Radical thought; education is really a lifelong digital service, periodically intermediated by humans and in physical spaces and places…
We need ‘university-as-a-service’, where learners subscribe for a lifetime, and dip in and out for stackable skills-based credentials.
If so .. it will be more radically transformed by AI than any other sector. And, fast.
Bodies of knowledge and skills that have traditionally taken lifetimes to master are being swallowed at a gulp.
The pace is accelerating; Google’s DeepMind Gemini release this morning outperforms GPT-4, and GPT-x is imminent…
For education, all this accelerates the shift from traditional ‘school’, to service, and on to lifelong learning and career companion.
Sal Khan (great 15-minute watch!) gets it, and his Khan Academy is moving quickly, focused on K-12:
“AI "can give every student a guidance counselor, academic coach, career coach, life coach... we launched this w/ GTP4 ... this isn't a fake demo"
Ethan Mollick (PLEASE move off X ASAP, Ethan!) has documented the impact on higher ed as a Wharton college prof for more than a year.
This isn’t crypto. I’ve been in tech or tech-adjacent fields for decades, and I’ve never seen all the major tech companies move so fast simultaneously.
In fact, the entire agenda of (Google) had changed — all in the course of nine days. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, had decided to ready a slate of products based on artificial intelligence — immediately…
…Mr. Nadella (Microsoft CEO) asked it to translate a poem written in Persian by Rumi, who died in 1273, into Urdu. It did. He asked it to transliterate the Urdu into English characters. It did that, too. “Then I said, ‘God, this thing,’” Mr. Nadella recalled in an interview. From that moment, he was all in.
(Of course, Nvidia’s CEO recognized this way back in 2013;
“He sent out an e-mail on Friday evening saying everything is going to deep learning, and that we were no longer a graphics company,” Greg Estes, a vice-president at Nvidia, told me. “By Monday morning, we were an A.I. company. Literally, it was that fast.”
Ten years later;
When the Nasdaq opened on May 25, 2023, Nvidia’s value increased by about two hundred billion dollars.)
Meanwhile, educational institutions are notoriously risk-averse and slowwwwww. That has to stop. (Not well known; risk-takers in traditional ed are winning.)
There are already innumerable high-value GenAI use cases in education. Or, as ChatGPT told me when I asked about the impact of GenAI on the education industry (partial list):
“Generative AI has the potential to significantly impact the education industry in various ways. Here are several potential impacts:
Personalized Learning: Generative AI can create adaptive learning experiences tailored to individual students' needs, preferences, and learning styles. This personalization can enhance engagement and improve learning outcomes.
Content Creation and Automation: AI can automate the creation of educational content, including textbooks, quizzes, and other materials. This can save educators time and resources, allowing them to focus more on teaching and interacting with students.
Tutoring and Support: AI-powered chatbots and virtual tutors can provide additional support to students, offering instant feedback, answering questions, and assisting with homework. This can be particularly valuable in situations where human tutors are scarce.”
(ChatGPT has given me a long laundry list beyond the above , and I’ve been prompt-refining from there — ping if useful!)
Jobs in education are comprised of tasks and skills that are highly exposed to AI. Folks who work in education get it, and are concerned about Generative AI disrupting their jobs ;
What’s an AI EDU institution to do? Lean in, and learn faster.
Invest in your people, and give everyone an opportunity to ‘learn’ AI now. They’ll marvel at the value of your investment;
I’m ready to declare 2023 the biggest leap forward in my 30-year career. That’s because working with generative AI has profoundly changed the way I work, what I work on and, increasingly, how I think.
Reward and publicize the creative first-AI-movers in your organization.
Provide every student an appropriate ‘learn-AI’ pathway asap.
Start LLM-ing your institution; make sure your data lake is all LLM-accessible and start using ChatGPT and other tools against your institutional LLM as it develops.
Full-speed AI.EDU ahead!
This is good from Harvard's Managing the Future of Work Joseph Fuller : ""AI will create the data that will allow us to do a whole lot more skills-based hiring by eliminating the taxonomy problem we have in the U.S. We don’t have the 8K employer committees in Switzerland. There are literally 8K committees that define what are the skills associated with each major job. And we don’t have federally controlled K-12 education, which provides some countries with a leg up. But when you’ve got AI looking out there, and a program director at company X and a project manager at company Y and a director at company Z—the people who occupy those jobs per LinkedIn all look pretty similar. And the job descriptions of those jobs have the same keywords. They’re really the same job.
Let’s say I’m running a multi-hundred thousand employee company, UPS let’s say. Now I can say what are the attributes of people who got promoted rapidly. And it isn’t, they went to Harvard or they went to Caltech or something. You’ll find, by the way, often they had highly rated supervisors. That’s going to allow us to match skills and experiences more accurately and to not rely on proxies like degrees or grade point averages or even the proxy of what someone currently makes or how fast they’ve gotten promoted on their résumé, but more legitimately based in an examination of what backgrounds seem to correlate with success and help with the upward mobility questions." https://workshift.opencampusmedia.org/the-future-of-opportunity-a-conversation-with-harvards-joseph-fuller/?utm_source=the-job.beehiiv.com&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=how-workers-rise
WaPo, w/ similar sentiments: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/12/ai-chatgpt-universities-learning/ "There is no better place to see the promise and the peril of generative artificial intelligence playing out than in academia. "