Do you think of the world as a safe place for all animals and plants? What does it mean for a species to be endangered? What animal or plant species do you know are endangered now?
Go to the World Wildlife Fund’s website and scroll through its list of endangered species. Choose three and find out their extinction risk status and what threats they face.
What is one important fact you learned about the species you selected? What was the most surprising thing you learned? What further questions do you have about the issue of endangered species?
1. Who wrote the United Nations report? How many sources were used? How many countries approved its summary findings?
2. How many known species of plants and animals are there in the world today? According to the report, how many are at risk for extinction?
3. What kinds of human activities are responsible for the worldwide decline in biodiversity? Give three examples from the article.
4. The article states that “in the Americas, nature provides $24 trillion of non-monetized benefits to humans each year.” Explain what that means. How would the extinction of up to a million species affect these benefits?
5. What actions does the report recommend to address the problem? Why does the report warn that “piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to set up wildlife refuges will no longer be sufficient” and “transformative changes” will be required?
6. Why will it be difficult to enact the changes proposed in the report, according to the article? What specific challenges do developing countries face in balancing economic development and conservation?
7. The article concludes:
In the next two years, diplomats from around the world will gather for several meetings under the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty, to discuss how they can step up their efforts at conservation. Yet even in the new report’s most optimistic scenario, through 2050 the world’s nations would only slow the decline of biodiversity — not stop it.
“At this point,” said Jake Rice, a fisheries scientist who led an earlier report on biodiversity in the Americas, “our options are all about damage control.”
Do you agree that it is likely that world action can only slow, not stop the decline in biodiversity? How optimistic are you that changes will result from the release of the United Nations report?
Finally, tell us more about what you think:
— What is your reaction to the United Nations report? How seriously do you think we should take their warnings? Make a case for or against, depending on your stance.
— What endangered species live in your community or state? (You can find out here.) How do you think you and your community would be affected by the predictions outlined in the report?
— What do you think should be done to address the extinction of plants and animals? What actions do you think you as an individual can take? What should the United States do? Which of the report’s recommendations do you think is most important? Which is most realistic?
— Research one area of human activity from the report, such as wasteful consumption, hunting and poaching, or illegal logging and fishing, and explore its role in the decline of biodiversity.
— Visit the Times Topics page for Endangered and Extinct Species and choose a species that interests you to learn more about.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex — better known as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle — on Monday welcomed their first child, a boy, the first interracial baby in the British monarchy’s recent history.
Here is why some are especially excited about this news:
Britain is 87 percent white, but interracial children make up its fastest-growing ethnic category, and will soon be the country’s largest minority group. The entry of Meghan Markle, the descendant of plantation slaves, into the royal family resonated deeply with many people of African descent, who almost immediately began to anticipate the birth of the couple’s first child.
What is your reaction? Are you interested in the British royal family in general? In this baby in particular? Or do you find all the attention to this topic mystifying? Tell us in the comments, then read a related article to learn more.
Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan.
Besides the deskbound staff, the title will employ a globally roaming band of contributors that form a creative team, including the designer Grace Wales Bonner, as well as Acyde and Tremaine Emory, who design the label No Vacancy Inn. They are the kind of people whose Instagram accounts make you click further to try and understand what they’re posting about.
“This is a new tier of person,” Mr. Brumfitt said, “these fascinating cross-cultural characters who are tripping around the world. They’re often doing far more interesting things than journalists.”
Many on this creative team mix creative and commerce, curation and marketing. “They are polymaths,” said Jason Gonsalves, the brand director of The Face. It is a blurring of lines that appears key to the new Face, one that reflects a shift in the creative class.
Do you know anyone who has lived and studied in a foreign country? Would you like to do that, and if so, where would you like to go? Why?
If you have spent any time outside of the region where you live — not necessarily out of the country — do you feel you experienced that place as a visitor or as a local? Would you say you had any “authentic experiences” there, or did you primarily do “touristy” things? Why do you say that?
In “Was My Study Abroad Experience ‘Authentic’ Enough?,” Claire Haug, a student at Smith College, writes about her semester studying in Amsterdam and the pressure she felt to have some sort of “authentic Dutch experience.” Her post begins:
On any given morning, I’m on my bike: zipping around tight corners and down cobblestone alleyways, dodging tourists while simultaneously trying to not fall into canals on my way to school in Amsterdam’s city center. Like any good Amsterdammer, I’m a pro at swerving and dodging, racing a tram and cursing out the pedicabs that take up the entire bike lane. I like to think that I fit into the cityscape — that at a glance, I could pass for a local, instead of a student studying abroad. I can ride with no hands, after all.
For increasing numbers of American students, studying abroad is a standard part of the college experience. Whenever I open up Instagram, I see snapshots of friends posing in front of famous landmarks with witty captions about how they’re not in Kansas anymore. But with it comes a certain set of baggage: the expectation that one’s time abroad should be “authentic.”
This has come up over and over again during the course of my semester here. When friends or relatives ask me how I’m doing, they often want to know: Am I having an authentic Dutch experience? But to be honest, I don’t know what it means to authentically experience a country or culture. At what point do you stop being a tourist and start experiencing things authentically?
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
— Do you want to study or work abroad at some point? If yes, where? And what kind of experiences would you hope to have while living abroad?
— How do you think studying abroad might be different from vacationing in that same place? Do you think there is similar pressure to live as the local people do when you are only traveling to a place for a short time?
— If you have already studied abroad, did you want to feel like you had truly lived in that place, as opposed to feeling like a visitor? Do you feel that you accomplished this?
— What might constitute an authentic experience for someone who were to visit your hometown? What would be the “touristy” things to do? Are any of those experiences nevertheless worthwhile?
— Why do you think being a tourist often gets a bad rap? And why is having an authentic experience so valued?
— About studying abroad, the author writes, “Some of my most vivid memories from the last few months are ones in which I felt vaguely uncomfortable or out of place.” To what degree does this resonate with your own experiences in unfamiliar places?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
We live in a time of rapidly accelerating advancements in technology. This can be seen in the field of machine translation which, over the course of a few years, has gone from rule-based translation techniques to neural network techniques to the most recent approach known as the Transformer—a novel neural network model developed by Ashish Vaswani and colleagues.
As fields like machine translation rapidly evolve, online courses must teach content that keeps up with the latest advances. How can educators in technology fields incorporate the latest research into their teaching and make complex ideas accessible to learners?
In this article, we illustrate how to apply Coursera’s pedagogy best practices to an approach adopted by the deeplearning.ai team for crafting lessons based on the latest research.
Assessing the Current Literature
The first step is to assess the research literature to determine what advances are worth teaching. As you read research in your field, ask yourself these three questions.
This paper made a substantial impact on machine translation techniques by allowing for faster computation and better results. Previous models relied on a general-purpose encoder-decoder framework. In that previous framework, translating an English sentence (e.g., I am happy because I am learning) into its Arabic equivalent (أنا سعيد لأنني أتعلم) would first require processing “I am happy because I am” before translating the word “learning.” This sequential computation takes time.
The Transformer model introduced a way to use parallel computing to achieve this task much more quickly, representing an important breakthrough in machine translation techniques.
2.Are the ideas useful in industry?
Answering this question allows us to understand the incentives for teaching a new approach.
Prior to 2014, Google used statistical machine translation for their Google translate system and then moved to neural machine translation. But today, their engineers have adopted the Transformer framework. This will have profound impact on how machine translation is used industry-wide as demand continues to grow for effective machine translation tools.
According to Grand View Research, the machine translation market is expected to reach $983.3 million by 2022. Learners entering this market obviously need to be well-versed in the latest machine translation techniques. Since the Transformer model was developed by engineers working at Google who have started to implement it in their own translation systems, the ideas are clearly relevant to industry applications.
3.Will the ideas stand the test of time?
No one wants to spend time learning something that will become obsolete in the next few months. So before deciding whether to teach the latest research, it’s important to consider the value of doing so for learners entering a fast-evolving field.
Vasawani and colleagues’ paper is one of the first research papers to not only introduce parallel computing to machine translation tasks but to also show how to reduce sequential computation in those tasks. It marks a transition into a new era of machine translation.
The foundational nature of the paper means others will continue to build upon its ideas. Teaching the ideas will allow learners to start with a solid foundation in the current state of the art even as the field continues to rapidly evolve.
Developing Assignments and Lectures
Once you’ve identified current research advances you want to incorporate into your course, the next step is to use Coursera’s “backwards design” approach to create a lesson that aligns learning objectives with appropriate assignments and instructional materials.
1.Define the Learning Objectives
Learning objectives should use specific, measurable action verbs to clearly define the desired outcome for learners (e.g., By the end of this lesson, you will be able to apply the Transformer model to a machine translation problem). Once the end goal is defined, then work backwards to develop an assessment that will allow learners to demonstrate that outcome.
2.Create the assessment
Based on the learning objective above, we might create an assessment where learners need to write code for our previously mentioned translation problem—translating the English sentence (I am happy because I am learning) into Arabic (أنا سعيد لأنني أتعلم).
In this task, we want the learners to focus on writing code that brings the most value to the new Transformer model—in this case, we want them to write code that allows for parallel computing in this machine translation problem. To scaffold this task, we might provide them with some starter code. In the instructions, we would direct them to add the code for parallel computing according to the techniques of the Transformer model.
3.Create the lectures
The final step in the “backwards design” process is to devise the instructional materials that will teach the concepts and skills learners need to know to be successful in the assessment.
In our case, we want learners to code a particular part of the Transformer model. So, we need to develop lectures that explain the “self-attention” mechanism and demonstrate how it is used for parallel computing.
The key concepts and skills learners need to know will be presented in videos of 4-7 minutes in length. Each short video lecture will cover a particular idea. When stacked together, they will provide the instruction the learners need to be successful in the assessment and to fulfill the intended learning outcome.
Machine translation is certainly not the only field that is rapidly evolving. All technology educators are faced with the challenge of keeping course content fresh and relevant. Adapt the ideas found here to your own domain of expertise to keep your courses aligned with the latest advances in your field.
Younes Bensouda Mourri teaches courses in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and AI pedagogy at Stanford University where he is a graduate student. He developed content for Coursera’s most popular Machine Learning and Deep Learning courses.
Adam Hodges, Ph.D., is a Sr. Teaching & Learning Specialist at Coursera. He works with university and industry partners to help them produce effective courses on Coursera.
Eric lost his career, home, and the ability to pursue his degree due to a serious illness. His decision to pursue the Google IT Support Professional Certificate helped him regain his footing.
My name is Eric and I live in the state of Oregon. When I was thirty years old, I decided to go back to school to get a degree in communications. Unfortunately, I had health issues that interrupted my plan repeatedly. As my condition got worse, I lost several jobs as well as the opportunity to finish up school. When I started to feel healthier I made a third attempt to finish my education. At the same time, I also got a job as a sales account manager for a computer company in Salem, Oregon. A few months into the job, I suffered severe intestinal problems and was hospitalized for a week. I wasn’t able to finish school or keep the job.
By the end of 2017, I had lost everything: my house, my savings, everything that mattered most. I spiraled into a dark place. I felt like a failure; I couldn’t finish anything I started. I was really stuck. Around the same time, I learned about the Google IT Support Professional Certificate and decided to enroll in early 2018. The Google program gave me purpose again as well as a goal for me to actually complete at my own pace.
After many years of feeling like I could never finish anything, my goals to complete my certificate helped change my determination and outlook. It was incredible to finish the program and document my progress on social media. I took my work seriously, and each time I finished a section, life seemed to get a little better.
Sharing my story helps remind me of how far I have come. It gives me the strength to keep going.My advice to those who are struggling would be to find a goal, no matter how small, and to make it a priority.
I recently had the pleasure of attending the 2019 Coursera Partners Conference in London, where we brought together academic, business and tech pioneers in a two-day celebration of learning. Amongst guest speakers were Thomas Friedman, Yale University, the Abu Dhabi Dhabi School of Government, AXA, Novartis, Coursera Co-Founder Andrew Ng, and many more.
Throughout the event, I met with over 40 Coursera business customers who exchanged insights with executive leaders in our enterprise track. The experience and results were truly inspirational, and worth sharing in the spirit of learning.
Here are my five key takeaways:
1. Technological change is outpacing human adaptability, and not just jobs are at stake.
As a result of global competition, AI and technological acceleration, it’s no longer viable to simply do what we did before. Virtually every job is undergoing change and is at risk of being outsourced or automated out (in full or part). We need to adapt to the changes around us or risk being left behind. To do so, we need to engage in smarter learning, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. Wherever you are, you need to invest in developing and transforming skills at an increasingly sophisticated rate, as the useful lifetime for a skill continues to diminish over time. Where previous generations could look forward to a future of learn, work, retire, the current world of work is far more cyclical. For many employees the pattern is a more continual flow of learn, work, change, learn, work, change – and with longer life expectancy, this pattern will take us through a longer work journey than ever before. The concept of lifelong learning has been around for some time, but we’re seeing more and more organizations embracing this philosophy and building a social contract where employees who invest in self-development will have greater opportunities for longevity in the workplace.
2. To stay in the game, L&D leaders must foster a self-learning organization.
Empower your teams to be lifelong learners and you empower lifelong employees. During one of our classroom breakouts, Stephanie Ricci, Chief Learning Officer at Axa, explained, “If you can build a lifelong learning journey that can improve daily work and lifelong engagement, you unlock the secret to success.”
How can we build on our existing foundations to become a self-learning culture?
Start with a learner-first mindset, and personalize your employee’s learning paths to their unique needs and career aspirations.
Allow them to access their program anywhere, anytime, and try pairing video lessons with interactive assessments, quizzes, and peer-reviewed assignments to offer an intuitive experience.
This is not a simple goal to achieve. Fostering a self-learning culture in many organisations involves cultural change, and learners need guidance, support and encouragement. An individual employee needs both the ability to learn (the right tools, capabilities and environment) as well as the desire to learn. Desire is fundamentally a function of “What’s in it for me?” Why should the employee learn? Identifying motivation is key and there are many reasons that could apply (including job security, internal mobility, longevity, opening up new career paths, greater pay and promotional opportunities).
Linking the value of self-development for the employee in terms they recognise to the value for the business that can be derived from transforming skills creates a powerful connection between intent and outcome. It links employees endeavours to business outcomes, helping individuals to feel their work and their learning is meaningful to their organisation.
Companies who are successful in fostering a self-learning culture will reap considerable benefits. Improvements in staff retention arise from staff feeling their employer is investing in their development and providing options for career growth and change within the organisation. Talent acquisition costs can fall as hard-to-find skills can be grown internally rather than acquired externally. The potential for improvement in business outcomes is also huge — improvements in customer service, leadership, productivity, time to market or market competitiveness — translate to the bottom line driving increased revenue growth and margins.
Watch how Telenor fostered a culture of self-learning here.
3. Transformative learning will close the skills gap more sustainably than micro learning.
Micro learning is a growing trend in the world of L&D, principally intended as an approach to learning to combat the minimal amount of time we have as employees to invest in our own development and ever shortening attention spans. Micro learning is usually associated with foundation content that supports the current operation skills of the organisation. Employees needing a reminder or refresher on a topic relevant to their current role may well access micro learning content on how to build a pivot table or tips for presenting skills (or more likely simply search for relevant content on YouTube).
However, such learning is not going to close the skills gap where what is required is entirely new skills or a significant change to the existing skill set of employees. You can’t teach someone how to be a data scientist by watching a 10-minute video. It requires a significant investment of time — multiple hours of learning, assessments, application of learning through peer reviews and practical application. This is the domain of transformational learning. While at face value it seems a more daunting challenge, many companies are not just embracing transformational learning, they are succeeding in driving a transformational learning culture where employees see learning as part of work, not separate to it. When this is done well, engagement levels can be very high, because the value to the employee of transformational learning is commensurately higher than simply supporting the role they do today. By definition, if learning is not transformative, then neither the individual nor the business is adapting to technological change and the risk of failure increases exponentially over time.
Find out more on identifying and investing in your skills gap with the Global Skills Index, here.
4. Hit pause.
As eloquently articulated by Thomas Friedman, “When we hit pause on a computer, it shuts down.” When we hit pause on a human being, that person starts. Navigating today’s business and personal landscape requires businesses, not just individuals, to reflect, reimagine and re-engineer our skills, and connect with a higher purpose. When we’re engaged with our day-to-day activities at work, there is little opportunity to do this. It’s only by creating space for ourselves within our working time that we establish an opportunity to reflect, to invest in our development, to consider the changing world around us and how we should respond to it. For many organisations this requires a shift in culture and mindset, but building capabilities around adaptability, critical thinking, and application of evolving technology is critical to our survival, both as an individual looking forward to the future of work, and for organisations facing ever increasing global competition and disruptive new entrants to the market.
Build your team’s capability with our AI for Everyone course.
5. The journey is greater than ourselves.
Many business executives I spoke with at Conference expressed a shared sense of mission and purpose with the attending universities. I received feedback that spending time with the education and tech partners of Coursera was inspiring and helped them step back as business leaders, and realize that beyond trying to improve individual companies, we are all on a much greater journey together to transform lives and build a future model for workforce development.
For me, it was inspiring to see how many of our partners share our vision of providing universal access to the world’s best education. At Coursera, we seek to provide life transforming learning to anyone, wherever they are in the world, and are in a unique and privileged position to work with so many leading educational providers and provide access to their incredible training content to consumers, governments, companies and organisations around the world. It is the connection between education partners, learners and customers that drives the greatest change, as each empowers the other.
It’s an incredibly exciting period to be engaged in the world of learning and there has never been a better time to be involved in L&D. Skills development combined with digital transformation are the key drivers for success within the fourth industrial revolution. By focusing on creating a self-learning culture within our organisations, we are also contributing to a global focus on education and lifelong learning which quite simply has the power to make the world a better place.
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About the author Leah Belsky is the Vice President of Enterprise at Coursera, where she runs the company’s business solution team. She has served on President Obama’s Technology Policy Committee and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She also sits on the Boards of Engine Advocacy and Public Knowledge, leading technology and startup policy organizations that promote freedom of expression, innovation, and access to knowledge. Leah is a graduate of Yale Law School and received her undergraduate degree from Brown University. She loves building, identifying, and scaling amazing teams and products and has served as a GM and leader of teams in sales/BD/revenue, operations, new product development, GTM, engineering, professional services, and international. Leah is based in Mountain View, California.
Leah Belsky is the Vice President of Enterprise at Coursera and runs the company’s business solutions team globally. She is based in Mountain View, California.
Did you watch the Kentucky Derby on Saturday? If you did, what is your reaction to what you saw? If you didn’t watch, what have you heard or read about the race’s outcome?
Look at the photo above. Do you think it is unusual to see such a muddy course?
1. How does the article explain why it is “little wonder” that the 145th running of the Kentucky Derby ended in “astonishment, controversy and confusion”?
2. Which horse crossed the finish line first? Why was it disqualified?
3. Which horse was then declared the winner? Why is it an “improbable victor”?
4. How did the stewards’ decision to declare a foul in the race make Kentucky Derby history?
5. Who is Flavien Prat? What role did he play in this history-making race?
6. How much money did Country House’s owners receive for the win? If a $2 bet was placed on this horse to win, how much money did the person who placed the bet win?
Finally, tell us more about what you think:
The article also delves into the current state of horse racing in the United States, including the issue of horse deaths at racetracks:
The stakes were already high on Saturday for a declining sport that has quickly become an endangered one. Twenty-three horse deaths over a three-month span at Santa Anita Park in Southern California shut down racing there and produced calls to ban the sport.
Here at Churchill Downs, 43 thoroughbreds were lost to racing injuries since 2016, an average of 2.42 per 1,000 starts, which was 50 percent higher than the national average during the same time.
So it was with racing hearts and fraught nerves that the crowd of 150,729 sent off the field of 19 horses on a rainy day that left the racetrack as sticky as peanut butter and the horses and riders determined to find safe and strategic footing.
A recent article quotes Walker Hancock, who is the fifth generation of a famous horse racing family whose farm has produced 75 champion horses. He states, “We got to change the public’s perception and clean this thing up if we are going to survive.”
Read the article and identify the reform efforts that are under consideration. Do you think that the American horse racing industry can win back the attention of people who had given up on it or had never liked it in the first place? Why or why not?
The poet and the point guard have never met. But they see the parallels in their crafts — the push-pull between creativity and pragmatism, between daring and safe.
Before this season, Mikko Harvey, an award-winning poet long enamored of the playing style of D’Angelo Russell, wondered if the Nets would ever find a place for their new point guard, whose imaginative play can vacillate between the beautiful and the boneheaded.
Do you throw the no-look pass for beauty’s sake when a practical pass would do?
