Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Engageli.com, a learning platform launched by Coursera’s co-Founder Daphne Koller in 2020, along with two more founders, announced yesterday its expansion into the corporate learning and development market (L&D) beyond its existing higher education business. The firm said it expects to deploy its first corporate solution for a client in Q3 of 2022.

In 2022, the global L&D market size will reach $357 billion, with $165 billion in North America, being the average worldwide annual spend per employee of $1,300, according to data company Statista.

IBL News | New York

An overwhelming majority of employers, 93%, say that “soft skills play a critical role in their decision about whom they want to hire.” This statement was made by Ian Siegel, CEO at ZipRecruiter, in the company’s recent report, The Job Market Outlook for Grads.

“Those soft skills include things like showing up on time, willingness to learn, enthusiasm, and a can-do attitude,” he added.

These are the soft skills employers have looked for most frequently in jobs posted on ZipRecruiter in the past 12 months:

IBL News | New York

The University of Michigan (U-M) announced this week the appointment of its new President, Santa J. Ono, 59, a biomedical researcher who previously served as President of the University of Cincinnati and Senior Vice Provost and Deputy to the Provost at Emory University.

Santa J. Ono will be the institution’s 15th president and first of Asian descent (he is of Japanese heritage.) Born in Vancouver, Canada, he earned a bachelor’s degree in biological science at the University of Chicago and a doctorate in experimental medicine from McGill University in Montreal.

He will officially step into the U-M role on October 13, taking over from interim President Mary Sue Coleman, who has been filling the role since January, when former president Dr. Mark Schlissel was fired after being accused of having an affair with a subordinate.

His nomination was voted unanimously by the Board of Regents during a special meeting on July 13 in Ann Arbor. (Under the Michigan Constitution, the board is responsible for electing the university president.)

His appointment followed a comprehensive search that began in February. A presidential search committee that included students, faculty, staff, alumni, and regents worked with the executive search firm Isaacson to identify and review candidates. An online survey collected additional thoughts from more than 1,000 respondents.

Dr. Ono is the leader of the University Climate Change Coalition, a network that connects 23 of the world’s leading research universities and university systems committed to accelerating climate action. He also serves as chair of the U15 Group of Canadian Research Universities, a collective of research-intensive institutions similar to the Association of American Universities.

“The University of Michigan is recognized worldwide as being at the pinnacle of public higher education,” Ono said. “It is a singular honor to be chosen to lead such an extraordinary institution. I look forward to embracing the university community and supporting their education, scholarship, innovation, and service.”

He has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, and University College London. While at the University of Cincinnati, he also served as a professor of pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

Ono will receive a base salary of $975,000, subject to annual increases at the Board of Regents’ discretion, and $350,000 in deferred compensation starting after the first year. He also will receive regular university benefits and supplemental contributions to a retirement plan, housing in the President’s House, an expense allowance, and the use of an automobile and a driver, all in accordance with university policies.

The university’s main campus in Ann Arbor includes 19 schools and colleges. There also are regional campuses in Dearborn and Flint and a nationally ranked health system, Michigan Medicine.

As one of the nation’s top public universities, U-M has been a leader in research, learning, and teaching for more than 200 years.

Ono is married to Wendy Yip, who trained as an immunologist at McGill and as a lawyer at Boston University. They have two daughters, Juliana and Sarah.

IBL News | New York

Instructure (NYSE: INST), the maker of Canvas LMS, celebrated this week its annual conference, InstructureCon, with 10,000 virtual users registered to attend the event, talks, and announcement of partnerships and new features. Instructure is one the last companies still celebrating a virtual gathering, despite almost all of the industry has already moved to face-to-face conferences. Next year, InstructureCon will take place in person in Denver, July 25-28, 2023.

These are some of the product updates on its learning platform:

• Discussions redesign: the user interface now allows for quoting replies, tagging respondents with @mentions, and the capability of flagging or reporting replies.
• Assignment enhancements for students: an improved submission workflow includes a progress tracker for each assignment, clear submission options, improved access to rubrics and feedback, and access to each attempt if multiple are given.
• Course pacing: a feature that allows the automatic distribution of due dates with different start dates based on an instructor’s defined pace, all to better support outcomes-based, or competency-based education (CBE).
• SpeedGrader and Gradebook improvements: updates that streamline grading workflows.

• Canvas Studio updates: Canvas Studio now supports media uploads from Vimeo and automates uploading from Zoom. With improved analytics, instructors can understand how students engage with course videos.
• Canvas Catalog updates: time-saving updates streamline purchasing and enrolling in courses, including in multiple listings simultaneously.
• Canvas Credentials: after the purchase of Badgr, the micro-credentialing tool was rebranded as “Canvas Badges” and “Canvas Credentials,” a suite of tools with unlimited badging, analytics, and personalized pathways.

Mastery, Instructure’s competency-based solution for K-12 assessment allows teachers to identify what students know and don’t know, standard by standard, in real-time when they can most influence learning. Recent improvements include the following:

• Enhanced Integration with Canvas
• Assessment content additions: expanded high-quality district assessment offerings in several states.
• Expanded tools, workflows, and accommodations: new text-to-speech options and improved reporting features.

• New Assessment Analytics Edition of Elevate K-12 Analytics: gives school districts the ability to compare student outcomes in the Mastery Connect AMS with state assessment results and to disaggregate by demographics and enrollment.
• “Group Perspectives,” like recently released student perspectives, Group Perspectives will soon enable highly-visual and interactive views of outcomes for student groups, such as classrooms, schools, English Language Learners, and more.
• Elevate Data Quality: planned enhancements include a new user interface and added features such as custom rule writing, user management, and integration with Elevate K-12 Analytics will provide additional assurances of downstream data quality in the analytics platform.

• Integration: Impact is expanding to even more products in the Instructure Learning Platform.
• Impact Virtual Assistant for Tier 1 Institutions (currently in beta): this will allow educators to intervene earlier with users and anticipate and resolve questions or issues.

In terms of new partnerships, Instructure announced further partnership integration with 40 popular EdTech solution providers, including AWS, Google for Education, Microsoft, Terracotta, eLumen Insights, Turnitin, Cidi Labs, Blindside Networks (BigBlueButton), Pathify, Terracotta, and InSpace.

IBL News | New York

A large language model (LLM) named BLOOM will be available for free as open source software. These models are used to write essays, generate code, and translate languages.

Its openness can democratize access to AI technologies, making a deep impact on society, according to experts talking at TheNextWeb.com.

It’d free AI from big tech labs that have spent millions of dollars developing systems such as LaMDA (Google) and GPT-3 (OpenAI). Training GPT-3, for instance, was estimated to cost up to $27.6 million.

BLOOM was an initiative bootstrapped and led by AI startup Hugging Face, with strong support from GENCI, the IDRIS team at the CNRS, the Megatron team at NVIDIA, and the Deepspeed team at Microsoft as well as the more than 250 entities (universities, startups, and enterprises) supporting the various participants of BigScience including EleutherAI and the Allen Institute for AI.

A research project called BigScience created BOOM in 2021.

The BigScience collaboration that created BLOOM was bootstrapped and led by Hugging Face

A team of 100,000 researchers from 60 countries and 250 institutions developed BLOOM. The model was trained on the Jean Zay supercomputer in Paris, France.

At 176 billion parameters, BLOOM is larger than OpenAI’s GPT-3 and MetaAI’s OPT.

The model can generate text in 46 natural languages and dialects and 13 programming languages.

BigScience says researchers can use BLOOM for less than $40/hr on a cloud provider. That makes it very affordable.

It’s available for free to any individual or institution who agrees to the system’s Responsible AI License.

“Large ML models have changed the world of AI research over the last two years but the huge compute cost necessary to train them resulted in very few teams actually having the ability to train and research them,” explained Thomas Wolf, the BigScience co-lead and Hugging Face co-founder.

“BLOOM is a demonstration that the most powerful AI models can be trained and released by the broader research community with accountability and in an actual open way, in contrast to the typical secrecy of industrial AI research labs,” said Teven Le Scao, co-lead of BLOOM’s training, in a statement.

IBL News | New York

Skill-based pay is one of the most effective ways to hire and retain IT talent, a survey from Gartner stated.

Around 10% to 12.5% of base salary would convert into premium pay. Individuals should continue to perform well to receive it.

Gartner says that an advantage of this premium pay is that it be flexed and adapted as businesses and markets evolve.

Beyond skills, the main way to attract and retain IT talent in 2022 and beyond is through compensation.

The Gartner Global Labor Market Survey shows that compensation is the No. 1 reason for IT talent attraction and retention today.

“CIOs must decide how to address skills shortages and whether to offer higher compensation, perks and incentives, training and reskilling to increase retention,” says the research.

The three effective strategies are:

• Prioritize raising pay and competitive compensation.
• Use variable pay components that can be adjusted or removed as talent needs and market conditions evolve. Common variable pay programs include skill-based premium pay, a signing bonus, and retention bonuses.
• Set effective pay conversations responding with empathy and explaining the value of the rewards, bonuses, benefits, and well-being programs.

IBL News | New York

The Singapore-based Genius Group, listed on the NYSE as GNS, announced yesterday the acquisition of the for-profit Lancaster, California-based University of Antelope Valley (UAV) for an undisclosed amount.

The closing was completed on July 7th, and it took place three months after Genius Group’s IPO. The group allocated $50 million for purchases since the IPO. An undisclosed portion went to UAV.

The Asian company said that it plans to build a Metaversity, that is, a digital twin of UAV in the Metaverse, “to deliver education globally in an immersive and engaging way.”

In addition, it will own an American institution with accredited courses and a central campus with in-person learning.

Genius Grop claims to host 2.9 million students in 200 countries, ranging from primary and secondary school students to startup founders and entrepreneurs.

Founders of UAV, Marco and Sandra Johnson, commented: “Roger — Roger James Hamilton is Founder & CEO of Genius Group — has a futuristic vision for UAV and we can’t wait to see where he takes the community and campus with his plans.”

IBL News | New York

2U Inc’s edX announced a partnership with Tulsa Community College (TCC) and Tulsa Innovation Labs (TIL) to fund a scholarship initiative called the Cyber Skills Center, intended to increase the technical talent pipeline in the area.

This scholarship will give eighty Tulsa adult learners access to free, fully online boot camp tech training programs in cybersecurity and data analytics.

The first boot camp cohorts — applications are now open — will begin in October 2022.

Boot camp graduates will enjoy career opportunities along with credits.

The scholarship is funded with support from TIL’s partner, the George Kaiser Family Foundation.

This initiative is part of edX’s Access Partnerships, a public-private partnerships program that connects colleges and universities with local workforce agencies and funding partners to offer adult learners affordable tech skills pathways. Programs currently active include Kansas University, University of Central Florida, University of Oregon, University of Utah, University of Denver, University of California-Davis, University of Minnesota, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at San Antonio, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Wisconsin Extension, and the University of Birmingham.

Since 2016, over 55,000 learners have graduated from boot camps offered at over 50 colleges and universities that are 2U partners.

IBL News | New York

The Harvard Corporation has begun the search for the University’s 30th president. For that, the institution has started to hear diverse views and thoughts from across the Harvard community.

The presidential search follows Larry Bacow’s announcement that he will step down from the presidency in June 2023, at the end of the 2022-2023 academic year.

Penny Pritzker, Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation and Chair of the presidential search committee, invited the Harvard community to submit advice and nominations of individuals for the role. Advisory committees of faculty, students, and staff will structure community input.

Penny Pritzker, a former U.S. secretary of commerce, civic and business leader, nonprofit trustee, and philanthropist, has served on the Corporation since 2018.

IBL News | New York

META, the social media conglomerate META, will open source a newly engineered AI model that can translate into 200 different languages.

This tool, called No Language Left Behind, is part of Meta’s R&D project to create a universal speech translator, which would help the growth of Facebook, Instagram, virtual reality destinations, and other of its social media properties. The open source approach — with the code available on GitHub — is taken to attract more technicians to the development work.

In an abstract, Meta explains that this universal translator is “driven by the goal of eradicating language barriers on a global scale” with the help of machine learning technologies.

From a technical perspective, “it’s a conditional compute model based on Sparsely Gated Mixture of Experts that is trained on data obtained with novel and effective data mining techniques tailored for low-resource languages.”

The model, that lays the groundwork for a universal translation system, achieves an improvement of 44% BLEU (which stands for Bilingual Evaluation Understudy).

• Technical Description of the Project (PDF)