Blogs on Improving Learning

tl;dr: Before you redesign your assessments, update your learning outcomes.

New prototype to share!

I’m a huge proponent of OER.

Generative AI tools have become superhuman in their capacity to discover vulnerabilities in computer code.

When I started blogging in the late 1990s, I wrote essays, marked them up with HTML, and linked them from my personal website.

Rather than imagining “prompt engineering” as a new form of writing that appeared *ex nihilo* three years ago, I find it helpful to think about the ways this new kind of writing remixes existing forms of writing.

tl;dr - Go play around with generativetextbooks.org and let me know what you think.

“Generative AI models don’t understand, they just predict the next token.”

Last week I had the amazing opportunity to speak at the 3rd Annual AI Summit at UNC Charlotte.

Back in the mid-1990s I read an absolutely amazing article that had a lasting impact on my thinking.

Human Teachers and AI Teachers Would you be surprised if you pulled a random person off the street, shoved them into a classroom full of students, and then found that they weren’t a particularly effective teacher?

The OELMs source code has been updated on GitHub to include better documentation to help you get started as well more examples of content and activities.

Or, in which Generative AI meets OER meets Reusable Learning Objects.

Since the advent of ChatGPT it seems like everyone is talking about Bloom’s 2 sigma problem.

Prelude The extraordinary woman who mentored me through graduate school and co-chaired my PhD committee, Dr.

This is the video recording of my recent talk, “Why Open Education Will Become Generative AI Education.”

This is the opening section of my September 19, 2024 presentation, Why Open Education Will Become Generative AI Education.

This is the middle section of my September 19, 2024 presentation, Why Open Education Will Become Generative AI Education.

All of the analysis, design, and development that happen in conjunction with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and fine-tuning of large language models is instructional design.

A significant amount of time, effort, and resources go into training large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions.

Over four years ago I described what I called the Musician’s Rule.

As recently as the early 1990s getting your thoughts and ideas out into the world at any kind of scale required finding a publisher that would agree to publish your work.

Large language models (LLMs) make it possible for faculty to rapidly create a wide range of formative and summative assessments for their students.

The Open Source Initiative, which has been the steward of the Open Source Definition since 1998, is leading a multi-stakeholder initiative to define Open Source AI.

It is absolutely critical that everyone who cares about technology-mediated learning understand this point.

The earlier we all start thinking about this problem, the sooner we can start generating ideas and potential solutions.

UPDATE: In a discussion about this post on LinkedIn, the following points of clarification were made: (1) the Kansas State University fee I use as an example below is a course type fee_, not a_ course materials fee_, (2) faculty have to proactively ask the

I recently attended one of the community meetings discussing whether or not a national open education strategy is needed in the US.

tl;dr - In order to be relevant today and in the future, a national open education strategy must (1) know exactly what it is trying to accomplish and (2) deeply integrate generative AI.

There’s broad recognition that access to high-speed internet is necessary for success in school, work, etc.

As I’ve been (re-)reading OER adoption research through a more critical lens I’m seeing a recurring pattern of significant threats to validity in the designs of studies purporting to measure the impact of OER adoption on student outcomes.

Preparing to participate in a panel on generative AI and education at this week’s AECT convention gave me the excuse to carve out some dedicated time to think about the question, “how would you summarize the impact generative AI is going to have on educat…

One of the main concerns about generative AI is “cheating,” or students getting credit for work they didn’t do.

I’ve found this to be a useful analogy for understanding what it means for generative AI to be “open”: Operating systems can be proprietary or open source.

If you’re not listening to the Latent Space podcast, you’re missing some of the best thinking on generative AI happening right now.

Last week I asked a “What if?”

There was some interest in my post yesterday about what I called “generative textbooks,” but based on people’s comments I don’t know that I explained the idea very clearly.

I’ve limited myself to one hour of writing for this post, so it’s more a collection of thoughts than a coherent narrative.

Our work at Lumen is focused on eliminating race and income as predictors of student success in the US postsecondary setting.

If you can remember the web of 30 years ago(!)

At some point over the last decade, open educational resources (OER) advocacy in US higher education became zero textbook costs (ZTC) advocacy.

The journal Nature, and all other Springer Nature titles, have updated their Guide to Authors with rules for using LLMs like ChatGPT when writing research articles for the publication.

2022 saw some significant advancements in artificial intelligence.

I missed this when it was first published, but a few months ago Ithaka S+R shared the results of their Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2021.

Treadmills are iconic pieces of exercise equipment for the wrong reason.

[caption id=“attachment_7070” align=“alignright” width=“167”] https://cheezburger.com/8016802816.

I’ve been writing this article 30 minutes here and 60 minutes there for several months (Wordpress tells me I saved the first bits in March).

A few thoughts about why improving student learning in the US higher ed context is so hard to do.

I’ve been interested in sustainability models for OER for decades.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years working with doctoral students as they search for “the question” that will guide their graduate studies and, eventually, their dissertation work.