Volume 37, Issue 2, of the UNESCO IESALC journal Higher Education and Society (ESS) is now available to the academic and research community. The issue’s thematic dossier contains sixteen research articles; a bilingual article in the section dedicated to the academic community of indigenous peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean; and, in the general section, seven articles addressing various issues in higher education, its stakeholders, and institutions. The thematic section entitled “Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in Teaching and Research: Best Practices, Challenges, and Future Prospects” examines the integration of GAI from multiple perspectives. In the words of Borhene Chakroun, director of UNESCO IESALC: Drawing on evidence and experiences from across Latin America and the Caribbean, the authors explore the pedagogical potential of artificial intelligence, its impact on student learning and the professional development of faculty, emerging institutional policies, as well as the ethical and governance challenges associated with its adoption. Taken together, these studies offer a nuanced understanding of how higher education institutions are responding to the opportunities and risks posed by this technology.
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Anthropic sees AI risks rising, no plan to release stronger "Model 2" - Madison Mills, Axios
Anthropic does not plan to release an internal model they're calling "Model 2" that appears to be more powerful than top-of-the-line Mythos, but the company is not slowing development broadly, according to its latest risk report. Why it matters: Anthropic says the risks of the most serious harms from its models are still low — but not as low as the last time it issued a report.The big picture: Anthropic raised its broad estimate of the risk of misalignment in high-stakes situations to "low" from "very low," citing recent cybersecurity incidents. The company also said it is seeing signs of acceleration in models' ability to conduct automated research and development — which could advance technical progress but also be misused in the wrong hands.
"As part of our standard R&D process, we internally train and evaluate many different exploratory versions of models that we don't intend to release. Model 2 is one of these," the company told Axios.
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
AI agents are sitting through students’ online courses, and colleges are struggling to stop them - Varun Mirchandani, Digital Trends
AI cheating has already gone from asking a chatbot to write an essay to using tools that can make that AI-written work look human. We’ve previously talked about AI tools designed to help students cheat and the growing problem of AI detectors struggling to keep up, as well as how commonly students are already using AI for homework. Now the technology isn’t merely helpiing students do the work. In some cases, it can effectively be the student. Just tell the AI to take the class. According to a New York Times report by Dana Goldstein and Alan Blinder, students can take things a step further and hand an entire online course over to an AI agent. As per the report, AI agents can be given simple instructions such as “log in and complete my quiz” and then operate inside online learning platforms. They can watch prerecorded lectures, take tests, write papers, and even participate in discussions with classmates.
Opinion: Why Universities Need AI Accountability, Not Bans - Marcel Folaron, GovTech
The question facing colleges is no longer whether students will use artificial intelligence, but whether they will use it responsibly. A 2025 EDUCAUSE survey found that 42 percent of students were already turning to generative AI at least weekly. As these tools become more common in both education and the workplace, students need to know how to evaluate the answers they receive. Universities initially focused on defining acceptable use and detecting AI-generated work. The next challenge is accuracy. Detection may show that AI contributed to an assignment, but it cannot determine whether the student understood the material or verified the evidence. That matters because AI can hallucinate and invent a journal article, distort a study’s findings, or cite a source that doesn’t exist, all with convincing authority. With that in mind, higher-education institutions should now focus on building accountability into AI use.
Monday, August 24, 2026
Using AI to create the practice opportunities online students need - Kathy Miller Perkins, Times Higher Education
For disciplines that depend on interpersonal skills such as communication, leadership, negotiation and mediation, AI can provide elusive experiential learning, particularly in asynchronous environments. For years, I faced a challenge familiar to many instructors who teach asynchronously online. My students were learning the concepts, reflecting deeply and developing new perspectives, but they weren’t getting enough opportunities to practise the interpersonal skills they would need in their careers. As a psychologist by training who teaches leadership and conflict resolution in sustainability-focused programmes, much of my work centres on helping students navigate complex environmental challenges.
The AI Literacy Test Higher Education Must Not Fail” Op-Ed Featured in Washington Examiner - Cornerstone University
“To be literate in AI is not merely to know how to type a good prompt,” Dr. Moreno-Riaño said. “It is to know when to trust an output, when to verify it, and when to reject it . . . [and] to understand the moral ramifications of the choices we make with these systems and to act in harmony with what is genuinely good for us as human beings.” The op-ed follows President Moreno-Riaño’s recent Fox News interview, which featured Cornerstone’s commitment to preparing graduates with the knowledge, wisdom, judgment and character to remain irreplaceable in an AI-driven world. President Moreno-Riaño points to two recent national polls showing that Americans see AI as both a major opportunity and a technology that requires safeguards. At the same time, according to Pew Research Center, approximately 70% of U.S. adults are already using various AI tools. Students, workers, patients and voters are interacting with AI every day, yet few have been formally taught how to evaluate what it tells them.
Sunday, August 23, 2026
AI in Nebraska education: Higher ed looks to human-centric approach to integrate artificial intelligence - Jolie Peal, Nebraska Public Media News
“The University of Nebraska is vast,” Adrian Wisnicki, co-director of the AI institute and a professor in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said. “There are 50,000 students, 10,000 faculty and staff, and so, as much as possible, [the executive vice president and provost] wanted to, in the leadership of the institute, represent the diversity of that and create a leadership that could engage with and speak to and support that diversity.” About 90% of students in higher education use AI occasionally in class, according to a survey from Instructure, the company that launched the education platform Canvas, and about 60% of college educators say they use AI. With this rise of AI use in higher education, the NU system launched a task force to look at how the university should respond to the new technology. One part of that task force’s recommendations was to launch the AI Institute.
Here’s how to show students what responsible AI use looks like - Andrew Firr and Alex Fenton, Times Higher Education
To support, we ask students to paste part of the assignment brief into a GenAI tool and request a plain English explanation, then to compare it with the official brief. They must consider what the tool clarifies and which requirements need to be checked against the marking criteria. This approach positions AI use as part of assessment literacy while highlighting the authority of the official brief and marking criteria.
Spotlight guide: Critical thinking in teaching and research
Spotlight guide: AI and assessment in higher education
Can academics tell the difference between AI-generated and human-authored content?
Saturday, August 22, 2026
AI and Enrollment Pressures Are Reshaping Higher Education - Amy McIntosh, EdTech
Higher education is at an inflection point. The 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report identifies the forces most likely to reshape teaching and learning over the next decade — and the picture is complex. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it’s changing relationships across campus. Institutions also continue to face mounting enrollment challenges. And emerging risks related to cybersecurity, policy reform and sustainability are compounding institutional strain. According to the report, AI is redefining instructional design and how faculty teach. As institutions continue to shape their policies around AI use, it’s impacting student-teacher relationships in the classroom. The report notes that AI is also changing how people decide what information to trust, leading some faculty to shift the way they monitor and assess student work.
AI fluency: The next foundation of US economic competitiveness - Alexis Krivkovich, Brooke Weddle, and Maurice Obeid; McKinsey
AI is advancing faster than organizations can adapt. Reaching the next productivity frontier will depend on workers across the economy acquiring the needed habits and skills. Today, AI fluency is rapidly becoming the common language of work and a prerequisite for the next chapter of competitiveness. Workers’ practical ability to use and manage AI in their day-to-day, integrate it into workflows, evaluate its outputs critically, and, increasingly, create with it is transforming how work gets done. Unlike many earlier technological capabilities (such as cloud computing) that were relevant mainly to specialists, the demand for AI fluency is spreading across all types of workers, industries, and wage groups. What began as a technical skill is becoming a must-have capability for knowledge workers, blue-collar workers, managers, students, and everyday citizens.
Friday, August 21, 2026
Would You Trust AI for Ethical Advice? - Christian Terwiesch, Gideon Nave, Lennart Meincke; Knowledge at Wharton
No disrespect to philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, but Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch no longer reads his wildly popular advice column, “The Ethicist.” Terwiesch used to love the long-running column in The New York Times until 2023, when he and two Wharton colleagues conducted an experiment to see whether people could tell the difference between Appiah’s advice or advice spit out by ChatGPT. In a blind study, even experienced professionals — including ethics professors and clergy — could not tell whether the AI-generated advice was more or less useful than the advice provided by Appiah. In fact, random participants preferred the AI-generated advice 59.6% of the time. An additional study found that participants who were initially resistant to taking advice from the chatbot became more accepting as they were shown the high quality of the AI reasoning.
Rogue AI Agents Aren’t Evil. They’re Just Eager to Please - Will Knight, Wired
AI agents that break free and hack into other systems are only trying to make us happy. Artificial intelligence agents merrily breaking free and hacking other systems might seem like a sign of the impending machine uprising. In reality, it happens when we push remarkably clever, but also kind of boneheaded, algorithms to follow our every command.
Thursday, August 20, 2026
OpenAI is expanding its cybersecurity program and launching a new AI model for security researchers - Cris Tolomia, Quartz
OpenAI expanded its Daybreak cybersecurity program on Monday with two access tiers and a new AI model built for security researchers, as the company argues defenders face a narrowing window to prepare before attackers deploy AI at scale. The program now includes Daybreak Blue and Daybreak Red. Daybreak Blue gives approved users access to GPT-5.6 Sol with system-level cybersecurity guardrails removed, supporting defensive work such as vulnerability discovery, malware analysis, incident response, and patch validation, the company said. Daybreak Red goes further, giving participants access to models trained specifically for cybersecurity work, covering exploit validation, vulnerability research, and security testing, the company said. OpenAI also introduced GPT-5.6-Cyber, a new model available exclusively through Daybreak Red. Built on GPT-5.6 Sol, the model targets cybersecurity-specific use cases and is designed to respond to higher-risk requests that standard safeguards would otherwise block, the company said. In an internal evaluation, GPT-5.6-Cyber handled 95% of advanced cybersecurity prompts — covering scenarios such as exploit-chain development, authentication bypass, and privilege escalation — while GPT-5.6 Sol with its default protections answered just 1.5%, and the Daybreak Blue variant answered 2%.
Anthropic is embedding invisible watermarks in Claude text and images - Cris Tolomia, Quartz
Anthropic is adding machine-readable marks to text and images generated by its Claude models, a step toward complying with E.U. rules requiring AI companies to label AI-produced content. The markings are imperceptible to the human eye but enable people and platforms to identify when content has been produced by Claude. The company uses two methods. Text generated by supported Claude models carries an embedded watermark that Anthropic says travels with the content if users copy and paste it and may hold up through some degree of editing. For files such as .png, .jpg, and .svg images, Anthropic is applying signed provenance metadata using the C2PA open standard, which is also used by Adobe $ADBE -3.05%, OpenAI, and Google $GOOGL -0.54%, according to The Verge.
https://qz.com/anthropic-claude-watermarks-ai-generated-text-images-081126
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