This year's Thursday awards luncheon featured Michael King, representative with the IBM Watson project. Michael spoke on how big data can/will transform education. The IBM Watson project is the merger of big data and artificial intelligence to create a question answering supercomputer. King spoke of how technology has gradually risen over the years to become the most important factor within enterprises, particularly within higher education.
King pointed out studies that indicated the importance of maintaining and improving workforce skills, and yet there remains a mismatch in skills and talent coming into the workforce from recent college grads. A study from the Institute of Business Value found that over 50% of academic and business leaders felt that higher ed was not meeting the demands of students, industry, or of society.
King went on to say that projects such as Watson can provide insights into how best to bridge the student experience gap. One of his slides showed how Baby Boomers wanted speed with their educational experiences, Gen X wanted great service, and Millennials wanted convenience. And all generational learners wanted better outcomes.
And congratulations to this year's award winners for eLearning Advocate (Kae Novak, FRCC), eLearning Educator (Anjali Vaidya, CCCOnline), and the Learning Technologies Team Award (Mursion, UNC).
See you at next year's conference!
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