"Higher Ed Institutions Need to Restore Americans' Trust," Said Educause

The Educause Nonprofit Association presented its Top 10 trends for 2025 on higher education technology, highlighting the need to solve the industry's trust problem. A majority of Americans (57%) distrust postsecondary institutions, and 68% think they're moving in the wrong direction. According to a June 2024 Gallup poll, the share of Americans who are confident in higher education has dropped by 21 percentage points in the past ten years. "The three biggest reasons survey respondents gave for their lack of confidence in higher education are poor quality or irrelevant educational content (46%), politicized agendas (41%), and cost (28%)," Susan Grajek, Vice President, Partnerships, Communities, and Research, for Educause explained during keynote presentation in San Antonio, Texas, during the annual event of the association. This trust problem is also reflected in how institutions use data and technology. AI is not contributing to increasing confidence. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer found that trust in AI companies has declined by fifteen percentage points in the last five years (from 50% to 35%) and by eight percentage points (from 61% to 53%). "The higher education industry needs to develop a strategy and approach to AI," explained Susan Grajek. "Trust has an emotional component and a behavioral component. We trust people and organizations we believe are authentic and caring. But that's not enough. We must also know that people, organizations, and things function well. Colleges and universities need to show that they understand and care about students, faculty, staff, and community members, and they need to work efficiently and effectively," she added.

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Microsoft Announced New Copilot Capabilities On Windows For All Users

Microsoft announced new Copilot capabilities on Windows for all users this month, including a tool that responds to questions about what’s on the screen. Also, Microsoft launched new versions, with a new style, of Copilot apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and the web. Another feature is Copilot Vision, which, installed on the Edge browser tool, reads and interprets the images and text it sees on the page for the first time. According to the giant company, “It can suggest next steps, answer questions, help navigate whatever you want to do, and assist with tasks, all while you simply speak to it in natural language.” However, it can interpret only the types of non-payment websites. An additional interesting feature is CoPilot Voice. Like OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT, Copilot Voice can detect the user's tone during conversations and respond accordingly. Users can interject at any point while Copilot Voice is answering. We're introducing new AI-powered experiences for Copilot+ PCs that help streamline daily tasks and tackle complex challenges. https://t.co/wquszOkSvU — Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) October 1, 2024

The OPM Industry Is On Life Support, Analysts Say

The OPM (Online Program Manager) industry is at a standstill after colleges’ interest in partnering with these companies vanished, according to data released by market researcher Validated Insights. Venture Capital investments for OPMs have disappeared, and colleges appear to simply be disenchanted with OPM providers. The OPM companies work on a revenue-sharing model through which they take a percentage, usually a majority, of tuition and fees for every student they recruit. In 2023, 147 contracts and partnerships with OPMs expired or were terminated, the most of any year since 2020. Only eight new OPM contracts were signed in the first quarter 2025 and 21 in the second quarter. Total funding for OPMs has dropped by 97 percent since peak interest in early 2021, and venture capital investments in the companies have all but disappeared. Validated Insights’ head of market research, Brady Colby, told Inside Higher Ed, “It used to be that 2U or some other OPM could ink a 15-year agreement at a 70 percent revenue share.” “Those days are over. Institutions now have the upper hand at the negotiating table.” Ed-tech market analyst Phil Hill said the sector was “on life support.” Last year, federal regulators put the companies in their crosshairs over their aggressive recruitment practices. The Education Department is threatening to regulate the OPM space more strictly, primarily by updating guidance for third-party services. For years, OPMs have been able to share revenue with colleges. This strict regulatory environment has played a role in the sector’s downturn. In 2024, onetime market leader 2U declared bankruptcy. Fordham University filed to end its long-standing partnership with 2U early last month after seven years of what the institution described as “incompetence” and “negligence." In May, Minnesota passed the first state law restricting OPM growth. This month, a student legal advocacy group sued provider Coursera and its partner, the University of Maryland Global Campus, challenging the legality of the OPM business model.

The Image Generation Model Flux 1 Made Available Its API

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Nvidia Released a Powerful Open-Source AI Model Named 'NVLM 1.0'

Hugging Face Hub for Fine-Tuned AI Models Surpassed One Million Listings

The Hugging Face hosting platform surpassed 1 million listings of AI models trained on data to perform specific tasks or make predictions. The platform started as a chatbot app in 2016 and became an open-source hub for AI models and tools for developers and researchers in 2020. In a post on X, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue wrote about how his company hosts many high-profile AI models, like "Llama, Gemma, Phi, Flux, Mistral, Starcoder, Qwen, Stable diffusion, Grok, Whisper, Olmo, Command, Zephyr, OpenELM, Jamba, Yi," but also "999,984 others." Delangue explained, "Contrary to the '1 model to rule them all' fallacy, smaller specialized customized optimized models for your use-case, your domain, your language, your hardware and generally your constraints are better. As a matter of fact, something that few people realize is that there are almost as many models on Hugging Face that are private only to one organization—for companies to build AI privately, specifically for their use-cases." Hugging Face's exponential growth into a major AI platform hosting fine-tuned models shows the increased interest in the field. Developers and researchers worldwide have contributed their results, making Hugging Face a large ecosystem. For example, many different fine-tuned versions of Llama models are optimized for specific applications. At the top of the most downloads category, with a massive lead at 163 million downloads, is Audio Spectrogram Transformer from MIT, which classifies audio content like speech, music, and environmental sounds. Following that, with 54.2 million downloads, is BERT from Google, an AI language model that learns to understand English by predicting masked words and sentence relationships, enabling it to assist with various language tasks. At the top five AI models, users find OpenAI's CLIP, which connects images and text, allowing it to classify or describe visual content using natural language. We just crossed 1,000,000 free public models on Hugging Face! That’s the ones the media covers like Llama, Gemma, Phi, Flux, Mistral, Phi, Starcoder, Qwen, Stable diffusion, Grok, Whisper, Olmo, Command, Zephyr, OpenELM, Jamba, Yi but also 999,984 others. Why? Because contrary… — clem 🤗 (@ClementDelangue) September 26, 2024 1M Models on @huggingface Hub 📈 Models are going exponential month over month and September isn't even over yet 🤯 pic.twitter.com/1NGRA4tqxN — Caleb (@calebfahlgren) September 26, 2024

2U's CEO, Paul S. Lalljie, Stepped Down After Less Than a Year

2U's CEO, Paul S. Lalljie, stepped down just weeks after the company emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. According to the company's announcement, Lalljie, who has been 2U’s CEO since late 2023, also resigned from his board seat. Lalljie [in the picture] served as chief executive for less than a year after succeeding 2U co-founder and longtime CEO Chip Paucek. 2U’s Board appointed Matthew Norden as interim CEO and initiated a search for a permanent successor. Norden is currently 2U’s Chief Financial Officer and will continue in this role as well. “Leading 2U through this period has been both demanding and fulfilling,” said Lalljie. “With over a decade of experience at 2U, Matt Norden deeply understands 2U’s business, its culture, and critically, the needs of our incredible partners,” said Brian Napack, Executive Chairman of 2U's Board. • News about 2U  

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Monday, November 24, 2025

Education technology today is marked by rising AI adoption among educators and innovative personalized learning approaches.

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Today in AI & EdTech

Monday, November 24, 2025

AI is transforming the education technology landscape as more teachers adopt intelligent tools, driving forward and adaptive learning experiences.

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