Posts

, ,

Artificial Intelligence – AI and Learning Without Scars

Artificial Intelligence – AI and Learning Without Scars

At Learning Without Scars, we are usually ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. Our curriculum designer, Caroline Slee-Poulos, likes to joke that we were on Zoom before it was “cool.” When it comes to AI, the situation is the same. Ron Slee is giving an update this week on all things LWS with, “Artificial Intelligence – AI and Learning Without Scars.”

In our July 1st, 2024, Newsletter Ross Atkinson told us about how we have been using AI and where it will take us with this wonderful advancement in technology. As with most technological changes they create Paradigm Shifts. Methods and Policies and Systems must change. Sara Hanks eloquently covers Continuous Improvement for us through her blogs and podcasts. If you have read her blogs or listened to her podcasts, well, you don’t know what you are missing. 

www.learningwithoutscars.com

I wanted to talk to you with this blog about how at Learning Without Scars (LWS) our goal is to provide the industries we serve with a platform of information. That is what we attempt to provide under our Resources tab. There you will find our blogs, podcasts, newsletter, reading lists and today I am pleased to share with you a new option – Film Clips. More on that shortly.

At our core, our purpose with the company is that we are a School. We offer more than seventy academic credits at Technical Schools, Community Colleges and Public and Private Universities worldwide. We are the only IACET accredited business in our industry. We are enormously proud to have this status for our students, Centers of Excellence, Industry Associations, and Original Equipment Manufacturers.

One of the most important aspects of our school is our Job Function Skills Assessments (CSA’s). We have created very comprehensive multiple-choice assessments to measure the skills and knowledge of the employees doing the work for dealers, distributors, associations, and manufacturers.

One more thing, before I get into AI. In the last couple of weeks, a new font has been created to help people with Dyslexia to be able to read written documents and books like a more traditional person. This to me is a HUGE development. As time permits, we will address this font for our learning material.

Artificial Intelligence – AI.

It is becoming the latest craze, almost a fad. Believe me when I tell you it is not a fad. It is here to stay and will continue to evolve in ways that we can only imagine.

ChatGPT is very new. It was created by an artificial intelligence company in 2022. Perhaps as old as two years. We are now at ChatGPT 4o. OpenAI was a research company started as a non-for-profit in 2015 and changed to for-profit in 2019. There is still a free version as well as a premium version that you purchase.

At LWS we use AI in a variety of ways. We convert word documents to audio tracks; we use it to translate from one language to another. That works for one-hundred and thirty different languages. We use it to create subtitles that allows us to be in compliance with the American with Disabilities (ADA) compliant. We use it to provide transcriptions of our podcast and create social media pieces. We use it to create avatars, what we call “HUMANARS.” ( a word we have coined)

Ross Atkinson, who directs us in all aspects of technology, keeps us out on the leading edge of technology for the education world. He is truly an indispensable part of our present and future. 

Our use of Humanars is expanding.

We create film clips for social media. Ross created an entry point on our website this past weekend. We primarily intended humanars for our classes. Caroline Slee-Poulos, my incredibly talented daughter, coordinates everything we do from a learning perspective, our accreditation, our learning management software, our reporting and commercial interfaces. She has an extremely critical function to perform for us. Without her I don’t think I would have been able to transition our learning products from me being the “Sage of the Stage” teacher in front of a class to all products completely on the internet.

Our classes are undergoing a complete redo. We have had the two foundations of teaching in place since the beginning: Lectures and Homework. We have followed traditional education parameters for every hour of lectures the class has two hours of homework. In fact, we exceed that and always have. Check out our reading List on the website.

Each adult education and workforce development class consist of about twenty segments, they average about fifteen minutes each. Each segment is presented by humanars. Our humanars are male and female of varying ages and from various regions of the world as represented by the Olympic Rings. We have a pretest, to measure skills and knowledge at the outset of the class and a final assessment. Each class also includes surveys to obtain student evaluations of the classes as well as suggestions for improvement. as well as a few surveys. Each segment ends with a quiz. At the conclusion of our classes the student will have a very comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. We call all our classes Subject Specific Classes.

Now I would like to introduce you to a new member of our team. Joudeb Chakrboty, Co-founder of Virtualess IT is now driving all our social media. He is evaluating everything we do on the social media front, and we welcome him to LWS. He has asked me to provide him with five blogs a week and two film clips a week. (Note: As if I needed more work.)

So, at LWS we are becoming more and more influenced by AI. 

And don’t forget CoPilot, from Microsoft or Claude, created by Anthropic. Or there is Gemini from Google or Meta AI from Facebook. The space is getting crowded.

The world keeps changing. Adapt and adjust or be left behind.

The Time is Now.

Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
For our course lists, please click here.
,

How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Online Education

This Is How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Online Education

(And the audiobook industry)

Tonight’s guest post on how artificial intelligence is changing online education is from our new guest writer, Helena Sjögren. Helena Sjögren is a Swedish commercial executive and entrepreneur. With over twenty years of experience in global digital companies, fast growing start-ups and scale-ups she is one of the co-founders of the AI audio technology company Reedz. 

If I told you that you could have your one-pager translated into spoken words into 70 languages to be able to address almost every person on the planet.

Would you call me crazy then?

And what if I said that this could happen faster than a week at a fraction of the price you pay for translations AND it all is done by a machine that actually sounds human?

Would you call me insane?

I rather think not. I like to think I’m, at least, half sane. Let me get back to why later in this post.

We all have had our perceptions about how a non-human voice sounds, right? With the idea of it sounding like how R2D2 in Star Wars had sound if he could speak or something similar.

So, with the “how hard can it be?” attitude and some groundbreaking AI technology Reedz started to develop text to speech (TTS) solutions and as late as December 2020 the company was founded by a group of friends living in Dubai and Sweden.

The first step was to create an audiobook service with summaries of the best-selling management and inspirational literature and via an App to give listeners access on the go. As per today the content also includes other topics such as health, parenting and special content for kids.

We have created an audiobook service that is developed to suit knowledge-hungry consumers who are interested in developing themselves and their knowledge in an easily accessible way.

Assuming that everyone has a mobile phone and that the time to read for many is limited, no summation is longer than 15 minutes. In addition, we know that our target group is often very concerned about their children’s development, which is why we have created 5-minute fact books especially for children

Along the way we also saw a huge potential in supporting educators to reach a broader audience in their local language. This is how AI is changing education and the way knowledge is reaching beyond borders.

“To do this collaboration with Ron and Learning Without Scars is a great example in many aspects. Our library is enriched with Ron’s expertise and with our technology it is possible for more people to take part of Ron’s classes in their local language. Simply a Win-Win.”

So, back to the question of me being insane or not. With machines so powerful it’s possible to improve the quality of the translation and it all happens as we speak. You are in the middle of this evolution.

We have started to expand very fast. We have shown that technology, languages and our audiobooks work. We can reach a market of between 3.5 and 4 billion people in their home language at the moment but the target is beyond that. We will reach “all” in their first or second language this spring. No one else can do that today. We can produce audiobooks and voice overs at a pace that no one else can.

For us, this is also a democratic issue, we want everyone, no matter where you live in the world, to have the opportunity to share knowledge. Today, it is the already rich and well-educated who have the greatest access to knowledge and preferably in a commercially viable language. We want to change that.

There is a large knowledge bank in the world in addition to what the publisher companies provide who are just waiting to reach their recipient. And there is a big trend in the world that genuine and local content is something that a global audience wants. To be an enabler for that to happen, and to democratize the opportunity to learn is Reedz’s mission.

Learning is everything.

Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
For our course lists, please click here.

 

 

 

, , , , , ,

A Pathway to Learning

A Pathway to Learning

Learning Without Scars Classes

Since we started a business to provide classroom training for parts and service operations and product support sales and marketing, we have been constantly creating and redesigning what I have always called “Learning Paths.” A pathway to learning is what we try to provide to all employees to help them realize their potential.

With the classroom training we established the first pathway to learning with management and supervision. For this, we designed two-day classes consisting of eight specific subjects. We then developed the three-year program that had twenty-four subjects covered and taught. We offered this and conducted these classes worldwide for major construction equipment manufacturers. We did the same thing for dealership associations. In the mid 1990s we created a series of videos for dealer associations, that continue to be used in certification programs for parts managers and service managers. Clearly the methods, systems, processes and requirements in the past twenty-five years have changed. The modern pathway to learning is reflected in the creation of our skill assessments and in the evolution of our subject specific classes. Much has changed.

As I mentioned yesterday we offered Planned Learning Programs, which we referred to as PLPs. These were the three-year programs built for leaders in the Parts and Service and Product Support Sales groups. During the twenty-five years these were offered we have had over ten thousand people attend the PLPs – Executives, Managers, Supervisors and Foremen from all around the world.

Next, we created Planned Specific Programs, or PSPs in our shorthand here. These programs were designed for the people doing the work. The people that I call “Heroes.” They take the orders, pick the parts, pull the wrenches, inspect the machines, manage the assets, and drive the trucks. These are the people who serve your customers. These are the people that keep your customers coming back.

With this most recent change to our website we are introducing the next evolution of our Learning Paths. This has been designed to allow the individual employee to create their own individualized Learning Paths. As you will have read over the past ten days, if you follow our blog, we start everything with a job function skills assessment. We then match the results of that assessment to the four levels of skills: Basic, Intermediate, Advanced and Expert. When the individual employee selects our classes tabs, and the department in which they are interested they are asked for their skill level. Then, they will be presented the classes that our years of teaching and thousands of students, have indicated that should be covered to provide the employee the ability to improve their Skill Level.

As you can imagine this has taken some time to develop and put together. It provides each employee the opportunity to personalize their own learning, to select the classes they believe will address the “gaps” in their skills and knowledge. Of course, the Dealership and the Leadership can also be involved in selecting the classes that should be taken. That will never change.

Now we are adding additional tools that will allow us to have “Virtual” meetings with students to discuss the classes and, in effect, simulate the Real Classroom after they have completed one of our Subject Specific Classes. This is what educators are doing now across Grade School, Middle School and High School across the country. This is also now being used at Junior Colleges and Universities.

Education and Learning has changed a lot over the past twenty-five years. The changes coming in the next five years will be even more dramatic. No business, whether in manufacturing, distribution, wholesale or retail or business associations can rest on their laurels. There has been too much change.

The equipment has changed, exotic materials, telematics, computerization. The systems have changed now using electronic catalogues and shopping carts, finance and payment methods have changed with “Square” and Touchless Credit Cards. The arrival of Artificial Intelligence and Drones for Job Management and Control. The world has changed.

The younger generation is much better prepared for these changes than the older generations. Their time is here and coming. We either adapt our systems, methods and everything else as of now or face trouble. We, at Learning Without Scars, have chosen to adapt and it has been extremely exciting and energizing. Is this also an opportunity for each and every business across the world? I believe it is.

The choice is yours.

The time is now.

For more information on finding your own pathway to learning, please visit our website at learningwithoutscars.org