Rice University has launched a transformational universitywide AI initiative to recruit 75 faculty members working across disciplines, invest in a new, state-of-the-art facility that advances research and industry collaboration, and expand AI-related courses and degrees, accelerating the institution’s emergence as a global leader in advanced computing and responsible AI. Rice has already recruited 35 faculty members in recent years whose work centers on AI across several schools, marking the halfway point in the faculty hiring effort. An additional 40 faculty will bring the total number of AI-focused faculty hired this decade to 75. These new researchers build upon Rice’s historical strengths in AI and computing.
Professional, Continuing, and Online Education Update by UPCEA
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Friday, October 23, 2026
How Artificial Intelligence Can Help With Critical Thinking - Monideepa Tarafdar, Greater Good Berkley.edu
Ironically, perhaps, recent research shows that people who interact with generative AI for work tasks can end up not thinking critically. They can surrender to AI’s quick and confident answers, which can lead to speedy but low-quality solutions. Scholars refer to this increasingly prevalent problem as cognitive offloading. And they are showing that it can erode the very skills that make knowledge workers valuable. My research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and knowledge work provides a different view, however. In one study, my colleagues and I interviewed 45 knowledge workers at a U.S. public university. They all were using generative AI applications in their core tasks: generating new ideas, solving complex problems, and designing novel solutions. We also analyzed the prompts and outputs from their iterative AI chats.
You Still Should Go To College In The Age Of AI. Here’s Why. - Jamie Merisotis, Forbes
Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence have raised uncertainty about jobs and the value of college. According to the Pew Research Center, young adults increasingly worry about AI taking jobs. No job is entirely AI-proof, creating a need for education and training that emphasizes human skills and adaptability. For college to remain valuable, it must become more affordable and quickly pivot to prepare people for technology-integrated jobs. Higher education must cultivate durable skills, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and interpersonal communication, alongside specific subject skills to help workers succeed alongside machines.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
From feed to access: Official digital media channels, information quality and student engagement orientation in higher education - Reymond C. Dalupang, E-Learning and Digital Media (Sage Journals)
Students in higher education increasingly receive academic and co-curricular information through official online pages, groups, and messaging channels. Although these channels are common, less is known about whether students experience them as complete, accurate, and retrievable digital media spaces that support participation in the wider higher education environment. This cross-sectional quantitative study examined 400 students who followed or regularly checked official digital channels in a higher education setting. The analysis measured digital channel use, perceived update quality and completeness, retrievability of prior announcements and reports, engagement behavior, and future participation intention. Results showed favorable ratings for digital media information quality.
Rush is on to patch a software vulnerability that could impact 70% of websites worldwide - DAVID MCHUGH and EMMA BURROWS, AP
Governments and corporations worked throughout the night on urgent security updates after the AI-assisted discovery of vulnerabilities in a programming language vital to 70% of websites globally. Many government sites appeared to be functioning normally Thursday, but outages or limited service continued while security work was under way. The FBI’s cyber division warned on Wednesday that the vulnerabilities could allow malicious actors to remotely execute code in the programming language, PHP, which powers websites and web applications. That raised the risk of sensitive data and networks being compromised, said the agency, which recommended that operators take websites offline if they can’t update them immediately.
The Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Powered Tutoring and Adaptive Learning Market Is Projected to Hit $20.6 Billion by 2030 - National Law Review
The rise of artificial intelligence in education is transforming how learners engage with content and receive personalized support. AI-powered tutoring and adaptive learning technologies are becoming central to this shift, enabling customized educational experiences across various settings. Let’s explore the current market landscape, growth drivers, regional trends, and key factors shaping this rapidly evolving sector. Market Growth Prospects in AI-Powered Tutoring and Adaptive Learning
The market for artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tutoring and adaptive learning has experienced rapid expansion recently. It is projected to grow from $8.09 billion in 2025 to $9.79 billion in 2026, representing a strong compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.9%. This increase during the historic period reflects a rising adoption of digital learning platforms, broader internet availability, heightened demand for personalized education, growth in online certification programs, and increasing investments in education technology.
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
What Does the Credential Still Certify? Cognitive Stewardship for AI-Mediated Education - Kai Yao, AIES 2026
Generative AI is changing a basic premise of educationalassessment: that submitted work can reliably evidence thehuman capacities a credential claims to certify. The chal-lenge is not simply whether students use AI, but what re-mains inferable about learning when some cognitive workhas been delegated to a system. This paper developscogni-tive stewardship, a framework for AI-mediated assessmentthat links the learning claim, delegation boundary, evidencestandard, and safeguards. We then audit verified public gen-erative AI assessment guidance from 30 universities.
Towards Trustworthy Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Nursing Education:Integrating Nurse-Informed Design with a Frugal Neuro-Symbolic Architecture - Nevena K. Dicheva, AAAI/ACM Conference on AI
The design,development,and evaluation of EduNurse, a domain-specific ITS prototype for nursing education.Guided by the CARE-ITS frame-work, this research presents a scenario-based ITS prototype (EduNurse) that translates empirically de-rived learner needs, pedagogical considerations, and framework-guided design principles into a functional educational system. EduNurse does not introduce a new AI technique. Its contribution is how it brings established approaches together within a nurse-informed ITSarchitecture designed around the pedagogical require-ments of nursing education. Within EduNurse, semantic similarity is used alongside educational decision rules to assess written scenario responses and provide feedback and learner support.
Strategies for making online courses more impactful - Heather Gass, Times Higher Education
In an asynchronous environment, it is easy to hide behind the screen, quietly grade papers and manage the course. Our challenge is to break that barrier and show our students that we are here to support and guide them. Setting up an online presence:
Developing your online presence at the beginning of the course is crucial. In my first announcement to the students welcoming them to the course, I include an introduction video, where I discuss the parameters of the course and strategies for success.
What are students paying for when they learn online?
Steps to building a winning online presence for your university
How to boost student motivation and engagement in virtual classrooms
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
The Uneven Payoff of Returning to College - Joshua Bay, Inside Higher Ed
A new report from California Competes, part of its ongoing Degrees of Value research series, examines the return on investment of a college degree among adults who previously stopped out and later graduated. Drawing on interviews with 27 California adult learners who left college and later returned, researchers explored the financial, personal and social benefits of completing a degree, as well as the costs associated with returning to college. Participants were first interviewed in 2023 and again in 2025. About half of the graduates interviewed saw their earnings increase within three years of completing their degrees, particularly those who returned with clear career goals. One graduate went from earning $10 an hour as a cleaner at a nursing facility to more than $100,000 annually as a nurse. But graduates in rural communities described more limited financial gains because of fewer local job opportunities.
What’s the value of a university education? - Mariianne Mays Wiebe, University of Manitoba Today
What is the role of the university in the face of the major societal shift represented by artificial intelligence? Universities should continue to “embrace our role as institutions where students learn how to think, not what to think,” says Hiebert-Murphy. A university education, she suggests, “offers a learning environment in which students develop the skills to think critically, engage deeply with challenging issues, evaluate information, generate creative solutions to complex problems and work collaboratively with others towards shared goals.” Engaging with diverse mentors and learners also develops leadership skills and exposes students to different perspectives. “These have been, and continue to be, essential skills for participating in society and contributing to its social, economic, intellectual, environmental, physical and cultural well-being,” she says.
AI Is Changing Jobs, Not Eliminating Them - Peter Cappelli, Knowledge at Wharton
Agentic AI changes three fundamental constraints that have shaped the modern organization: human capacity, expertise, and coordination. For more than a century, the familiar building blocks of organizational design, from tasks and jobs to teams, management layers, and hierarchies, have reflected those constraints. AI doesn’t remove them entirely, but it alters them enough that leaders can ask a more consequential question: What can this company do that wasn’t possible before?
Most organizations are not yet asking, let alone answering, that question. AI adoption is scaling rapidly, and individuals are already seeing meaningful productivity gains, but enterprise value has not kept pace.
Monday, October 19, 2026
Are communication skills still important in the age of AI? Research says yes - RM Barton, Purdue
In an artificial intelligence (AI)-mediated world, many professionals are seeking skills that will help them weather technological shifts and find career stability. Emerging research suggests that the skills the future job market will demand most are skills that technology cannot replace or replicate: people skills. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the importance of people skills will likely be emphasized by generative AI. Professionals who know how to work with other people, lead effectively, manage projects, communicate well and collaborate with AI as expert prompters and reviewers will fare better than professionals without these skills. Communication is one such people skill that is becoming more important in the age of AI. Looking at today’s complex organizational environment, the reasons are clear. Effective communicators can help companies avoid costly communication disasters and public relations (PR) missteps. They can also collaborate with AI tools to develop better prompts and outputs, create messages that connect with human audiences and AI search engines alike, build trust with stakeholders, and manage important relationships.
As frontier models go rogue, colleges beef up AI cybersecurity education - Eric Geller, Cybersecurity Dive
As the world increasingly recognizes the need for safer and more secure AI, U.S. colleges and universities are trying to meet a growing demand for AI security education that prepares future workers to safeguard businesses’ and governments’ powerful AI systems. AI cybersecurity education programs, from undergraduate and graduate classes to professional certificates, are sprouting up all over the country, as experts warn that young people need to understand how to manage AI risks as they enter a workforce teeming with algorithms, models and agents. The recent autonomous-hacking incidents involving frontier AI models have further underscored the need for cybersecurity education.
The AI Invasion Has Come for Mathematics - Ahmed Abbes and Haynes Miller, Inside Higher Ed
On Tuesday, OpenAI released hundreds of new mathematical findings, following closely on the resolution by OpenAI’s bots of the Millennium Prize problem addressing the Navier-Stokes equations. This was a true blitz: 10,000 internal agents spent 88 hours and produced a proof apparently satisfying the criteria of this challenge, issued by the Clay Mathematics Institute some 25 years ago. The company is thought to have spent millions on this stunt. The mathematical community that had been converging on this example—and it is just that, an example—has been digesting this new work with professional interest.
Friday, October 16, 2026
The Superintelligence Force: A Moment to Reconsider the Pace and Nature of AI - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
I am not entirely convinced that the “Superintelligence Force” is the best way to cool down the competition and slow down the race. However, here we are. This is the only available opportunity to cool down the competition and pursue a safer approach to further development. Although higher education was not heavily consulted in the preparation of this model, we will be impacted by the priorities and products that are produced as a result. Hence, we should actively seek inclusion in the process. We must also recognize that hundreds of other development efforts are being pursued in smaller independent as well as larger military and other governmental initiatives around the world. Some of these are providing open-source solutions that can then be further developed and applied by unregulated actors.
He Helped Create Modern AI. Now the ‘Godfather of AI’ Wants an FDA-Style Approval System for It. - Sherin Shibu, Entrepreneur
- Geoffrey Hinton is known as the “Godfather of AI” due to his pioneering work in the field.
- The Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist wants new AI models to be approved like drugs.
- Hinton’s call for greater oversight arrives as AI industry insiders raise alarms about the technology they are helping build.
Workforce in motion: Skills and pathways to future jobs in the United States - María Jesús Ramírez, Kweilin Ellingrud, Tanguy Catlin, Diego Castresana, and Anna Kortis -McKinsey
AI, automation, and broader structural trends are accelerating the reallocation of work across the US economy. Capturing its benefits requires developing new professional pathways and skills, and reducing barriers between declining and growing occupations. The US economy could create more jobs in the next decade than will be replaced through automation, but the change may require the largest and most sustained workforce transformation in US history. Jobs of the future, particularly growing jobs, could pay more on average but require more skills. Roughly 60 percent of growing employment could be in the top two wage quintiles, with much of the increase concentrated in healthcare, construction, and management occupations. Conversely, more than 70 percent of declining employment could be in the bottom two quintiles, primarily in office and administrative support, retail and sales, and transportation and logistics occupations.
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Deluge of 377 OpenAI proofs bewilders the math world - Konstantin Kakaes, Quanta Magazine
The technology firm OpenAI has announced the solutions to 377 open questions across nearly every mathematical subdiscipline. The results are spread over 722 papers, which OpenAI has uploaded to the Github code repository. They were achieved by a new, unnamed internal model that the company intends to release publicly in the near future, once they deem it safe. All of the papers were written by this model; only one, on a zero-free region of the Riemann zeta function, was edited by a person.
UW-Stevens Point to host lectures, panels on strategies to navigate AI misinformation - UW Stevens Point
The “Truth, Trust and Technology: Information in the Age of AI” series for the 2026-2027 academic year aims to help people navigate the complexities of information people must evaluate with an abundance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within digital platforms we read and use. This kickoff event, “Technology Brought Us Here, Now What?” features presenter Chad Johnson, associate professor in the Department of Computing and New Media Technologies. Participants will learn more about how humans can protect themselves and adapt to a constantly changing technological environment. “In this series, we will attempt to cut through the smoke screen, separate the signal form the noise, understand what we’re facing, and learn about how to survive it all,” said Johnson.
Gonzaga Community Explores AI Through Faith, Ethics, and Dialogue - Gonzago University
This fall, faculty, staff, and students are participating in reading groups focused on Pope Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which examines artificial intelligence through the lenses of human dignity, ethics, faith, and the common good. The discussions are creating space for the Gonzaga community to engage thoughtfully with one of the most significant technological developments of our time. The first fall AI reading group session was organized through Foley Library and invited participants to discuss the encyclical and its implications for higher education and society. The conversations reflect Gonzaga's commitment to cura personalis, educating the whole person, and preparing students not only for careers, but for lives of purpose and ethical discernment about the use of this powerful new technology.
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