We developed the “5E” framework (engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate) to structure our online sessions around five learning stages. We then used GenAI to speed up lesson design and respond to our students’ needs in real time. Not only did this approach increase participation and deepen understanding of complex topics but it also allowed us to cater to students’ varying levels of existing knowledge and disciplinary backgrounds.
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, June 12, 2026
Will AI Help Revive the ‘Stale’ OPM Market? - Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed
Over the past few years, OPMs—including Coursera, iDesign and 2U—have adopted AI-powered features designed to enhance support for instructors and students through coaching, content creation, tutoring and curriculum mapping. According to an April analysis, 70 percent of OPMs are now deploying AI for such purposes. But experts are skeptical that the AI boom will have a big payoff for the beleaguered OPM market, which is attempting to rebound with the help of private equity after years of declining revenues, reputational damage and mounting government scrutiny.
Are academics making an (em) dash for AI? - Times Higher Education
In the four years since its commercial launch, generative artificial intelligence has had a profound impact on personal and professional life. But are academics enthusiasts or sceptics? Five scholars explain how the technology has affected their own practice – for good and bad. Artificial intelligence writing is instantly recognisable, we are told—soulless, dispassionate, and devoid of the spark that marks genuine thought. Historian Jonathan Rees, in Academe this spring, calls it “bland, unspecific, pedestrian prose”. Journalist and UCL academic Sarfraz Manzoor, in a recent piece for The Independent, concluded that an AI article his students read was “competent but forgettable”. Scroll through r/professors on any given day and you will find dozens, if not hundreds, of colleagues enthusiastically nodding along and complaining bitterly about students submitting work that any fool can see was written by a machine.
Thursday, June 11, 2026
Bypassing the Bachelor’s Degree - Josh Moody, Inside Higher Ed
Hazelden Betty Ford Graduate School created a pathway for students to earn a master’s degree without a bachelor’s. Officials say the program helps passionate students find their footing and fills much-needed workforce roles in the counseling field. Kevin Doyle, president of Hazelden Betty Ford Graduate School, said the institution was inspired to launch the program to open doors for passionate students whose academic and career journeys weren’t a straight path and to fill gaps in the counseling workforce. “We frequently got calls from people who badly wanted to come to our school, and in the initial screening, they would disclose that they didn’t have a bachelor’s degree,” Doyle said. “We often could feel the passion that they had and wanted to be helpful to these folks. But thinking narrowly—before we did more exploration of this concept, we just referred them to go back and finish their bachelor’s degree and call us, two years from now, four years from now, whatever.”
Law Professors Prefer AI Over Peer Answers - Alejandro Salinas, et al; SSRN
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly promoted as educational tutors, yet most evaluations focus on domains with a single ground truth. Many disciplines, however, hinge on judgment: reasoning, weighing ambiguity, and reaching defensible conclusions. Law provides a sharp test. We conducted a blinded evaluation of short-answer tutoring in contracts courses with sixteen U.S. law professors. Participants created 40 representative questions, wrote answers, and judged 2,918 anonymized comparisons between human and LLM responses. Professors rated LLMs far higher than their peers (average win rate = 75.33%), with models performing similarly to the best instructor. LLM responses were also rarely flagged as harmful (3.53% vs 12.06% for professors). Preferences for LLM answers were consistent across evaluators and reflected shared professional standards. Our evaluation can be reliably extended to additional models by employing a separate LLM as a judge, rendering expert agreement an effective, scalable method to evaluate AI tutors in judgment-rich domains.
How Personalized AI Tutors Can Help Students Learn - Emma Needleman, Knowledge at Wharton
The researchers built an AI tutoring platform that gives all students access to the same gen AI chatbot and course materials, but varies the sequence in which practice problems are assigned. In a five-month Python course across 10 Taipei high schools, students were randomly assigned to one of two groups: One received a standard sequence of problems progressing from easy to hard, while the other received a personalized sequence, in which an algorithm adjusted problem difficulty based on each student’s performance and interactions with the AI tutor. Because everything else was held constant, this design isolates the impact of personalized homework.
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
Tech Future Promotes Continuing Professional Education - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
It wasn’t that long ago that professional education was the less-respected, fragile forum for night school, weekend programs, extension and applied study at many colleges and universities. More recently housing the nascent online programs of the 1990s, this school or college was last in recognition and stature among the more powerful renowned and acclaimed schools and colleges. The sooner we adapt to more efficient access to external databases and broad retrieval of digital information, the better we will be prepared to shift with the rapidly changing workplace in order to remain relevant and useful as employees. Of course, we will add our own personalities, perspectives, ethos, philosophies and histories to applying the data tapped through technology, thereby adding the value of our thoughts and experiences. Guiding us along the way will be continuing professional education. Professional education will enable us to apply our human understanding and values to empower us to advance even as previous jobs we had held disappear into history.
Stackable Micro-Credentials: The Revenue Multiplier Enterprises Actually Buy - AI Certs
Enterprises are moving away from broad, slow degrees and generic upskilling programs. Instead, they are rapidly shifting to modular, skill-specific training. Stackable micro-credentials group together narrow, job-focused skills to create clear, targeted career pathways. This blog shows strategy allows businesses to close immediate talent gaps while increasing internal revenue, creating a highly efficient path to rapid software and technological adoption. Many businesses waste millions of dollars on broad, generic training programs. Workers sit through long, general classes but return to their desks without knowing how to use tools for their specific daily jobs. This lack of clear utility creates a major business bottleneck, especially as companies push to adopt complex software systems.
Quantum’s bold promise: What business leaders need to know - Henning Soller and Sven Smit with Anna Heid, McKinsey
For years, business leaders and corporate boards have viewed quantum computing (QC) as a threat—and for good reason: It has the potential to break today’s strongest encryptions. That moment, commonly known as Q-Day, will occur when quantum computers succeed in factoring exceptionally large numbers, undermining the math that public-key cryptography depends on. Though business leaders are keeping Q-Day top of mind, they are viewing QC through a new lens—less a threat and more an opportunity. Many are spurring their companies to experiment with QC now so that they will be ready to deploy it at scale once quantum computers become mainstream, which could happen within the next five years.
Tuesday, June 9, 2026
Agentic AI and job skills. How will agentic AI reshape the workforce? - McKinsey
In this video, McKinsey Senior Partners Kate Smaje and Robert Levin and Special Adviser Eric Lamarre, authors of Rewired: How Leading Companies Win with Technology and AI (Wiley, April 2026), discuss what’s real—and what isn’t—about AI-driven workforce disruption. The authors reflect on how AI is changing the kinds of skills organizations value most and what business leaders need to do now to build teams and capabilities that can keep pace with an AI-enabled enterprise. “The core issue is that we’ve really got to think about how organizations are going to work fundamentally differently,” says Smaje.
Five big changes coming to higher education July 1 - Meredith Kolodner, Matt Krupnick and Jon Marcus, the Hechinger Report
From student loan repayment to career and technical training, big changes in higher education are coming July 1. Tens of thousands of students are sent each year to Texas' alternative disciplinary schools, sometimes for minor offenses like being disruptive. Plus, hundreds of college-based programs around the country are designed to help students who are former foster youth graduate with plans to build stable careers.
Workforce Pell
Scrapping the SAVE loan program
Public Service Loan Forgiveness
Graduate student loan limits
Parent loan limits
California Senate passes bill that would create $12B in state research funding - Ben Unglesbee, Higher Ed Dive
California’s state Senate passed a bill on Wednesday that would create a new public entity to help fund health and science research, including at California universities, amid the Trump administration’s disruption to the federal research system. SB 895, which passed by a 29-9 vote, would establish the California Foundation for Science and Health Research and issue $12 billion in bonds to fund the foundation’s grants and awards. That’s down from $23 billion in an earlier version. To become law, the proposal would require passage in the House, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature and voter approval at the next statewide general election. Dozens of unions, professional associations, faculty groups, universities and other organizations have endorsed the bill.
Monday, June 8, 2026
White House Aims to Establish Political Oversight of Federal Grants - Ryan Quinn, Inside Higher Ed
The White House is advancing a sweeping rule change that would give administration officials more power over billions of dollars in federal grants. The regulations seek to codify that Trump officials have the right to keep doing what they started last year: canceling thousands of grants that they said didn’t align with the president’s priorities, and shooting down new ones for the same reason. The proposed rules would set up a process for this political review, possibly helping insulate it from legal challenges that stymied the administration in the past. Among many other changes, the rules direct “senior appointees” at federal agencies to take charge of awarding and terminating new and existing research grants and other federal awards—a change that reflects an August executive order.
2026 EDUCAUSE The Impact of AI on Learning Assessment Report - Jenay Robert, EDUCAUSE
Few areas of higher education have been as passionately debated as learning assessment in the age of AI. Since the debut and rapid adoption of readily available generative AI chatbots, educators have grappled with how learning assessment would be impacted. By only surveying individuals who are currently doing the hands-on work of learning assessment, we can provide you with information about how the learning assessment landscape is changing in practice, not just in theory. Explore the full Impact of AI on Learning Assessment report: https://library.educause.edu/resources/2026/6/2026-educause-the-impact-of-ai-on-learning-assessment-report
eHBCU: A first-of-its-kind HBCU online consortium to expand economic mobility through education - McKinsey
Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are essential for creating economic mobility. According to McKinsey research, they enroll more than twice as many Pell Grant-eligible (low-income) students as non-HBCU institutions, and their graduates are 51 percent more likely to move into a higher-income quintile than graduates of non-HBCUs. The mean mobility rate across all US colleges is 1.6 percent, but the mean mobility rate for HBCUs is 3.0 percent.Yet many HBCUs face persistent structural challenges that limit their ability to scale impact—particularly in online education. Fragmented admissions processes, limited staffing dedicated to online learners, and uneven access to capital and technology partners have constrained growth, even as demand for flexible, high-quality digital learning has accelerated.
Friday, June 5, 2026
Choosing to Stay Human - Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing
But using AI for writing has a cost beyond turning off readers, it risks undermining the development of an important human task. I am lucky enough to have been writing for decades, and I have developed my own style which I think shines through whether I am writing a book, a tweet, or a blog post. That style took a lot of super annoying work to get to: good teachers and rewrites and mean online comments all contributed. If the AI does fine writing, I could skip all of that, but I would have done so the cost of giving up something that has turned out to be very important to my career and my happiness. This is not a condemnation of using AI to help with writing in any way. I think AI can be a fantastic tool for good writers (I have AI check all of my writing and roleplay different reader perspectives to see if I missed something important). For those who struggle with communication, AI can help get their ideas across better, and writing may not be thinking for everyone. Plus, a little bit of effort can make AI writing less cliche, more personal, and more worth using (in moderation). So, this is instead a condemnation of using AI as a default, or, even worse, without thinking at all. Balancing using AI with our own mental abilities is going to be a defining challenge of the coming years.
Autistic students who make it through college face a bigger challenge: getting jobs - Kelly Field, Hechinger Report
Today’s college graduates are entering one of the tightest job markets in years, as companies scale back entry-level hiring amid economic uncertainty and the explosion of artificial intelligence. Just under a third of 2025 graduates - and fewer than half of 2024 graduates - have found full-time employment related to their education, according to one recent report. The market is even tougher for young adults with autism, who have long had one of the highest rates of joblessness among individuals with disabilities. Even before the hiring slowdown, more than 30 percent of autistic college graduates were unemployed, and about a quarter of those who did have jobs were in office- and administration-support roles, one study found.
Rural Opportunity,Through Apprenticeship - Sara Weissman, Inside Higher Ed
Howard isn’t originally from Exeter, a town of roughly 700 people, but she grew up on her family’s cattle farm in a similarly rural area just a half hour away. Over her years in school, she was diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia, and she struggled to get the support she needed. Now, she’s training to teach kids like her through Pathways for Paraprofessionals, a registered apprenticeship program sponsored by Missouri State University. The apprenticeship advances paraprofessionals like Howard, who are already assisting high-needs students in Missouri classrooms, toward bachelor’s or master’s degrees in special education through on-the-job training and coursework. Apprentices also work toward their teaching certifications. While the program doesn’t exclusively train rural teachers, it’s explicitly designed for them, with all classes taught online by Missouri State professors or virtually or in-person in local school districts by K–12 teachers and administrators. Fundamental to the earn-and-learn apprenticeship model, paraprofessionals continue to work full-time during their training.
Thursday, June 4, 2026
How to choose the right AI tools for teaching - Laura Milne, Times Higher Education
University educators have a duty to prepare students for an AI-enabled world. This can be challenging, given the plethora of tools available; the temptation to try every shiny new one is common, but doing so without careful consideration may raise ethical concerns. So which AI tools should we use? And how should we incorporate them into our teaching, learning and assessment sustainably? To understand this, we must build our own AI knowledge first.
Free course empowers people with disabilities - McPherson Media Group, Shepparton News
The world‑first program, delivered by Collaborating 4 Inclusion and The University of Sydney, supports inclusive, practical and person‑centred emergency preparedness. It was co-designed by people with a disability and focuses on emergency preparedness for individuals and groups. The training consists of six self-paced online modules completed over five weeks, which include reading, videos and activities, with the opportunity to connect with others through the P‑CEP learning community. Greater Shepparton City Council emergency management and resilience manager Belinda Conna said the course was a great opportunity for at-risk groups in the community to access practical and inclusive information.
Assessing critical thinking in critical times - Kate Williams, Times Higher Education
Improving critical thinking is neither easy to do nor easy to measure. Outside educational philosophers, it is often defined as something “you know when you see it”. Or, perhaps more clearly, you know it when you don’t see it. When people opine on the absence of critical thinking, they often use examples of illogical assumption, unsupported arguments and poor decision-making. Bolstering critical thinking skills prepares learners to listen to others’ ideas, seek evidence and draw logical conclusions. The way we assess critical thinking offers a pathway for higher education’s sustained relevance in the age of AI.
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