employment rates overall. On average, economists assigned a 47 percent probability of “moderate“ AI progress by 2030, defined as systems that can operate semi-autonomous research labs, put out high-quality novels, and complete complex projects with oversight.
The AI Transformation Manifesto - McKinsey
Central Illinois union painter shares the value of apprenticeships in a statewide professional development program - Addy Carnahan, Lauren Warnecke, WGLT NPRIllinois
Jalissa Jones, also from ISU's Center for Specialized Professional Support, said people tend to think of apprenticeships being exclusively related to trades, but that's not always the case. “Another really vital part of this program is the idea of changing people's minds about what apprenticeships and what apprentices look like,” she said. “It can be in medical field. It could be in cybersecurity or insurance. There's a lot of insurance apprenticeships, which is not something I knew before I started working at this job.…I think that is the forward face of apprenticeship.”