AI’s Emerging Uses

A foundation-backed push on AI skills through experiential learning at community colleges, and a research group’s experiment with AI-augmented tech training. Also, a deep dive from Work Shift on AI in its play era, and the Cusp podcast’s highlights on what it all means for education and work.

Work-Based Learning and AI Skills

As a growing number of community colleges mull how to prepare students for jobs that may change due to artificial intelligence, a new project seeks to help two-year colleges offer AI-related experiential learning opportunities.

The experiment is led by Complete College America, a nonprofit group focused on student success, and Riipen, a company that works with colleges and faculty members to connect students with work-based learning projects. 

“Nobody really knows where AI is going to go,” says Charles Ansell, vice president for research, policy, and advocacy at Complete College America, which recently created a council to help colleges understand how the technology will impact their campuses and students.

However, Ansell says, it’s a safe bet that employers will want college graduates to have competencies in AI, and that community colleges will face more challenges than deeper-pocketed four-year universities in ensuring that their students gain those skills.

“Some colleges and their students will be left behind,” he says. “The colleges that have a lot of money are already doing this.”

It takes time to create degrees and certificates in artificial intelligence, Ansell notes, and that process is complicated by a lack of data about what’s needed in the labor market. Work-based learning offers a quick, low-risk solution, particularly when the projects are based on the real-world needs of employers.

Students can benefit both from degree programs that help them develop specialized technical, AI-related skills that are in high demand now and from more general digital and data literacy preparation that incorporates the latest wave of AI, says Philipp Schmidt, vice president of technology innovation for the Axim Collaborative. 

Yet experiential learning opportunities can be expensive to scale, Schmidt says: “How one might go about establishing a program like this at colleges that don’t have a lot of financial resources is one of the open questions we hope this project will help to answer.”

With funding from Axim, the project plans to create AI-focused experiential learning opportunities at five open-access colleges next fall, most of them community colleges. The goal is for at least 875 student participants to get a boost to their AI skills, with results that could inform the development of similar experiential learning projects at other campuses.

“We anticipate that there will be lots of demand for this,” says Ansell.

Keeping Pace With AI Adoption: The work-based projects will embed AI competencies that provide skills needed by the most at-risk workers in industries and job roles that will be disrupted by the technology.

Riipen, which is based in Canada, offers an online marketplace that features 35K employers and up to 6K live projects at any given time.

“Our mission is to eliminate underemployment,” says Mara Woody, the company’s director of strategic partnerships. She says Riipen wants to help bridge the growing AI skills divide, which poses a challenge for smaller employers as well as under-resourced colleges and students.

“Small businesses are also figuring out how to apply AI skills,” she says.

The typical approach for Riipen is to support professors and instructors as they augment existing curricula with work-based learning. More new learning likely will be in the mix for this project, given the focus on emerging technology, says Dave Savory, Riipen’s co-founder and vice president of experiential learning.

The projects will vary broadly across disciplines, with different options for students who are pursuing liberal arts degrees versus those who are earning credentials in advanced manufacturing. “Every program that we work with is going to have different stakeholders,” Savory says.

However, the experiment will seek to avoid creating new work for overwhelmed community colleges. Its leaders say the goal is to help college programs that already have value in the labor market keep pace with the AI adoption curve.

Complete College America and Riipen are on the right track with their emphasis on work-based learning that’s built in partnership with industry, say Julian Alssid and Kaitlin LeMoine from Work Forces, which offers consulting in workforce education.

“The key will be to ensure that the program can continuously adapt and evolve alongside AI advancements and ever-changing jobs,” they say.

Community colleges face unique challenges in technology adoption, say Alssid and LeMoine, including limited resources and faculty training needs. But the sector also is actively embracing AI.

The Kicker: “We see tremendous potential for community colleges to play a pivotal role in preparing the workforce for the AI era,” they say.

Intelligent Tutoring in Sectoral Training

Artificial intelligence can help instructors with course design and development, giving them more time to work with students. A new project from the American Institutes for Research seeks to bring this promising use of the technology to workforce training.

AIR’s partners for the initiative are Per Scholas, a well-established sectoral training provider, and the University of Memphis. The coalition is working to develop an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for Per Scholas and its tech training programs. Specifically, instructors will use the adaptive software to help prepare learners for certification exams.

The goal is to reduce the burden on instructors, says Samia Amin, AIR’s managing director for workforce innovation and learning. “It’s so hard to keep up,” she says. “The instructors are chomping at the bit.”

ITS systems have been explored in K-12, but not much in workforce education. Per Scholas is experimenting with the technology in IT training, Amin says, with interest in possibly expanding to the nonprofit’s cybersecurity program.

AIR is taking an ecosystem approach with the technology’s potential in workforce training, with an initial focus on early adopters. “You want the people who will go into the uncertain with you,” says Amin.

The research group will examine results from the project, to see if students fare better on their certification exams and whether it’s cost-effective for Per Scholas. Amin is optimistic that a strong case will emerge for scaling up the use of similar AI tools by sectoral training organizations, whose upskilling services will be in high demand in coming years, she predicts.

“They’re going to be much more important as AI and job augmentation takes place,” says Amin.

AI in Its Play Era

The months following ChatGPT’s debut saw a whirlwind of predictions about how generative AI would remake the world, but not much that was concrete. We’re still in a period of uncertainty, but some clear through lines are starting to take shape across education and work.

We took a step back to pull together the four big trends we’ve seen emerge across our reporting on AI this past year—and we’ve laid them out for you in “AI in Its Play Era,” a new Work Shift explainer. They are:

• More targeted tools are emerging for learning and work, and costs are coming down. The big challenge now—and likely into the future—isn’t so much access to tools for lower-income learners and workers but access to know-how.

• Growing numbers of colleges and universities are experimenting with AI, often with Big Tech as guides.

• New partnerships are cropping up with an eye toward shaping AI’s longer-term, systemic impact—especially around data and navigation. Other areas of focus include teaching and learning, student support, and AI policy.

• The federal government, think tanks, and philanthropy are pushing for a more prominent “worker voice” as AI continues to roll out across society.

These trends—along with targeted philanthropy—are shaping curricula and student supports, as well as experiments with skills-based hiring and navigation tools. More importantly, they’re laying the groundwork for bigger change to come. 

We hope you’ll check out the explainer and use it as a reference for your work now and in the coming months. And stay tuned for more, as this is the first in a series of explainers that will be looking at trends and sharing concrete examples of how AI is shaping jobs, education and workforce programs, student supports, and navigation.

Open Tabs

Apprenticeship Headwinds
Indiana faces challenges with its ambitious plans to boost apprenticeship, reports Casey Smith for Indiana Capital Chronicle, citing a paper from the Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute. The research group found no evidence of sufficient organic demand among Indiana employers for hosting apprentices. Program sustainability also is a challenge, one that can potentially be overcome with intermediaries as well as time, investment, and leadership.

Skills-Based Hiring
California is developing a massive statewide employment network to improve hiring for jobs in state government, and to attract and employ workers without four-year degrees, James Regan, California’s deputy secretary for workforce development, writes in Route Fifty. The biggest initial challenge for the state, which is among 21 to drop some degree requirements, is raising awareness about job opportunities through skills-first hiring.

College in High School
Nearly 2.5M high school students took a dual-enrollment course from a college in 2022–23, with roughly 1.8M dually enrolled at a community college, writes John Fink from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, citing new federal data. These programs comprised a third or more of total community college enrollment in 10 states and more than half the sector’s enrollment in Indiana and Idaho.

Tech Jobs
The software industry’s shift to the cloud and function-specific products has transformed a wide swath of jobs, Ryan Craig, managing director at Achieve Partners, writes in his newsletter. Jobs that were once entry level and didn’t demand prior skills or experience in a specific industry or with a particular job function are no longer accessible for college graduates or even candidates who hold graduate or professional degrees, he writes.

Digital Credentials
One in four jobseekers (24%) reports using digital credentials in a job search, according to a survey conducted by Morning Consult for Jobs for the Future. Covered credentials included digital versions of a paper credential or those issued by an institution or employer that display the mastery of a skill. Respondents who said they have used digital credentials tended to be younger, more educated, and wealthier.

WIOA in California
Some of the most popular job training programs in California that were covered by federal WIOA funds were for medical or nursing assistants, producing graduates who earned less than $30K, Adam Echelman reports for CalMatters and Open Campus. Trucking was also popular but often led to jobs with brutal hours and high turnover. Echelman reports that much of the training money went to for-profit schools that faced disciplinary actions.

Job Moves
Rick Torres, president and CEO of the National Student Clearinghouse, will retire in February after leading the nonprofit organization for 17 years.

Russ Poulin, the longtime executive director of WCET and vice president of technology-enhanced education for the Western Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), will retire at the end of this year.

Matt Hulett has been named CEO of StraighterLine, an online course provider. Hulett formerly was president of Rosetta Stone, a language learning software company.

Labor Day is next week. Hope you all get some time off. But this newsletter will be in your inbox next Thursday. Catch you then. —PF