As the fall semester comes to a close, we have one last look at the interesting higher ed news from 2025. In this week’s issue, we discuss practical advice for managing the learning environment in the age of AI. From there, we turn our attention to the hidden ways that federal research spending supports local economies and close with practical guidance for managing IT projects with ed tech vendors more effectively. 

We hope you enjoyed The HEat Index this year! We’re taking our end of year break, but we’ll see you back in your inboxes in early 2026.   

After reading today’s issue, share your stories about managing vendor projects in the comments! 

Getting Creative with Learning 

From You Can’t AI-Proof the Classroom, Experts Say. Get Creative Instead. | Inside Higher Ed 

Teaching and learning experts offer advice on how to keep students engaged rather than relying on AI to do their work.  

Our Thoughts  

The most useful thing about this piece is the honesty baked into the headline. We cannot “AI-proof” assessment by just swapping tools. The goal should not be to police AI more aggressively, but instead to design learning experiences that make it harder to outsource the thinking, and easier for students to reconnect with why the work matters. It also helps to say the quiet part out loud: detection is not a dependable strategy. Even OpenAI discontinued its own text classifier due to accuracy limitations, and vendors that still offer detection tooling explicitly warn about false positives and thresholds that should not be overinterpreted. In other words, if our plan depends on certainty, it is going to fail. 

The harder conversation is the one the article gestures at but cannot fully solve in a few quotes–scale. It is easier to recommend oral defenses and relationship-rich dialogue when you have 18 students, not 500. For large lecture courses, the win is not a single “AI-resistant” assessment, it is a portfolio of smaller moves that collectively shift incentives: more process evidence (draft checkpoints, annotated bibliographies, source rationales, reflection on revisions), more in-class signal (short handwritten or device-free synthesis, micro-presentations, discussion artifacts), and selective verification (randomized five-minute follow-ups with a rotating subset of students, or small-group oral check-ins supported by TAs). You do not need to interrogate every student every time. You need enough authentic signal, often enough, that the path of least resistance becomes actually doing the work. 

Finally, I keep coming back to the risk of “AI literacy theatre,” where we publish confident frameworks faster than we build real evidence about what works in practice. The antidote is exactly what this article hints at: more experimentation, more sharing, and a lot more humility. If we treat assessment redesign as a community learning problem, not an individual faculty burden, we will get better faster, and students will get something far more valuable than a new set of rules. 

Federal Research Spending Reduction Impacts 

From The Billion-Dollar Ripple Effect | The Chronicle of Higher Education 

The Chronicle looks at the larger community impacts of the research spending cuts at colleges and universities. 

Our Thoughts  

Although this story focuses on Vanderbilt and Michigan, it is really about the research ecosystem that surrounds every campus with a grant portfolio. It is easy to talk about “cuts to federal research” as something that affects PIs and labs, but this piece reminds us of the small companies that sit just off campus and depend on that work: the frog farm that supplies model organisms, the firms that make assay kits, the technicians who service specialized equipment and freezers, and the regional distributors that handle gases, dry ice and shipping. When grants are frozen or indirects are capped, universities may be able to bridge for a time, but many of these vendors do not have that cushion.   

Work from the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science has shown that roughly 30% of vendors paid with university research dollars are located in the same state as the institution, and many are within a short drive of campus. That aligns with other studies that find each million dollars in university research spending can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional local economic activity, especially in smaller regions. These are not abstract multipliers. These small businesses employ local residents, pay local taxes, and sponsor the occasional youth sports team. When research contracts shrink or disappear, those firms are often the first to feel it. 

Whether you agree with the policy direction or not, it is important to recognize how far the ripples travel. Federal research dollars do not just support “elite institutions.” They anchor regional economies, support high-skilled jobs, and bring outside dollars into communities through universities, hospitals, and small technology firms. Stories like this remind us that decisions made in Washington can quietly reshape a regional economy long before they show up as headlines about a lab that had to close. 

Managing Vendor Projects 

From When Tools Collide: Managing the Clash of Vendor and Internal Toolsets | EDUCAUSE Review 

Aligning project management tools between higher education institutions and implementation partners requires early collaboration and negotiation to ensure successful, minimally disruptive technology deployments.  

Our Thoughts  

I appreciate how practical this article is. It names a very specific friction point that almost every campus has felt: you sign up for a new platform and then discover you are also signing up for your partner’s project tool, communication norms, and working style. That “tool collision” is rarely anyone’s top risk on the kickoff deck, but it can quietly become the project’s biggest tax. I know it certainly created challenges more than once for projects I led at various institutions.  

What I like most is that Herridge and Mulry do not treat this as a tooling debate. They treat it as an operating model decision, and they give you four realistic paths, from “do nothing” to a simple rubric for deciding what the source of truth should be. They also make an excellent point: duplicating task tracking across systems is not just annoying, but it is extra effort that does not move the implementation forward. That is a hard-earned lesson for many in IT project management.  

The only point I would add to their already excellent article is this: tool alignment is change management. Even if the vendor tool is excellent, adoption is still a human problem. If the campus experience feels like “one more system to log into,” you will get workarounds, side emails, and missed handoffs. If the experience feels like “meet us where we are,” you build goodwill, reduce friction, and keep attention on what matters, which is delivering the implementation with minimal disruption and maximum learning.