A select number of students have begun to receive settlement payouts from the $4 million settlement lawsuit in which the plaintiffs argued students should not have been required to pay full tuition prices during the period of remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Payments were scheduled to be sent out Jan. 30 to settlement class members, which includes students enrolled at UW during the winter or spring 2020 quarters. After administrative costs, attorney fees, and the payment to the lead plaintiff, the remaining $4 million will be split evenly between the approximately 56,000 settlement class members who did not opt out. UW transitioned to remote instruction at the end of winter quarter in March 2020 and students paid regular tuition prices.
Thursday, February 26, 2026
Is AI Inescapable in Higher Education? - Maddie Rodriguez, the Spectator
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly becoming a day-to-day norm. Nearly 90% of college students use AI for academic purposes. A third of them use it daily, and another 24% use AI several times a week. According to the 2025 AI in Education Trends Report, AI is being used as a learning partner, but what does that mean? Professors and students alike are worried that AI is being used as a shortcut, that it threatens the ability to think critically, and that it is contributing to a decline in writing quality. Questions about how to integrate it ethically, if at all, are increasing as its use grows. In July 2024, the Technology Ethics Initiative (TEI) at Seattle University was created to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration on campus between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and academic learning. Its main goal is to bring together research related to technology ethics and technology policy.
Students question the value of higher education amid AI - Naomi Martin, the Ithican
Ithaca College’s statement on AI use includes the desire to prepare students for an AI-driven future and workforce, which is already here. Large companies like Pinterest and Amazon have made moves to pivot toward AI resources, with Pinterest laying off under 15% of its workers and Amazon cutting 14,000 corporate jobs. The influence that AI has on the job market varies by industry. Junior Caroline Guzman — an advertising, public relations, and marketing communications major — said that within her classes, AI is emphasized as a necessary tool in the job market. “In the workplace, you are going to use AI,” Guzman said. “Multiple professors have told me if you are not using it, you are falling behind in strategic communications.” Guzman said the AI applications that are used in APRMC courses include tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. Many of the tools that APRMC has historically used, like Canva, now have AI incorporated in their foundation.
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
Here are 3 ways to mine AI for insights, and do it safely - Alcino Donadel, University Business
“We try to educate all of our staff to ensure that whatever they’re using is approved and screened by our central IT teams so that we know that it’s guarded and protected,” says Pablo Ortiz, provost of Barry. College administrators interviewed by University Business revealed how they use AI without compromising their data, integrity or institution’s mission. “We cannot critically govern AI without actively using it,” says Bogdan Daraban, vice provost of Innovation and Technology Education at Barry.
Professional Development Planner - TAAFT
This prompt turns AI into a Professional Development Planner who helps you create strategic skill-building and growth plans. The system assesses your current capabilities against your career goals and creates actionable development plans that fit your life circumstances.
This planner helps you invest in your growth strategically rather than haphazardly.
### **Example User Prompts**
1. “I want to grow professionally but I’m not sure what skills to develop. Help me create a strategic development plan.”
2. “I need to upskill for where I want to take my career. Help me figure out what to learn and how to learn it.”
3. “I keep starting courses and certifications but never finishing them. Help me create a realistic professional development plan.”
Google adds music-genertion capabilities to the Gemini app - Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch
Google adds music-generation capabilities to the Gemini app - Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch
Google announced on Wednesday that it’s adding a music-generation feature to the Gemini app. The company is using DeepMind’s Lyria 3 music-generation model to power the feature, which is still in beta.To use the feature, you’ll describe the song you want to create, and the app will generate a track along with lyrics. For instance, you could ask Gemini to create a “comical R&B slow jam about a sock finding its match,” and the app will generate a 30-second track along with cover art made by Nano Banana. Google said that you can even upload a photo or a video, and the AI-powered tool will create a song to match the mood of the media file.
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
Introducing Claude Sonnet 4.6 - Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is our most capable Sonnet model yet. It’s a full upgrade of the model’s skills across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design. Sonnet 4.6 also features a 1M token context window in beta. For those on our Free and Pro plans, Claude Sonnet 4.6 is now the default model in claude.ai and Claude Cowork. Pricing remains the same as Sonnet 4.5, starting at $3/$15 per million tokens. Sonnet 4.6 brings much-improved coding skills to more of our users. Improvements in consistency, instruction following, and more have made developers with early access prefer Sonnet 4.6 to its predecessor by a wide margin. They often even prefer it to our smartest model from November 2025, Claude Opus 4.5.
Leading With Grounded Confidence - Brené Brown and Adam Grant, Knowledge at Wharton
In her new book Strong Ground, Brené Brown argues that leaders deliver their best work not by projecting certainty, but by staying grounded: engaging with courage, clarity, and compassion even as conditions shift around them. In a series of conversations about the book’s core ideas (listen here and here), Brown and Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant explore how this grounded stance enables leaders to think more clearly, act more effectively, and stay connected to their teams under pressure. Grant extends Brown’s framework with insights from his research on curiosity, learning mindsets, and the value of admitting what we don’t yet know. Together, they offer a practical path for replacing performative toughness with grounded confidence — helping leaders navigate uncertainty while still delivering for their organizations.
A Guide to Which AI to Use in the Agentic Era - Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing
If you are just getting started, pick one of the three systems (ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini), pay the $20, and select the advanced model. The advice from my book still holds: invite AI to everything you do. Start using it for real work. Upload a document you’re actually working on. Give the AI a very complex task in the form of an RFP or SOP. Have a back-and-forth conversation and push it. This alone will teach you more than any guide. If you are already comfortable with chatbots, try the specific apps. NotebookLM is free and easy to use, which makes it a good starting place. If you want to go deeper, Anthropic offers the most powerful package in Claude Code, Claude Cowork (both accessible through Claude Desktop) as well as the specialized PowerPoint and Excel Plugins. Give them a try. Again, not as a demo, but with something you actually need done. Watch what it does. Steer it when it goes wrong. You aren’t prompting, you are (as I wrote in my last piece) managing.
Monday, February 23, 2026
The AI Wake-Up Call Everyone Needs Right Now! - Matt Wolfe, YouTube
The podcast focuses on a viral article by Matt Schumer, which argues that AI development has reached a "COVID-like" inflection point where rapid, exponential growth is about to fundamentally disrupt society. The creator highlights that the newest models, such as GPT-5.3 and Claude 4.6, represent a shift from simple instruction-following to demonstrating genuine judgment and taste [04:33]. Crucially, the video explains that AI is now entering a self-improving feedback loop, where current models are being used to write the code and manage the deployment of their successors, potentially leading to an "intelligence explosion" [11:46]. To prepare for this shift, the host suggests moving beyond free versions of AI tools and spending at least an hour a day actively "playing" with paid models to solve complex, multi-step problems [24:18]. He emphasizes that AI is no longer just for basic research or coding; it is becoming a substitute for any work requiring strategic thinking or medical and legal analysis [16:19]. The ultimate message to you, ray, is that the greatest advantage right now is being an early adopter who understands how to navigate these autonomous systems before they become broadly superior to human performance in most professional tasks. [Summary provided in part by Gemini 3 mode Fast]
The Apprentice: Why Higher Ed Is Leaning Into Earn-and-Learn - Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed
VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. It’s a management acronym popularized by the U.S. military to describe the changing world after the Cold War. But Minah Woo, vice president of workforce innovation and strategic partnerships at Howard Community College in Maryland, said it accurately describes the current operating environment for higher education. “We are dealing with a lot of things happening all at once,” Woo said, “and it’s requiring us to think outside the box and be agile.”
One solution? Apprenticeship. It’s not an innovation, per se, since apprenticeships predate the modern university by centuries. But many institutions are helping reimagine what an apprenticeship can be and whom it can be for. And, in so doing, they’re reimagining the interplay between higher education and the workforce and how learners can obtain a credential of value. Today’s apprenticeship programs span not only the skilled trades but fields from nursing and teaching to cybersecurity. And while apprenticeships can and do exist outside of higher education, they’re increasingly offered for credit, or embedded within degree pathways.
‘Unsettling’ adverts are coming to your AI chatbot - Cristina Criddle and Daniel Thomas, Financial Review
James Denton-Clark, chief growth officer of Stagwell Europe, says that “early demand is predominantly from large, sophisticated advertisers due to the pilot’s minimum investment requirement in the low six figures”. He adds: “What distinguishes this initiative is not merely another ad format; it marks another serious attempt to monetise AI and agents that can answer, plan, and purchase on behalf of users.” Jessica Tamsedge, chief executive of Dentsu Creative UK&I, calls the opportunity a “no-brainer for advertisers”, pointing to the surge in the share price of Walmart after it announced a partnership with OpenAI. Walmart’s share price surged after it announced an advertising partnership with OpenAI. Clients are already seeing “much higher quality traffic” from ChatGPT compared with classic search engines, says Nikhil Lai, principal analyst at Forrester.
Sunday, February 22, 2026
AI and Course Design: Machines Can Help, but Only Humans Can Teach - Deb Adair and Whitney Kilgore, EDUCAUSE Review
It's clear that AI is reshaping higher education. The technology is no longer knocking on the door. It's already inside, and it's rearranging the furniture. In faculty lounges, curriculum committees, and course design meetings, conversations about AI are urgent, often fraught, and almost always unclear. There's excitement, but there's also fatigue, skepticism, and confusion. Colleges and universities are seeking meaningful and practical ways to engage with the technology; however, most institutions lack a working policy. At the heart of higher education's response to AI is the vital question of how to harness the technology without sacrificing the humanity of teaching. Because, as it turns out, what students want isn't more automation but more human engagement. And that means keeping people—not technology—at the center of learning.
What AI could mean for film and TV production and the industry’s future - McKinsey
Industry leaders are questioning how AI could change what content is made and how it is produced. Our research indicates three potential industry outcomes beyond disrupting the content supply chain. AI is already beginning to be deployed in some areas of the film and TV production process, though the potential magnitude of its long-term impact is still coming into focus. While the technology’s limits, adoption trajectory, and potential scale of impact are yet to be determined, historical technological shifts and early use cases suggest AI could, over time, materially alter the industry’s structure and profit pools. As a result, industry leaders face practical questions about near-term operating choices and strategic questions about what AI could mean for their businesses longer term. This impacts the job market for learners seeking placement in the field.
The Person in the Machine: Why AI Personhood Rights Are Inevitable (And Arriving Sooner Than You Think) - Thomas Frey, Futurist Speaker
Do AI systems deserve legal personhood? The instinctive answer — from almost everyone — is “absolutely not.” AI isn’t conscious. It doesn’t feel pain. It doesn’t have moral worth. Giving legal rights to a machine sounds like science fiction, or worse, like surrendering human primacy to our own creations. But here’s what most people don’t realize: we’ve already done this before. And the entities we gave legal personhood to weren’t conscious, didn’t feel pain, and definitely didn’t have moral worth. They were called corporations.
Saturday, February 21, 2026
A one-in-a-million reunion, a reverse-mentoring match - Mastercard
A chance meeting at an online training session shows how learning now flows both ways — and why curiosity matters more than seniority. These types of reverse mentoring relationships make sense in a world where new technologies might be second nature for younger people, but difficult to grasp for even seasoned professionals like Tabanera. “Nico’s generation grew up with these tools and technologies,” she explains. “The learning is embedded in them.” Beyond training, Lagreste Zucchini works with organizations to design scalable data models and analytics frameworks that turn reporting into strategic decision-making tools. As co-founder of Analytic Mood and the emerging AI venture Nitaki Group, he is particularly interested in how artificial intelligence and automation are redefining how companies compete and create value.
Transform Teaching Now: Accommodate Learning In Chaotic Times - Jeni Hebert-Beirne, the Fulcrum
The most recent American Psychological Association Stress in America™ survey shows “62% of U.S. adults 18 and over reported societal division as a significant source of stress in their lives.” Seventy-six percent of U.S. adults say the future of the nation is a significant cause of stress. As a public health professor with over a decade of teaching experience, I’m deeply concerned about the ability of students in higher education to meet their learning goals in this volatile socio-political environment made intentionally chaotic by erratic and disruptive events that arise almost daily. Eighty-seven percent of the 127 students and guests (my class is open to the public) in my graduate public health course recently responded to a poll that they feel that the current and past social, economic, and political policies and programs cause them stress or anxiety.
Worried AI means you won't get a job when you graduate? Here's what the research says - Lukasz Swiatek, The Conversation
For example, international researchers have noted agriculture has been a slow adopter of AI. By contrast, colleagues and I have found AI is being rapidly implemented in media and communications, already affecting jobs from advertising to the entertainment industries. Here we are seeing storyboard illustrators, copywriters and virtual effects artists (among others) increasingly being replaced by AI. So, students need to look carefully at the specific data about their chosen industry (or industries) to understand the current situation and predicted trends. To do this, you can look at academic research about AI's impacts on industries around the world, as well as industry news portals and free industry newsletters. Students can also obviously build their knowledge and skills about AI while they are studying. Specifically, students should look to move from "AI literacy" to "AI fluency." This means understanding not just how AI works in an industry, but also how it can be used innovatively in different contexts. If these elements are not already offered by your course, you can look at online guides and specific courses offered by universities.
The automation curve in agentic commerce - McKinsey
This is the year AI agents stopped being an experiment and became part of how people shop, not in headline-grabbing ways but in everyday moments—helping shoppers make sense of choices, assemble baskets, resolve trade-offs, and move toward action. Yet what looks like small convenience today is an early signal of a much larger shift in the way we shop. According to our research, even under moderate scenarios, AI agents could mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030.1 Because agents navigate the same internet as humans—visiting websites, engaging with APIs, and interacting with loyalty programs—they can scale quickly. And as they do, they are reshaping how intent forms, how products are discovered, and where value pools can be found.
Friday, February 20, 2026
Milwaukee’s 5 higher education leaders team up on AI - Corrinne Hess, Wisconsin Public Radio
The leaders of Milwaukee’s five institutions of higher education are partnering with one of Wisconsin’s largest companies with the goal of making the region a nationally recognized leader for artificial intelligence and data science. During a meeting at Northwestern Mutual’s headquarters downtown, the chancellors and presidents of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Marquette University, the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee School of Engineering and Waukesha County Technical College, expressed the same sentiment: AI is moving fast. “We’ve got to do it well, we’ve got to do it correctly and we’ve got to do it ethically,” said Rich Barnhouse, president of WCTC. “And we’ve got to get AI in the hands of every single American.”
One New Thing: How AI Is Helping College Administrators Offload Work - Alina Tugend, US News
The nonprofit Educause does some of the best and most widely distributed research on ed tech in higher education. Its new report on artificial intelligence goes beyond the way students are using the technology to offer an up-to-date snapshot of how and where higher ed as a whole is. “The Impact of AI on Work in Higher Education,” issued by Educause in partnership with associations of higher education, business officers and human resources, demonstrates how AI plays an increasingly important role in all areas for college and universities. Among the top three areas: automating repetitive processes; offloading administrative work and mundane tasks; and analyzing large databases.
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