Prompt Engineering – It’s a real thing

I’m a Prompt Engineer! Well, that’s an overstatement, but I did successfully complete the course, “Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT.” It served a two-fold purpose for me. First, it provided a valuable opportunity to deepen my knowledge and understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) as I’m curious about how it will continue to disrupt learning and other aspects of our daily lives. Secondly, I found the class on Coursera, the largest Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider that offers more than 7,000 courses to more than 100 million students globally (19 million in the U.S. alone) in a variety of languages.

My prompt engineering course was taught by the Computer Science Department Chair at Vanderbilt University, and he was great. I was intrigued by the business model of charging just $49 per month until I completed the course. Initially, I had high hopes of completing the six-module course in one month; however, as is often the case for so many students, life got in the way, and the course took me two months to complete.

Given that most of my formal education occurred prior to the Internet (for real), I never considered myself an “online learner” and stayed away from pursuing any online offerings. However, I’ve been closely observing MOOCs for the past decade, witnessing their remarkable appeal to millions of people around the world. I was pleased with the convenience of blocking out an hour here and there on weekends to watch the video lectures, do the assigned readings, take notes, and complete the assessments.

It was interesting to assign prompt and audience “personas,” such as the role of a travel agent crafting a vacation itinerary, a 7-year-old requesting a bedtime story, a woodpecker learning to survive an Upstate New York winter, or an organization like MVCC reflecting on aspirations and apprehensions regarding its trajectory over the next five years. The practice of submitting prompts and asking ChatGPT to suggest improvements for those prompts also proved to be unexpectedly enlightening. It’s a strategy I hadn’t previously considered, but it sure makes sense and works quite well!

Some assignments were more interesting than others. I enjoyed the Few-Shot prompt pattern where I had to describe the input (such as a student needing to drop and add a class), instruct ChatGPT to “think” (for instance, securing the student identification number), and then direct it to take “action” (such as entering the student ID, securing the class schedule, and executing the drop/add process). With little effort, I essentially surfaced the basic programming behind an AI-enabled scheduling bot. This is why I love the slightly trick question — “What is the most important programming language for AI?” — the answer being “English.” It’s all about phrasing and leveraging the prompts to achieve the desired outcome.

The course went on to teach several different prompt patterns, including Game Play, Template, Recipe, Chain-of-Thought, Ask for Input, and Outline Expansion. My favorite, however, was the “Alternate Approaches” prompt pattern where I provided some context and asked for alternative perspectives or strategies. I thought of an AI career coach and described myself as a young college graduate interested in a 40-year career with distinct goals in a chosen field and asked for two to three job titles in four- to five-year increments throughout the 40 years. ChatGPT came back with four or five questions to clarify my interests, then provided an informative outline of three different career paths complete with relevant job titles to consider at each stage of my fictional career. Fascinating.

I still have a lot to learn about artificial intelligence — we all do. Its impact on our world is already palpable, and I believe it will only continue to accelerate disruption in ways that are hard to comprehend right now. Here’s an interesting opinion piece about AI (it may have the NYTimes firewall) and the importance of human skills in an uncertain future. While some people fear the potential negative possibilities of AI and others are excited about it (including investors in the stock market these days), I’m trying to stay tethered somewhere in the middle to see the pros and cons more clearly. Given all the unknowns with AI, one thing I do know is that I need to take responsibility for my own learning and continue finding ways to “muck around” in the messiness, building my understanding and honing my skills to successfully navigate an AI-enabled future. I hope you do the same.

If you have any questions or comments on this post, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu 

Small Bets – Innovating at the Edge

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified many trends that were creating disruption even before 2020 and accelerated elements of our society that brought the future to the present overnight. With enrollment declines and dramatic decreases in state and local government budgets, funding models for public community colleges have become more fragile than ever. Since 2007, the convergence of technologies has fostered the development of new and disruptive educational platforms, and this has only been magnified by the pandemic. Augmented and virtual reality, as well as robotics and artificial intelligence, are developing at rapid rates with tremendous potential to disrupt learning even further. And the ever-widening gap between the “haves and have-nots” in this country has grown to the largest among any of the G7 nations, with the wealth gap between the richest families and the poorest in this country doubling between 1989 and 2016. This has been made even worse by the pandemic — burying our most vulnerable students behind layered and intersecting barriers to advancement.

It’s enough to make one curl up and just hope for survival. It’s overwhelming at times to consider how fast everything is moving amidst such complexity. However, if the idea of making small bets — innovating at the edges of an organization — is embraced, an organization can shrink the change, as Dan Heath suggests. MVCC has been nurturing our organizational culture to continually scan the environment to monitor these macro trends and take bold actions to make small bets that will keep the College well-positioned for the increasingly complex and ever accelerating future. With partners like Jobs For the Future (JFF), the Community Foundation of Herkimer and Oneida Counties, and many others, we’re able to identify promising practices and rally the resources to launch minimal viable products (MVPs) and begin iterating our prototypes.

Securing the Financial Future of the Institution

State and local funding combined with student tuition have long been the primary revenue base of community college funding. Grant funding is mostly temporary and is not sustainable, so something more is needed. The MVCC Foundation created a separate Limited Liability Corporation (LLC), Tea Leaf Ventures, to support three social enterprises. If a social enterprise is a commercial venture that supports social good, why not make the College the social good? Tea Leaf Aircraft Exchange, Tea Leaf Manufacturing, and Tea Leaf Touring and Consulting are all in their infancy but hold great promise for new and sustainable revenue for MVCC.

Embracing Disruptive Platforms

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are disrupting the way in which people access content and learn. Coursera enrolls 73 million and edX enrolls 32 million individuals around the world. We are prototyping how to create non-credit to credit-bearing pathways for students to complete this content and apply it to their credit programs. Our computer science faculty created a pathway from the Coursera platform for the Google IT certification curriculum. In addition, we’ve also used the edX platform to deliver a non-credit leadership certification to students in our YouthBuild program at our Educational Outreach Center. As content delivery is changing, so is the transcripting of learning. MVCC recently launched the digital credentialing platform Credly to allow students to post their micro-credential certifications on their personal social media accounts like LinkedIn.

Anticipating Accelerating Technology

Technology is accelerating an incredible rate. Robotics, augmented and virtual reality, and behavioral “nudging” are all technologies of promise to increase student engagement and success. Robots have been the thing of science-fiction but they are increasingly becoming more prevalent in society. While some robots are available at substantial costs, MVCC faculty are working with the Cyberhawks student club to program Misty the Robot, which was purchased with a $2,500 donation. Misty will be available on the Rome Campus in the near future to interact with students.

Our YouthBuild program is implementing immersive learning technology through SkillMill Training through Interplay. We also implemented Persistence Plus this past Fall to connect with students through texting powered by intentional messages of engagement supported by artificial intelligence that is having a positive impact on student retention.

Muting the Impact of the Wealth Gap

Although College-Community-Connection (C3) is an important component in our current holistic student supports, it’s actually a “small bet” early prototype of what may very well scale to be a fundamental component in our future operations if the current national trends of a widening wealth gap between the “haves and have nots” and the growing complexity and stress of daily life continue. Ensuring that our students’ basic needs are met and that they can rely on the College to help make sense of all the learning options that will help them secure a good job or career will become more important over the next decade. C3 has all the makings of what will be needed if these trends continue.

COVID-19 has compromised our students’ ability to build the relationships they need to secure a great job and pursue the career of their choice. Our Career Services department is working with a cohort of about 125 students on a special LinkedIn project that will allow us to test a few things and gradually scale up the ways in which we get our students on the platform to expand their professional networks and build social capital for themselves.

Guided Pathways as Prelude

Guided Pathways is a comprehensive framework to increase equity and student success. Given the magnitude and scale of changes called for in the framework, it’s hard to imagine Guided Pathways would be a small bet. But if the trends of a growing wealth gap, decreasing support of public education requiring new business models, accelerating technology reshaping the student experience, and increased stress and complexity in society, the Guided Pathways framework is a prelude to the types of changes that will be needed 10 and 20 years into the future.

All of these small bets are in motion. Some are more developed than others, but all of them combined signal that MVCC is focused on how the present connects to the future. Making small bets like these positions us to learn with emerging and promising approaches to serving our students better and keeping the College strong and well-positioned in what will likely continue to be a very uncertain future.

If you have any questions or comments about this post, please contact me directly at presblog@mvcc.edu.

The Future of Learning is Already Here: Wildly Accessible Content

I remember the anxiety I felt in 2012 when it seemed every other day for several months I would trip across a story about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and how they were going to disrupt and fundamentally change higher education. When some of the most prestigious colleges and universities began offering their curriculum online for free, it was hard to miss the fact that things were changing. Fortunately, the headlines subsided and most higher education professionals took a cleansing breath and rationalized that MOOCs lacked a sustainable financial model and would soon go away — we didn’t have to worry about them. 

However, MOOCs amplified the fundamental structural flaws of modern postsecondary education — rising costs, questionable outcomes, lack of personalization, lack of flexibility, too much variability based on delivery by individual faculty members, and misalignment between programs and employability. Since 2012, MOOCs have indeed persisted to the point that in 2016 the three largest MOOCs in the United States earned a combined $100 million net profit and beat most every college to market with the concept of scaled employer-driven credentials. Check them out and peruse their offerings to see just how accessible and affordable they are, as well as the name brands providing the instruction — Udacity, Coursera, and edX.

Similar to MOOCs, the Khan Academy has infiltrated K-12 systems across the nation and is widely used (albeit discreetly in most cases) in higher education. With several large funders like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Khan Academy is providing supplemental learning through short, clear, and extremely useful videos on content across a range of disciplines. In 2018, more than 100 million people accessed content on Khan Academy’s website with nearly 5 million paid subscribers.

Another platform influencing modern learning is Google Classroom. In 2012, Google accounted for about 1% of all media devices used in public K-12 classrooms. With the launch of Google Classroom and Chromebooks, their market share grew to 58% by 2016. Colleges today are finding recent high school graduates arrive wondering why they must purchase large expensive textbooks when they’ve been reading short, relevant, easily accessible content online for the past four years in high school.

The explosion of online content and platforms like Khan Academy and Google Chromebooks have spawned the development of Open Educational Resources (OERs). The modern textbook is undergoing a complete transformation and is being replaced by online content — sometimes through OERs and resources like Collective Commons, and other times through licensing other online resources.

With online content so readily accessible and the power of platforms accelerating change, new models of delivery are appearing beyond MOOCs and OERs. For example, Udemy provides curriculum from independent educators offering standard undergraduate curriculum at reasonable prices. Straighterline.com offers the 50 most common undergraduate general education courses for a nominal fee. The curriculum is approved by the American Council of Education and offered through more than 130 college and university partners. In 2017, they enrolled 22,000 new students in addition to the 75,000 already enrolled and had students report successfully transferring their courses to more than 2,000 colleges and universities. While some may question their quality at this point, the arguments remind me of those I heard 25 years ago when the University of Phoenix, Walden, Nova, and others burst on the scene with online programs — and most of us spent the subsequent 10 years playing catch up once their quality improved.

The reality of wildly accessible content and people increasingly comfortable learning in varied ways is now facilitating the largest employers bypassing traditional higher education delivery systems (read colleges and universities) to simply offer their own curriculum to accelerate the development of a qualified workforce. Consider employer-driven content like AT&T and Walmart partnering with Coursera; Salesforce offering free curriculum to train associates across the country to take their product to scale; Google offering their IT Certifications; and the intense demand for computer programmers has prompted the rise of coding boot camps like the Flatiron School that is now approved for federal financial aid, Apple and their Everyone Can Code curriculum and Amazon coding camps.

MVCC is uniquely positioned to address these disruptive innovations because of the work we have done over the last several years. With the creation of a the Code Academy, the incorporation of the Google IT Training Certificate into our non-credit offerings and soon our credit offerings, and our current work in examining and redesigning prior learning assessments, we are ready to do the work necessary to stay relevant while maintaining the highest of academic standards. MVCC is the first community college in the SUNY System to adopt a Board of Trustees Policy on Microcredentials, and it is this kind of forward thinking — and our unique ability to take innovations and make them our own — that will help us thrive in these uncertain times. 

The future is already here. We must find small spaces to safely prototype and utilize some of these emerging delivery systems to eventually integrate into our regular, core offerings that in five to 10 years will need to dramatically change in ways we’re only now beginning to see.

Please send comments and questions to presblog@mvcc.edu.