Artificial Intelligence in Online Learning
Ray Schroeder, UIS Professor Emeritus, UPCEA Senior Fellow
Illinois Online Higher Education Symposium 2024
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image - thanks to Adi Goldstein Unsplash
Illinois Online Higher Education Symposium
Illinois Online Higher Education Symposium
Please Bookmark! https://sites.google.com/view/online-ai
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"For those who learn, teach, develop, support, or administer online education"
Opening Thoughts - Online learning continues to be the preferred mode of delivery of higher learning to adult and professional students. Over the past nearly thirty years we in the online learning field have innovated and recreated the face of higher education in Illinois. Through our efforts, we have brought the learning to the learners rather than always requiring they come to campus. In doing so, we have sustained and expanded enrollments to many who otherwise would not have access to higher learning! Congratulations to you all!
Recently Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools and agents have become available to enhance the delivery of learning online. They promise to make our online programs more efficient, effective and flexible for lifelong learning. We will examine the opportunities that these advanced, smart technologies offer and the potential they provide to further extend and expand our online learning programs. We will share some perspectives on where we are today and where we may be society-wide by the end of 2025 and beyond. Personalization, adaptive learning and tutoring are among the top AI uses today. Agency, swarming, and greater autonomy are on the near horizon. I encourage you to use resources I share such as Ray's eduAI GPT Advisor , Inside Higher Ed Online: Trending Now , and the AI in Higher Education blog to stay up to speed and advance your work. I must note that much of what I share today is the product of the collaborative effort of myself and my great colleague, Katherine Kerpan, of UIC with whom I regularly research and co-author.
Learning Outcomes:
Where we are today in the use of GenAI
What we can expect in the next year
Powerful tools, podcasts and blogs to keep up with these important changes
Resources to share and present to colleagues and others
Where we are today
The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Online Learning - Rebecca Burylo, Faulkner University 12/2023
Artificial intelligence (AI) is growing rapidly, with generative AI forecasted to become a $1.3 trillion market by 2032. Many sectors have been leveraging this technology to innovate processes, including higher education. For colleges and universities, the impact of AI is particularly felt with online learning (eLearning). Faulkner University in Alabama offers numerous online degree programs. Here, we examine the role of AI in online learning to regularly enhance programs and better meet students’ needs. Discover some areas where AI is changing online learning.
https://www.faulkner.edu/news/the-role-of-artificial-intelligence-in-online-learning/
Intelligent Agents in AI Really Can Work Alone. Here’s How. - Tom Coshow, Gartner 10/1/2024
Today’s AI models perform tasks such as generating text, but these are “prompted” — the AI isn’t acting by itself. That is about to change with agentic AI, or AI with agency. By 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously. Intelligent agents in AI are goal-driven software entities that use AI techniques to complete tasks and achieve goals. They don’t require explicit inputs and don’t produce predetermined outputs. Instead, they can receive instructions, create a plan and use tooling to complete tasks, and produce dynamic outputs. Examples include AI agents, machine customers and multiagent systems.
Here Come the AI Agents! - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed 11/6/2024
Anthropic offers the new function that enables its Sonnet version to control your computer: “Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the first frontier AI model to offer computer use in public beta.” This is just the beginning of the next phase of generative AI. Over the coming weeks and months, we will see many platforms offer this capability to users. So, what’s the big deal? It is the equivalent of moving from an automobile to a self-driving autonomous vehicle. We have primarily worked with chat bot versions of generative AI in which we enter a prompt, the program does some research and responds via text, image, video or audio. That has been effective for single-instance transactional engagement. Yet, we have not been able to automatically create and complete a complex list of tasks on the computer that are dependent upon reasoning and prior actions.
https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/blogs/online-trending-now/2024/11/06/here-come-ai-agents
Setting context - an upbeat, positive essay worth sharing
Machines of Loving Grace - Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic 10/2024
Too long, we have been merely reactive to GenAI. We react to the latest version of tools as they are released. This essay is pro-active, giving us a vision of the future:
In fact I think it is critical to have a genuinely inspiring vision of the future, and not just a plan to fight fires. Many of the implications of powerful AI are adversarial or dangerous, but at the end of it all, there has to be something we’re fighting for, some positive-sum outcome where everyone is better off, something to rally people to rise above their squabbles and confront the challenges ahead. Fear is one kind of motivator, but it’s not enough: we need hope as well. The list of positive applications of powerful AI is extremely long (and includes robotics, manufacturing, energy, and much more), but I’m going to focus on a small number of areas that seem to me to have the greatest potential to directly improve the quality of human life. The five categories I am most excited about are:
Biology and physical health
Neuroscience and mental health
Economic development and poverty
Peace and governance
Work and meaning
For those who might not have the time to read the essay, here's Wes Roth's excellent podcast
Doubling down on the optimism as well as the advances in this insightful essay
Check out this NotebookLM "podcast" on the essay. Know that NotebookLM takes text, such as Amodei's 15,000 word essay and creates a two-person discussion (podcast) of such realistic-sounding, and quite accurate, discussion. While it may take nearly an hour to read the essay, this NotebookLM version is less than 20 minutes:
How to create a podcast with Google's NotebookLM
https://www.marqo.ai/blog/how-to-create-an-ai-podcast-with-googles-notebooklm
One more podcast analysis of Amodei's Essay - this from the NY Times "Hard Fork"
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the Future of AI - Douglas, AI Newsroom 11/8/2024 (today)
In Nadella’s view, AI is transforming how we learn and work, with implications for every industry. He envisions a world where AI tutors are accessible to everyone, enabling a deeper, more personalized learning experience. “The big novelty is that every student can now have access to a personalized AI tutor throughout their life.” This unprecedented access to knowledge, combined with the flexibility of tools like GitHub Copilot, opens doors for students, professionals, and lifelong learners. On the future of work, Nadella emphasizes that AI’s purpose isn’t to eliminate jobs but to improve the quality of work. By automating tedious tasks, AI allows professionals to focus on higher-value activities.
https://the-ai-newsroom.com/p/satya-nadella-on-the-future-of-ai
This GPT is designed to help you and other leaders in higher education keep up with the rapidly changing field of GenAI. I encourage you to ask: "In what ways will AI enhance online learning" - Shall we try that now?
For the same question, here is a link of the OpenAI-o1 preview version with cryptic notes of what it was doing during 11 seconds of "thinking." Of course, you can prompt it for any topic in the area of AI in Higher Education (or other question outside the area) that you may want to pose.
Here's one more question "how will AI agents advance higher education online learning? " Note that this time OpenAI-01 Preview spent 20 seconds thinking. Here's the response it gave. You can also ask that citations to sources used be included.
I often ask Ray's EduAI Advisor "Do you have a message for me today" Here's the response from last Friday.
The AI Revolution Is Coming for Your Non-Union Job - Molly Kinder, Mark Muro, & Xavier de Souza Briggs, Time 10/14/2024
During this election cycle, we’ve heard a lot from the presidential candidates about the struggles of America’s workers and their families. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump each want to claim the mantle as the country’s pro-worker candidate. Accordingly, union leaders took the stage not only at the Democratic National Convention, as usual, but at the Republican convention too. At the VP debate, J.D. Vance and Tim Walz offered competing views on how best to support workers. Surprisingly, one economic issue the candidates have yet to address is one in which millions of voters have a great deal at stake: the looming impact of new generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies on work and livelihoods. The candidates’ silence belies a stark reality: the next president will take office in a world already changed by GenAI—and heading for much greater disruption.
Now let's consider the impact of GenAI on your job and career:
Will AI Replace Course Creators, Online Coaches and Consultants? - Heights Platform
No, we do not believe that artificial intelligence is a threat to course creation and coaching. And here is why. Recently, there have been numerous exciting advancements in AI that have the potential to greatly enhance various aspects of our lives. Although AI is impressive, it can also be intimidating for many people, especially due to the rapid pace of these advancements. For creators of any kind, it can feel somewhat alarming how AI excels at creative tasks and can effortlessly produce work comparable to that of artists, writers, and designers within seconds. Even online course creators are not immune to this concern, particularly considering AI's vast knowledge from its training data. So, is there a chance that online course creators will become obsolete in the future, with AI taking over course creation?
Ray's response is - "Yes, in some cases your special qualities may preserve your job; in more cases it will make you much more productive to work with GenAI. We should be alert to the changing employment needs over the next several years."
https://www.heightsplatform.com/blog/will-ai-replace-course-creators-online-coaches-and-consultants
Top AI Researcher Reveals The Scary Future Of Employment 7/2024
AIGrid - Andrew Black
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs8BNPYtOA
My Last Five Years of Work - Avital Balwit, Paladium 5/17/2024
https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/05/17/my-last-five-years-of-work/
Geoffrey Hinton Reveals the Scary Future of Employment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrZktFfbUI
Two hundred years ago 80% of adults worked in food production in America; now just two percent work in the production of food. Consider how that magnitude of change impacted lives and the economy broadly in the first industrial revolution. Lower cost labor is now available through GenAI, and will become even more so, through wide-spread AI agents working 24 hours/365days without requirements of benefits. These technologies will simultaneously handle tens or hundreds or thousands of tasks. This will have an effect. Should we carefully be reviewing employment trends in the fields that our graduates pursue to ensure we are preparing them for continuing careers? How can we ensure we are not preparing our learners for jobs that will not exist? How will this impact our online curricula? Should we be offering more just-in-time certificates to enable workers to adapt to the changing demands of the workplace? Will Universal Basic Income (UBI) be an answer?
AI Just Reached Human-Level Reasoning – Should We Be Worried - AI Revolution, YouTube
Learning to Reason with LLMs - OpenAI 9/12/2024
OpenAI o1 ranks in the 89th percentile on competitive programming questions (Codeforces), places among the top 500 students in the US in a qualifier for the USA Math Olympiad (AIME), and exceeds human PhD-level accuracy on a benchmark of physics, biology, and chemistry problems (GPQA). While the work needed to make this new model as easy to use as current models is still ongoing, we are releasing an early version of this model, OpenAI o1-preview, for immediate use in ChatGPT and to trusted API users(opens in a new window). Our large-scale reinforcement learning algorithm teaches the model how to think productively using its chain of thought in a highly data-efficient training process. We have found that the performance of o1 consistently improves with more reinforcement learning (train-time compute) and with more time spent thinking (test-time compute). The constraints on scaling this approach differ substantially from those of LLM pretraining, and we are continuing to investigate them.
Study finds LLMs can identify their own mistakes - Ben Dickson, Venture Beat 10/29/2024
A well-known problem of large language models (LLMs) is their tendency to generate incorrect or nonsensical outputs, often called “hallucinations.” While much research has focused on analyzing these errors from a user’s perspective, a new study by researchers at Technion, Google Research and Apple investigates the inner workings of LLMs, revealing that these models possess a much deeper understanding of truthfulness than previously thought. This finding suggests that current evaluation methods, which solely rely on the final output of LLMs, may not accurately reflect their true capabilities. It raises the possibility that by better understanding and leveraging the internal knowledge of LLMs, we might be able to unlock hidden potential and significantly reduce errors.
https://venturebeat.com/ai/study-finds-llms-can-identify-their-own-mistakes/
Consider that OpenAI o1 outperformed PhD holders in Biology, Physics and Chemistry on 448 multiple-choice questions written by domain experts. It is possible for LLMs to update themselves in content knowledge every day; what does that mean for PhD holders who are teaching while slipping behind AI in content expertise? How might this impact university research? Working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at a speed far faster than humans, what will this mean for staffing?
2025 will be the year of AI Agents - good description by Andrew Ng in Matthew Berman's Podcast
Consider how agents will change what we can do with AI? Could agents (supervised by senior faculty members) teach classes such as TAs do? Could they serve as advanced tutors? Could agents, directed to sources for subject matter expertise, develop courses ready-to-run on a LMS? Could agents simulate students with realistic differences in academic background taking the courses, then recommending changes to be more successful? How about synthetic students (labeled as such) in your discussion boards to represent the backgrounds (e.g. urban or rural) that are not well represented in your class. Of course, they can enter into written or voiced discussions (perhaps even debates)!
Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, with his vision of agents on Matthew Berman's Podcast
How to Install and Use Anthropic's New Agent - Matt Wolfe, YouTube 10/23/2024
OpenAI Releases Swarm: An Experimental AI Framework for Building, Orchestrating, and Deploying Multi-Agent Systems - Asif Razzaq, MarktechPost 10/11/2024
Swarm’s strength lies in its two primitive abstractions: agents and handoffs. An agent in Swarm is a combination of specific instructions and tools that it can use to accomplish a task. At any point during its process, an agent has the ability to “hand off” a conversation or task to another agent, which makes the orchestration seamless and modular. This abstraction not only enables complex interactions among different agents but also ensures that the overall coordination remains under tight control. By leveraging these elements, Swarm is able to keep the coordination and execution processes lightweight, making it a highly testable framework. Additionally, Swarm is built on top of ChatCompletions, which provides a robust and versatile foundation, enabling developers to create and deploy multi-agent systems without unnecessary overhead.
Imagine thousands, millions or more agents available on demand. Imagine individual agents specialized in different aspects of online course design, development and assessment. How will these intelligent entities advance our work in higher education? Will they reduce costs and advance productivity? (remember they are working non-stop 24 hours a day) What tasks related to online learning do you look forward to handing off to your personal AI agent?
Embodied AI Future:
Boston Dynamics, Toyota Research Institute Team on Humanoid Robots - Liz Hughes, AI Business
Boston Dynamics said the project will combine the physical capabilities of its electric Atlas robot, along with its ability to be programmed and teleoperated to allow researchers to deploy it across a range of tasks to collect performance data that will be used to support the training of advanced LBMS to show that “large, pre-trained models can enable the rapid acquisition of new robust, dexterous, whole-body skills.” Additionally, Boston Dynamics and TRI plan to conduct research to address key training questions for humanoid robots, explore how research models can leverage whole-body sensing and understand human-robot interaction along with safety and assurance measures to support these new capabilities.
https://aibusiness.com/automation/boston-dynamics-toyota-research-institute-team-on-humanoid-robots
All New Atlas by Boston Dynamics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M
Optimus Robot by Tesla
Consider how "embodiment" of AI in agile robots might extend the potential for use on campus. How might they serve in libraries? How might they serve in lab classes? What other applications at universities might benefit from an agile, super-strong, physical presence?
Peter Diamandis Moonshots with Emad Mostaque, former CEO of Stability and author of "How to Think About AI" on AI in 2025
What Studies Reveal about AI Empathy 10/5/2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zYpHInjkyU
Consider this, "What agents are we letting into our inner circle?" Are they friendly, empathetic and dedicated to our needs, or are they serving the priorities of others? How can we be sure?
Consider our key roles in universities: Teaching-Advising-Research-Service. Imagine one year, three years, five years from now; how will our capabilities change? How can we best monitor and anticipate technological changes that can be applied in to advance higher education?
We - those attending this symposium - are the ones who must remain alert to the changes in the field of artificial intelligence in higher education in order to contribute to forward-thinking, informed policy-making at the institutional level. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is upon us with no less impact than any of the prior global shifts. We must help lead our universities into the era of the next industrial revolution of advanced AI. I am most fortunate to have the regular collaboaration and co-research opportunities with the ever-insightful, talented and energetic Katherine Kerpan of UIC. My hope is that you will find colleagues with whom to collaborate this field.
How can you keep up with the daily developments and trends?
How can you keep up with the daily developments and trends?
Online: Trending Now: Ray's bi-weekly columns in Inside Higher Ed https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/blogs/online-trending-now
Ray's Daily Curated Reading Lists and Social Media.
UPCEA Professional, Continuing and Online Education Update http://continuingedupdate.blogspot.com/
UPCEA Alternative Credentials in Higher Ed https://altcred.blogspot.com/
UPCEA Artificial Intelligence in Higher Ed https://ai-in-highered.blogspot.com/
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Brief Bio https://sites.google.com/view/raysspace/home/schroeder-bio
Contact Ray
rschr1@uis.edu ~ rayschroeder@gmail.com - ray@upcea.edu
UPCEA Senior Fellow, UIS Professor Emeritus
Tip for those who scrolled all the way to the very bottom 🙂
ChatGPT Search vs. Perplexity - Matthew Berman podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGjt4KyPZC4
You can add ChatGPT search to Chrome’s site search shortcuts. The advantage is that ChatGPT does not have "sponsored sites" or ads (!) - it summarizes the response to the querry and includes a list of sources.
Open Chrome Settings
Select Search Engine from the left-hand menu
Click Manage search engines and site search
Under Site Search, click Add
Change the name to “ChatGPT” (without the quote marks)
Change the shortcut to “@chatgpt” or a shortcut of your choice
Change the URL to “https://chatgpt.com/?q=%s” and then click Add
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