All this considered, a question has arisen from teachers of every discipline: how do we develop assignments that facilitate learning with AI constantly present? This question does not have a single correct answer. Different instructors have different opinions on the role AI should play in education due to their discipline or personal teaching philosophy. I interviewed two professors of electrical engineering at my graduate university to get their points of view in the context of STEM classes. They were both professors that taught classes in my electrical and computer engineering undergraduate degree. I knew beforehand that these professors had differing views on the role of AI in their courses. The following interviews seek to show that even in the same disciplines, educators can have different approaches to their course and assignment design when it comes to AI
Saturday, June 27, 2026
Opinion: Generating Some AI Clarity for Higher Ed and Beyond - Jim A. Jorstad, GovTech
The pace of development and proliferation of artificial intelligence tools - generative, agentic, physical - can be hard to follow, but IT leaders must do their best to stay apprised of potential innovations and risks. Some might say these are the best of times for artificial intelligence. Others might say these are the worst of times, if they're looking for a clearer understanding of the many forms of AI, its definitions and applications. Many IT professionals engaged in developing AI have a deeper technical understanding. However, there are faculty, staff, administrators and students who don’t have a clear understanding of the technology and how it may transform their education and future lives. Let me try to provide some basic understanding of the current AI terminology and offer some insights into its many applications in a variety of disciplines and situations.
Friday, June 26, 2026
Cal State faculty push to prevent AI tools from replacing them as schools and staff experiment - Mikhail Zinshteyn, Cal Matters
The nation’s largest public four-year university may soon be barred from replacing faculty with generative AI as a bill backed by a union of professors comes nearer to reaching the governor’s desk. Few examples exist of the California State University’s attempting to replace faculty labor with generative AI tools, but the faculty union wants to prevent such efforts from ever getting off the ground. The bill so far has garnered no opposition from lawmakers and may clear the Legislature as soon as Monday. “We do have some cases of the potential replacement of faculty work by AI, and so I personally am very concerned about closing the barn door after the horse has already gotten out,” said Kevin Wehr, a professor of sociology at Sacramento State, which is part of the Cal State system. Wehr leads the bargaining team for the faculty union, the California Faculty Association.
The AI-centric imperative: Navigating the next software frontier - McKinsey
The software industry is entering a new era—and it may yet prove even more disruptive than the software-as-a-service (SaaS) revolution that preceded it. The emergence of gen AI and, more recently, agentic AI is not just another technology wave; it is a foundational shift redefining what software is, who builds it, who uses it, and how companies are organized and operate. Gen AI alone is projected to unlock $4.4 trillion or more in annual value across the global economy, with software companies poised to capture 10 to 15 percent of that total—and agentic AI may well accelerate the speed at which this value is realized. But capturing it is far from guaranteed, and incumbent companies will face heightened competitive intensity and complex new challenges.
Thursday, June 25, 2026
An augmented reality tool for accessible learning - Cindy Lam, Sai Kit Yeung, Kenichiro Takei; Times Higher Education
Combining GenAI with simple augmented reality tools offers a practical way to support accessible, adaptable and interdisciplinary learning. So, how can we make GenAI more intuitive, accessible and relevant across disciplines? One approach is to pair it with simple visual tools. GenAI-powered AquaReality cards offer a low-cost and scalable way to bring abstract concepts to life, while supporting interactive and interdisciplinary learning.
Why did China just junk 12,000 degree courses? They were ‘obsolete’ - Aamaan Alam Khan, the Print (India)
Universities have been prompted to end some courses due to a rise in the number of graduates and low employment opportunities. According to China’s education ministry data, cited by Xinhua, higher education institutions in the country scrapped 12,200 undergraduate degrees between 2021 and 2025, after finding them to be obsolete. These were replaced by 10,200 new courses that are more aligned with the demands of the job market. This move has affected over 30 per cent of the total degree programmes offered in China. Most of the suspended degrees are from the fields of humanities, arts, management, and foreign languages, which are now believed to have become outdated. The SCMP report said that the new programmes have been introduced keeping in mind China’s economic development goals, with nine of them focussed on integrating next-gen AI into the real economy.
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Graduates’ AI fears fueled by universities - Erika Donalds, Washington Times
Commencement ceremonies traditionally inspire hope and excitement about the future — from both the graduates and the older generations sending the younger ones out into the world. Sadly, we saw the opposite this spring as the class of 2026 rejected progress and innovation by booing speakers’ mentions of artificial intelligence. Young Americans entering the most technologically competitive workforce in human history hear “artificial intelligence” and respond with fear and resentment rather than ambition and optimism.
Inside college AI cheating wars: extreme surveillance, false accusations, jarring confusion - Jaweed Kaleem. LA Times
While lock-down browsers and sharing screen videos are common in online exams, mirrors and body movement restrictions are more extreme. But students and experts said it is all a reflection of the chaos, confusion and fear a new technology has wreaked upon the classroom. “It just felt so degrading,” said Ashley, another UCLA sociology student who studied under the same professor, who required students to show their arms and hands. A UCLA junior, she said she faced accusations of plagiarism, incorrect citations and suspiciously short intervals for Google Docs time stamps after she said she drafted assignments in a separate notes app and pasted them in the day they were due. Online message boards are full of student complaints about policies gone too far, such as proctoring software that uses keystroke patterns, eye-movement tracking or facial scans to detect if students are using AI prompts.
Tuesday, June 23, 2026
Study finds detectors struggle to accurately identify amount of AI content when papers have been partially human written - Georgia Luckhurst, Times Higher Education
For the study, published in Education and Information Technologies, researcher Lucky E. Atamhenwan fed 81 sample essays into Turnitin. The scripts ranged from those that were 100 per cent LLM-generated – either by ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini – to those written solely by people. Turnitin did not flag any of the essays that were 100 per cent human written as being generated by AI. And in every instance in which the detector flagged AI-generated words, it was indeed due to the presence of LLM-generated work in those samples. But the software struggled with the scripts that were partially AI-written, consistently failing to identify the correct percentage of LLM-generated work included.
The race to reimagine higher education: How Canadian universities can lead the AI transformation. - Joël Blit, University Affairs
Universities are among the most durable institutions human beings have ever created. While a scholar from the Middle Ages might have found parts of the modern campus bewildering, they would still recognize the basic form: experts at the front of rooms, students organized into courses, knowledge divided into disciplines, credentials awarded after examinations. For all the technological change around them, universities have remained remarkably stable because their core product has always depended on something difficult to capture and mechanise: expert tacit knowledge. For that same reason, they are now about to be transformed. The real significance of artificial intelligence is not that it can write essays, summarize documents, or answer emails. It is that, for the first time in history, machines can capture tacit knowledge: the practical, experience-based know-how that experts possess but cannot fully explain. It is this tacit knowledge that has made doctors, lawyers, professors, and other experts so valuable in the current economy. Machines could not do what we ourselves could not write down. Machine learning changed that.
Monday, June 22, 2026
Leading the Era of AI - Michael Malone, Higher Ed Dive
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has pushed higher education to a crossroads, and a paradigm shift is required. Universities who expect to lead in this new AI-shaped landscape must reimagine higher education as a hyper-personalized journey for students, enabled by AI, interactive data, predictive analytics, and adaptive technologies from end to end. Integrating AI into every fiber of the educational experience is essential to this approach. Yet it begs a complement, one that emphasizes “human judgment in the AI era” to foster leaders who don’t just follow AI-driven outputs, but possess the critical thinking and judgment to explain, defend, or override them.
A framework for ensuring student AI proficiency - Margaret Ellis, Times Higher Education
Over the past few semesters, I have structured my teaching around a framework that helps students build that capability: demystify, use and reflect. Many students arrive with strong opinions about AI but only a partial understanding of how these systems work. Some see them as nearly magical tools that can produce answers instantly. Others dismiss them as unreliable or assume they are only useful for technical specialists. Demystifying AI begins with explaining the basic ideas behind large language models (LLMs) and related systems. We show students how these models are trained, what kinds of data they rely on and why their outputs can sometimes appear confident even when they are incorrect.
Sunday, June 21, 2026
Americans looking for proof of the value of higher ed - Matt Zalaznick, University Business
Americans need some convincing about the true value of higher ed. They “haven’t given up on college,” but institutions need to prove that what students learn will lead to civic and economic opportunities, says a new analysis. And the most important place to provide that evidence is in the communities surrounding campus, says the report, “Trust in Higher Education Starts Local,” from C&S (Campus and Community Solutions), a civic education nonprofit.“Higher ed doesn’t have a PR problem. It has a proof problem,” says the organization that surveyed more than 2,400 adults in the U.S. to examine attitudes toward colleges and universities—and to chart a path forward.
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