On one hand, they’ve made their ire toward the technology clear: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with hisses during his commencement remarks at the University of Arizona’s graduation ceremony on Sunday when he invoked the inevitability of a future with artificial intelligence. “The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will,” Schmidt said, pausing for a moment as students booed. “The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.” But the outward disgust toward the AI boom doesn’t tell the full story of the 2026 graduating class’s relationship to AI. The same cohort is also adopting the technology at a rapid clip, with 57% of U.S. college students reporting using the AI tools in their coursework weekly, and 20% using it daily, according to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education study published last month. But where some see a contradiction, experts see a peek into the minds of young graduates—the first generation of college students to experience their four-year undergraduate experience with tools like ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, at their fingertips.
Professional, Continuing, and Online Education Update by UPCEA
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Tuesday, June 2, 2026
Online Education Market Hits New High | Major Giants edX, Pearson, FutureLearn - Open PR
The latest study released on the Global Online Education Market by HTF MI Research evaluates market size, trend, and forecast to 2033. The Online Education study covers significant research data and proofs to be a handy resource document for managers, analysts, industry experts and other key people to have ready-to-access and self-analyzed study to help understand market trends, growth drivers, opportunities and upcoming challenges and about the competitors. Consider how these insights might influence your strategic decisions
Why Professional Development Matters for Museum Professionals - Manuel Charr, Museum Next
Museums are at a crossroads. Visitor expectations are changing, digital transformation is reshaping how collections are shared, and conversations around inclusion, decolonisation, and community engagement are redefining what museums are for. In this environment, professional development isn’t a nice-to-have for museum professionals — it’s essential. Whether you’re a curator, educator, collections manager, digital lead, or in museum leadership, continuing to learn is one of the most powerful things you can do for your career, your team, and the communities you serve. This article explores what professional development means for people working in museums, why it matters, and how to make the most of the opportunities available to you.
Monday, June 1, 2026
Green Card Seekers Must Leave U.S. to Apply, Trump Administration Says - Madeleine Ngo and Albert Sun, NY Times
The change could upend the lives of people who entered the country lawfully through temporary visas and are seeking green cards to remain in the United States, including students, spouses of U.S. citizens and a wide range of foreign workers. The process of obtaining a green card — which gives immigrants the right to live in the country permanently and provides a path to citizenship — takes months or longer, meaning families could be separated for extended periods.
If Canvas Goes Down Again, What’s the Contingency Plan? - Lisa Anderson and Mairéad Martin, Inside Higher Ed
Faculty and administrators across the country, shaped by their experience adapting instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic, knew what to do last week. Shifting the modality of instruction is not new for us. Instructors quickly improvised alternative assignments, delayed quizzes and exams, populated offline course materials, and adjusted timelines in order to keep learning moving forward. When it came time to notify students of these adjustments, however, a more fundamental issue became apparent. Many instructors came to discover they had no reliable way to contact their students outside the learning management system itself. Some did not know how to access their course rosters outside Canvas. Others teaching large online lectures encountered institutional email delivery limits. Many had no established communication pathways beyond LMS announcements.
Cuts and hiring freezes spread as spring semester closes - Alcino Donadel, University Business
Numerous public universities are closing out the spring term with hiring freezes, layoffs and structural cuts as leaders confront budget shortfalls. Last week, the University of Oregon announced that it has frozen hiring and pay increases while it works to close a projected $65 million structural deficit, largely tied to lower out-of-state enrollment and tuition revenue. These actions reflect a “changing reality across higher education” as universities wrestle with enrollment declines, state funding reductions, rising costs and uncertainty in federal research funding and other factors, President Karl Scholz said.
Friday, May 29, 2026
Why Higher Education Needs Humanics - Michael J. Avaltroni, US News
In a world where artificial intelligence now permeates daily life and higher education, it has become essential to weave the human element throughout the delivery of instruction – particularly healthcare education.Enter humanics.The integration of humanics – often described as the study, understanding and development of key human qualities – represents a novel way to foster interdisciplinary collaboration in education, technology and the human component in an AI-driven world. It speaks to the urgent need to build healthcare teams that optimize all the advances in artificial intelligence with the humans in the middle – our students, clinicians and patients. It also speaks to the urgency to redefine higher education itself.
BOR Announces Systemwide Strategic Objectives for Artificial Intelligence Integration - SD.gov
The South Dakota Board of Regents (BOR) announced a strategic set of objectives designed to position the state’s public universities to become leaders in adopting artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education. As AI continues to reshape workforce expectations, academic disciplines, and operational practices, the Regental system is taking coordinated action to ensure students, faculty, and staff are prepared to succeed in an increasingly AI‑driven world. “Artificial intelligence is transforming every sector of our economy, and higher education must evolve just as rapidly,” said BOR President Jeff Partirdge. “These strategic objectives ensure that South Dakota’s public universities prepare students to be AI-ready, responsive to workforce demands, and capable of responsibly utilizing emerging technologies. This is an investment in the long-term success of our students and our state.”
Grade inflation much higher in ‘AI-exposed’ degrees - Jack Groves, Times Higher Education
Drawing on publicly available data from a large research university in Texas, Igor Chirikov, a senior researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, examined the marks awarded to more than 500,000 students between 2018 and 2025. When these grade patterns were compared against syllabus data on the types of writing tasks used for assessment, it revealed the share of A grades in “AI exposed” courses rose by 13 percentage points, or 30 per cent, compared with the 2022 baseline. Overall grade point average rose by 0.12 points for “high-homework” courses in which AI could potentially complete the assessment, says the study, which was published as a working paper by Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education. Grade inflation occurred only in homework-based writing and coding tasks and was not found to the same extent in in-person examination, explains the study, which suggests the computing power of “AI [is] substituting for student effort specifically on the unsupervised assessments where instructors cannot observe the production of submitted work”.
Thursday, May 28, 2026
Can colleges still deliver in the age of AI? One Ivy League school is investing $30 million to improve career outcomes - Jessica Dickler, CNBC
College students are increasingly worried about what an AI-driven jobs apocalypse could mean for their employment prospects. To that end, many colleges and universities are racing to recalibrate.
Even at nation’s most elite schools, the focus is shifting to career readiness. Fears that artificial intelligence will upend students’ future career plans are reverberating across college campuses. “Higher education needs to do better,” said Joseph Catrino, the inaugural director of Dartmouth’s Center for Career Design. “We need to do better for our students — we need to step up and help students be prepared.” The Ivy League college recently raised $30 million in endowed funds to support internship opportunities. Now students can access up to $6,500 during any term to help finance unpaid or underpaid internships. “This allows the student to explore and engage in a field that they normally wouldn’t be able to,” Catrino said.
MIT president blames federal policy shifts for big drop in research on campus - Washington Post
MIT is doing less research and enrolling fewer graduate students as a result of federal actions, the university president warned Thursday. Federally funded research on campus is down more than 20 percent compared to this time last year, MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, told the campus community in a video message, and the number of new federal research awards is also down more than 20 percent.“That is a striking loss for one of the most influential and productive research communities in the world,“ Kornbluth said.
Why Indiana University’s AI skills course is free - Pamela Whitten, University Businiess
Indiana University just gave away our most popular AI skills course by making it completely free and open to all, with no application or tuition required. Anyone who completes the course that we’ve come to know as GenAI 101 will earn an AI skills badge from our world-renowned Kelley School of Business at no cost.Our decision to make such a highly sought-after course available for free is rather unconventional for a major university. Tuition is one of the ways we pay the bills, yet we know that the ability to wisely work alongside artificial intelligence is too important of a skill to lock behind a paywall. When our faculty developed and launched GenAI 101 eight months ago, we could not fully predict the continuing and accelerating appetite for AI literacy among corporations, small businesses, state agencies, and universities across the country. They asked us to share it, and we have now done so by making the class freely available to anyone.
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
For Whom the Bell (Curve) Tolls? Classes That Yield Too Many A’s! - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
We are seeing colleges and universities across the country cracking down on grade inflation. There are multiple points of pressure that tend to inflate grading at both the institutional and individual faculty member levels. The flaw is not inherent in AI; rather, it is in the failure of faculty members to apply the technology in a way that cultivates learning among all students and accurately assesses mastery of the course content. Fortunately, we are now equipped by AI to effectively and efficiently implement mastery learning and supplant the age-old assembly-line model with a framework designed to enable all students, over time, to achieve mastery of the desired learning outcomes. The mastery learning model instead ensures that students do not progress through the course without achieving mastery of each module: “Mastery learning (or, as it was initially called, ‘learning for mastery’; also known as ‘mastery-based learning’) is an instructional strategy and educational philosophy, first formally proposed by Benjamin Bloom in 1968.
AI research papers are getting better, and it’s a big problem for scientists - Joshua Dzieza, the Verge
“It’s a huge burden on the peer-review system, which is already at the limit,” Degen said. “There’s just too many papers being published and there’s not enough peer reviewers, and if the LLMs make it so much easier to mass produce papers, then this will reach a breaking point.” Optimists about generative AI have high hopes for its ability to produce future scientific breakthroughs — accelerating discovery, eliminating most types of cancer — but the technology is currently undermining one of the pillars of scientific research, inundating editors and reviewers with an endless stream of papers. Paradoxically, the better the technology gets at producing competent papers, the worse the crisis becomes.
Institutions Prepare for New Accreditation Regulations = Jessica Blake, Inside Higher Ed
As the second week of accreditation negotiations gets underway, experts say the operational cost of the new regulations may be high for institutions—but the payoff could be worth it. As the Department of Education heads into its second week of negotiations over accreditation policies, the proposed regulations remain largely unchanged, higher education experts say. That has triggered concerns among institutions and their accreditors about the operational burdens that the sweeping regulatory proposal could impose. The draft—first released in mid-April and updated on May 11—could dramatically change how accreditors oversee colleges and what institutions need to do to comply.
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
First UK universities to offer LLE short courses announced - Tom Williams, Times Higher Education
Just under 60 English universities will be able to offer short courses that qualify for student loans when the new lifelong learning entitlement (LLE) is introduced later this year. The Department for Education has announced the first institutions approved through the new system, with those on the list able to offer single modules for study in several priority areas. Ministers have billed the move as a “radical” change to the student finance system, intended to allow people to return to education in later life or stagger their learning over a longer period.
We now have clashing views on the value of college - Matt Zalaznick, University Business
Americans’ outlook on the value of college is split between a belief in the power of a degree and serious doubts about affordability. Degree-seekers, graduates and employers think costs put a crucial credential out of reach for many potential students, according to a new survey by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. “Americans haven’t lost faith in the value of college, but they’re increasingly unsure they can afford to take part,” said Courtney Brown, vice president of impact and planning at the Lumina Foundation. “That gap between belief and access should be a wake-up call.”
The AI assembly line: Strategic imperatives for CEOs - Gianmarco Cilento, Steffen Fuchs , and Varun Marya; McKinsey
Just as Ford’s production line transformed physical labor, agentic AI—systems that can act autonomously rather than just responding to prompts—is now reshaping cognitive work, including engineering design, supply chain planning, and risk assessment. (We will refer to agentic AI simply as “AI” throughout this article.) With AI, companies no longer need to depend solely on the judgment and availability of a small number of experts to make complex decisions or create sophisticated products. Instead, knowledge becomes broadly accessible to anyone with the right AI capabilities, accelerating decision-making, product customization, and other tasks once limited to experts.
Monday, May 25, 2026
Landscape of Emerging Technologies in Higher Education: A Review - Sharin Jacob, Heather Miceli and Hannah Schneider, Digital Promise
This literature review explores the rapid integration of artificial intelligence in higher education, examining both institutional influences and instructional practices. It highlights how governance frameworks, resource allocation, and faculty attitudes shape access and responsible technology adoption. Pedagogically, the paper emphasizes the necessity of embedding AI literacy, critical evaluation, and ethical reasoning into curricula to prevent student overreliance on AI tools. Ultimately, institutions must balance innovation with accountability by carefully aligning AI tools with educational values to advance authentic learning.
Students prefer personalized, AI-generated educational videos over non-personalized, human-recorded videos - Bill Tomlinson, etc all; Nature
Personalization is a well-established driver of student engagement, yet delivering individualized instruction at scale remains a challenge in online education. Recent advances in generative AI make scalable personalization feasible, but AI-generated educational videos are often perceived as inferior to human-recorded content. This tension raises the question: how does the value of personalization compare to that of human presence? We investigated this question through a field deployment in two offerings of a large undergraduate online course (493 respondents). AI-generated personalized videos served as the primary instructional modality, alongside a smaller set of non-personalized human-recorded and AI-generated videos. At the end of the course, students ranked preferences across personalized and non-personalized formats and human-recorded versus AI-generated content. In a direct comparison, students preferred AI-generated personalized videos over human-recorded non-personalized videos (mean rank 2.26 vs. 2.69; Wilcoxon signed-rank test, ).
The Third Wave of Online Education: Why AI-Powered Adaptive Learning Could Disrupt Universities, Corporate Training, and Workforce Development - Tim King, Solutions Review
The Third Wave of Online Education Has Begun. Artificial intelligence is beginning to fundamentally reshape education. Not simply classroom technology. Not digital homework systems. Not video-based e-learning platforms. Education itself. During a recent episode of Inside Jam, Solutions Review President Doug Atkinson sat down with Jonathan Cornelissen to discuss what may become one of the defining transformations of the next decade: the rise of AI-powered adaptive learning systems capable of personalizing education at scale. The discussion explored the evolution of online learning, enterprise AI upskilling, workforce disruption, higher education economics, AI-native tutoring systems, and the growing realization that traditional educational models may no longer align with the pace of technological change.
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