Intentional Teaching: Recent Episodes
Derek Bruff
Intentional Teaching is a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. Hosted by educator and author Derek Bruff, the podcast features interviews with educators throughout higher ed.
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I’m back with another “Take It or Leave It” panel! This one is a little different. On October 2nd, in my role as associate director of the UVA Center for Teaching Excellence, I hosted a virtual panel titled “Take It or Leave It: AI’s Role in Online Learning” featuring three fantastic UVA colleagues. The conversation went very well, and the panelists and the CTE gave me permission to share the audio from the panel here on the Intentional Teaching podcast.
The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are all at the University of Virginia. Michelle Beavers is associate professor and coordinator of the Administration and Supervision Program in UVA’s School of Education and Human Development. Leo Lo is dean of libraries and university librarian, advisor to the provost on AI literacy, and professor of education. Sara McClellan is assistant professor of professional studies and program coordinator of the Public Administration Certificate Program at UVA’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.
You’ll hear me briefly describe five recent op-eds on teaching and learning in higher ed. For each op-ed, I’ll ask each of our panelists if they “take it,” that is, generally agree with the main thesis of the essay, or “leave it.” This is an artificial binary that I’ve found to generate rich discussion of the issues at hand.
Episode Resources
· Michelle Beavers’ faculty page
· Leo Lo’s LinkedIn page
· Sara McClellan’s website
· Essay 1: “Are You Ready for the AI University?”, Scott Latham, April 4, 2025
· Essay 2: “AI Risks Undermining the Heart of Higher Education,” Zahid Naz, April 21, 2025
· Essay 3: “Urgent Need for AI Literacy,” Ray Schroeder, April 30, 2025
· Essay 4: “Sometimes We Resist AI for Good Reasons,” Kevin Gannon, September 24, 2025
· Essay 5: “On AI, We Reap What We Sow,” Chad Hanson, September 10, 2025
Support the show
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Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
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Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
On the show today I talk with Leslie Cramblet Alvarez and Chris Hakala, authors of the new book Understanding Educational Developers: Tales from the Center from Routledge Press. The book blends scholarship and personal narratives to explore the career trajectories of the professionals who work at CTLs. How do academics move into these careers? And what can these careers look like over time?
Leslie Cramblet Alvarez is assistant vice provost and director of the Office of Teaching and Learning at the University of Denver. Chris Hakala is director for the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship and professor of psychology at Springfield College.
I wanted to talk with Chris and Leslie about what they discovered while writing their book. I also wanted to know what advice they had for navigating educational development careers here in the U.S. in 2025, with higher education under attack from the federal government, a looming demographic cliff affecting enrollment and tuition, and a budget situation that for more institutions is not rosy. Leslie and Chris offer advice for faculty considering a move into a faculty development role, as well as for those of us current working at CTLs trying to plan our careers.
Episode Resources
Leslie Cramblet Alvarez (staff page, LinkedIn)
Chris Hakala (faculty page, LinkedIn)
Understanding Educational Developers: Tales from the Center, Leslie Cramblet Alvarez & Chris Hakala, Routledge, 2025.
“An Indirect Journey to Indirect Impact,” Derek Bruff, #alt-academy, April 10, 2015.
“Teaching Centers Need to Step Up,” Chris Hakala, Inside Higher Ed, July 12, 2022.
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
Today on the podcast, we learn about one initiative that offers a path forward for AI and writing instruction. It’s called the PAIRR Project, where PAIRR stands for peer and AI review and reflection. This approach takes the well-established peer review pedagogy used in writing instruction and adds a layer of AI-generated feedback on student writing. PAIRR has been developed and tested by dozens of faculty at public colleges and universities in California, and I’m excited to have two of those faculty on the podcast today to tell us about it.
Marit MacArthur is a continuing lecturer in writing at the University of California at Davis and one of the principal investigators on the PAIRR Project. Anna Mills teaches writing at College of Marin, a community college, and brings her experience with open educational resources to the project. Marit and Anna and I talk about student voice, AI literacy, metacognition, the importance of prompt testing, linguistic justice, and more.
Episode Resources
The PAIRR Packet, https://pairr.short.gy/packet
The PAIRR Project, https://writing.ucdavis.edu/pairr
Marit MacArthur’s faculty page
Anna Mills’ website
“Peer and AI Review + Reflection (PAIRR): A Human-Centered Approach to Formative Assessments,” Lisa Sperber, Marit MacArthur, Sophia Minnillo, Nicholas Stillman, and Carl Whithaus, Computers and Composition, June 2025
“Comparing the Quality of Human and ChatGPT Feedback of Students’ Writing,” Jacob Steiss et al, Learning and Instruction, June 2024
“What Past Education Technology Failures Can Teach Us about the Future of AI in Schools,” Justin Reich, The Conversation, October 2025
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
Here in the US, the political environment is more heated than I’ve ever known it in my lifetime, and some of that heat is coming directly at higher ed and its faculty. This episode is all about managing those “hot moments” in our classes when just about any topic can be “hot.”
My guests are Bethany Morrison, assistant director at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan, and Rick Moore, associate director for faculty programming at the Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington University in St. Louis.
We talk about the reasons a class discussion can get "hot," the difference between a hot moment and a high-stakes discussion, the stakes these discussions can have for us and for our students, and strategies for preparing for and managing these challenging discussions.
Episode Resources
“Managing Hot Moments in the Classroom,” Lee Warren, 2000
“Faculty, Advocacy Groups Fear Texas A&M Firing Threatens Academic Freedom,” Alex Nguyen, Texas Tribune, September 15, 2025
“Teaching in an Election Year with Bethany Morrison,” Intentional Teaching ep. 50, September 24, 2024
Promoting Democracy Teaching Series, University of Michigan. See, especially, the instructor resources.
“Academe Has a Lot to Learn about How Inclusive Teaching Affects Instructors,” Chavella Pittman and Thomas Tobin, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 7, 2022
“Teaching in Turbulent Times,” Rick Moore, UVA Teaching Hub
“Teaching for Democratic Engagement and Civic Learning,” Bethany Morrison, UVA Teaching Hub
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
In this episode, we explore why digital accessibility can be so important to the student experience. My guest is Amy Lomellini, director of accessibility at Anthology, the company that makes the learning management system Blackboard. Amy teaches educational technology as an adjunct at Boise State University, and she facilitates courses on digital accessibility for the Online Learning Consortium. In our conversation, we talk about the importance of digital accessibility to students, moving away from the traditional disclosure-accommodation paradigm, AI as an assistive technology, and lots more.
Episode Resources
Amy Lomellini on Linked In, https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-lomellini/
Nothing Without Us with Amy Lomellini, ThinkUDL podcast, https://thinkudl.org/episodes/nothing-without-us-with-amy-lomellini
Blackboard Ally, https://ally.ac/
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
The online education wings of most colleges and universities have changed a lot since 2020, with online units moving in from the periphery to the center of operations at most institutions. On the podcast today, we’re going to take a look at the state of online education in the United States, and to do that, we’ll make use of data from the 2025 Benchmarking Online Enterprise Survey (BOnES) conducted by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
On the show today, I talk with Bruce Etter, senior director of research and consulting at UPCEA, and Julie Uranis, senior vice president of online and strategic initiatives at UPCEA. Although BOnES surveyed chief online learning officers, there’s a lot in the report of interest to faculty and instructional designers and educational developers, and Bruce and Julie do a great job walking us through some key takeaways.
Episode Resources
Benchmarking Online Enterprise Survey (BOnES), https://upcea.edu/bones25
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
Today on the podcast, I'm excited to try out a new format. I'm calling it "Study Hall" since we're gathered together to discuss some interesting teaching and learning studies, with this edition's studies exploring the intersection of generative AI and education.
The panelists for this edition of study hall are Lance Eaton, senior associate director of AI in teaching and learning at Northeastern University; Michelle D. Miller, professor of psychological sciences at Northern Arizona University; and David Nelson, associate director at the Center for Instructional Excellence at Purdue University.
Episode Resources
Grinschgl, S., & Neubauer, A. C. (2022). Supporting cognition with modern technology: Distributed cognition today and in an AI-enhanced future. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 5(July), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2022.908261
Sun, Y., & Wang, T. (2025). Be friendly, not friends: How llm sycophancy shapes user trust. arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10844
Darvishi, A., Khosravi, H., Sadiq, S., Gašević, D., & Siemens, G. (2024). Impact of AI assistance on student agency. Computers & Education, 210, 104967. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2023.104967
Lance Eaton’s blog, AI + Education = Simplified, https://aiedusimplified.substack.com/
Michelle Miller’s newsletter, R3, https://michellemillerphd.substack.com/
Dave Nelson’s LinkedIn page, https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-nelson-8698b94a/
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
Today on the podcast, we’ll get a window into how AI is affecting the teaching and learning landscape at one university, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. My guest today is Alex Ambrose, professor of the practice and director of the Lab for AI in Teaching and Learning at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at Notre Dame.
Alex discusses Notre Dame’s recent decision to adopt Google Gemini campuswide, surveys of Notre Dame students and faculty about their changing views of generative AI, and the need for higher ed to do a better job teaching AI literacy than we did teaching digital literacy a decade ago. Plus, we hear about a really interesting project in the Notre Dame physics department using AI to provide feedback on handwritten student work on physics problems.
Episode Resources
Alex Ambrose’s website
“Navigating AI’s Evolving Role in Teaching and Learning” with Jim Lang and Alex Ambrose, Designed for Learning podcast
“What Is AI Literacy? Competencies and Design Considerations,” Duri Long & Brian Magerko, Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
“Assessing and Developing Generative AI Literacy in Instructors,” Alex Ambrose, Si Chen, & Xiuxui Tang, University of Central Florida 2025 Teaching & Learning with AI Conference
“Student Perspectives on Generative AI: Usage, Ethics, and Institutional Support in the Humanities,” Xiuxui Tang et al., 2025 Midwest Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference
“Leveraging AI for Rubric Scoring and Feedback: Evaluating Generative AI’s Role in Academic Assessment,” Xuixui Tang et al., University of Central Florida 2025 Teaching & Learning with AI Conference
Anthropic’s AI Fluency course, https://www.anthropic.com/ai-fluency
“Validity of peer grading using Calibrated Peer Review in a guided-inquiry, conceptual physics course,” Price, Goldberg, Robinson, & McKean, Physics Review Physics Education
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
On two recent episodes of this podcast, we talked about an essay titled "Higher Ed Is Adrift" by Kevin McClure. In the essay, Kevin outlines some of the many attacks the current U.S. presidential administration is leveraging against higher ed, and he notes that many faculty and staff are finding their institutional leaders' responses lacking.
Today on the show, I talk with Kevin McClure, who is a professor of higher education and chair of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, about his essay and the responses it has generated. Kevin comes to this conversation as a faculty member and as a former student affairs staffer and as someone who studies higher education. He’s the author of a new book, The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation, published this year by Johns Hopkins University Press. In our conversation, we talk about individual and collective action in the current moment, higher ed’s “communication battle,” and his advice for academic leaders.
Episode Resources
Kevin McClure’s website
The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation, Kevin McClure, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025
“Higher Ed Is Adrift,” Kevin McClure, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 2025
“Five Steps to Defend Higher Ed,” Kevin McClure, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2025
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
I have now read a few books on the intersection of higher education teaching and generative AI, and Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT is by far my favorite. There’s no hyperbole here, just practical advice on making the most of generative AI with dozens of concrete examples from the authors and from other instructors in their network. The book was written by Dan Levy, senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and Angela Pérez Albertos, who was first a student in Dan’s class, then a teaching assistant working with Dan, and is now the head of U.S. strategy at Innovamat, a global educational organization focusing on math learning.
Today I get to share my conversation with Dan and Angela about Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT, and I think you’ll find it interesting, whether you’re eagerly embracing AI in your teaching, actively resisting it, or somewhere in between.
Episode Resources:
Teaching Effectively with ChatGPT website
Dan Levy’s faculty page
Angela Pérez Albertos on LinkedIn
A short ChatGPT prompt to learn about anything
“Talking to Colleagues about Generative AI” by me
“AI-Enhanced Live Polling” by me
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
I’m back with another “Take It or Leave It” panel! I know it’s only been a couple of episodes since the last one, but there’s a lot happening in higher ed in the US right now and I find these panels helpful for making sense of it all. Once again I’ve invited three smart colleagues on the show to discuss recent op-eds that address the challenges that colleges and universities and their teaching missions are facing here in 2025. For each essay, we decide if we want to Take It (that is, agree with the central thesis of the essay) or Leave It (that is, disagree). It’s an artificial binary that generates lots of useful discussion about the state of higher ed.
The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are Stacey Johnson, director of learning and engagement at the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities and co-editor of the book How We Take Action: Social Justice in the PK-16 Language Classrooms; Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi and author of the book The Present Professor: Authenticity and Transformational Teaching; and Viji Sathy, professor of the practice of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-author of the book Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom.
Episode Resources
· Stacey Johnson’s website
· Liz Norell’s website
· Viji Sathy’s website
· Essay 1: “Higher Ed Is Adrift,” Kevin McClure, April 25, 2025
· Essay 2: “I Teach Computer Science and That Is All,” Boaz Barak, May 2, 2025
· Essay 3: “Ghosts Are Everywhere,” Patrick Scanlon, April 18, 2025
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
Cogniti is a tool developed at the University of Sydney that instructors can use to create custom AI chatbots ("agents") for use in their teaching. Cogniti makes it easy to create a special-purpose agent, invite students to interact with the agent, and have some visibility into how students are using the agent.
I have a theory that in a few years, teaching-focused custom AI chatbots are going to be standard tools available to higher education instructors. I may be wrong about that, but if it turns out to be the case, it makes sense to start figuring out the affordances and limitations of these tools now.
On this episode, I talk with Danny Liu, professor of educational technology at the University of Sydney and lead developer of Cogniti, about the tools origin and uses. Danny brought along a couple of University of Sydney colleagues who have been experimenting with the tool: Matthew Clemson, senior lecturer of biochemistry, and Isabelle Hesse, senior lecturer of English. We had a great conversation about the current and potential roles of custom chatbots in teaching and learning.
Episode Resources
· Cogniti website
· Videos from the 2024 Cogniti Mini-Symposium
· Matthew Clemson’s faculty page
· Isabelle Hesse’s faculty page
· Danny Liu’s faculty page
· “Dr MattTabolism: An AI Assistant That Helps Me Help Students with Biochemistry” by Matthew Clemson, Minh Huynh, and Alice Huang
· “AI as a Research and Feedback Assistant in Essay Plans and Annotated Bibliographies” by Isabelle Hesse
· Are You a Witch?, a custom GPT by Marc Watkins
· “Structure Matters: Custom Chatbot Edition” by Derek Bruff
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
Higher education in the United States has been faced with some unique challenges in 2025, largely because of actions taken by the new U.S. presidential administration. In this "Take It or Leave It" edition of the podcast, I invited three wise colleagues on the show to discuss recent op-eds that address ongoing challenges to the teaching missions of colleges and universities. For each essay, we decide if we want to Take It (that is, agree with the central thesis of the essay) or Leave It. Our judgments might be binary, but our discussion of the essays and the challenges they address is full of nuance and complexity.
The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are Betsy Barre, assistant provost and executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University; Bryan Dewsbury, associate professor of biology and associate director of the STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University; and Emily Donahoe, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. All three are experienced Take It or Leave It panelists, and I am very excited to have them back on the show.
Episode Resources
· Betsy Barre’s website
· Bryan Dewsbury’s website
· Emily Donahoe’s Substack
· Essay 1: Higher Ed Is Adrift, Kevin McClure, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 2025
· Essay 2: Institutional Neutrality Is a Copout, John Jenkins, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2025
· Essay 3: Are You Ready for the AI University?, Scott Latham, April 8, 2025
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
On the podcast today, I talk with four University of Virginia faculty who are serving this year as Faculty AI Guides. This provost-funded program has enlisted 51 faculty to explore potential uses of generative AI in their teaching and to share what they learn with colleagues in their departments and schools. Back in January, we invited the Faculty AI Guides to share assignments from their fall courses that thoughtfully integrated AI to support student learning. I put some of these assignments in a collection on the UVA Teaching Hub website (see the link below), and on this episode of the podcast, I talk with four of the Faculty AI Guides who contributed assignments.
Kiera Allison is an assistant professor of management communication, Jamie Jirout is an associate professor of education, Spyros Simotas is an assistant professor of French, and Jun Wang is a lecturer in Chinese. In our conversation, the four Faculty AI Guides talk about their motivations for being in the program, what they have learned about AI and teaching through their experiments, how they respond to concerns about students outsourcing their learning to AI, and what’s next for their use of AI in teaching.
Episode Resources
· Faculty AI Guides website
· “Integrating AI into Assignments to Support Student Learning,” UVA Teaching Hub
· “Red Lights, Green Lights, and AI-Integrated Assignments,” Derek Bruff, March 4, 2025
· AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Our Own, Verity Harding, Princeton University Press, 2024
· “How to Encourage Students to Write without AI,” Beth McMurtrie, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2025
· “AI Podcast 1.0: Rise of the Machines,” Planet Money, May 26, 2023
· “Comparing the Quality of Human and ChatGPT Feedback on Students’ Writing,” Jacob Steiss et al., Learning and Instruction, June 2024
· “Exquisite AI Corpse,” Maria Dikcis, AI Pedagogy Pr
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
In this episode, I share a conversation I had recently with Lauren Malone, assistant professor of communication at the University of Tampa. I met Lauren at a conference in Tampa, where she was presenting her ongoing experiments integrating AI into her communications and media studies courses. In particular, she shared about her use of Google NotebookLM in a game studies course that focused on writing for digital games. Lauren was already on her second semester kicking the tires on NotebookLM in this course, and I wanted to learn more, so I invited her on the podcast. In the interview, she talks about creative thinking with AI, the importance of the struggle in learning, very different student responses to AI, and changes she’s already making to her use of AI as this work in progress continues.
Episode Resources
· Lauren Malone’s website, https://lmaloneonline.wordpress.com/
· Google NotebookLM, https://notebooklm.google/
· There’s an AI for That, https://theresanaiforthat.com/
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
Pratima Enfield is the associate dean of instructional design at the United States Naval Community College. Prior to her current position, Pratima was the executive director of online learning at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Pratima and her SAIS colleagues bridged the gap between the instructional design and student support functions that are more typically siloed in online programs. Instructional designers work with faculty and student support staff work with students, so it’s not a given that these two teams will collaborate. But that’s exactly what happened at Johns Hopkins. I’m excited to have Pratima on the show today to tell us about it.
Episode Resources
· Pratima Enfield’s LinkedIn page
Support the show
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Subscribe to Intentional Teaching bonus episodes:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2069949/supporters/new
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
Today on the podcast, I’m republishing one of my favorite interviews from Leading Lines, the podcast I hosted for the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching from 2016 to 2022.
In this interview from 2022, I talk with Remi Kalir, who was (at the time) an associate professor of learning design and technology at the University of Colorado. Remi is a scholar of annotation, that simple act of adding a note to a text. Remi takes a broad view of what counts as a “note” and as a “text,” making annotation a powerful lens for examining how we humans make meaning. In the interview, Remi and I focus on the use of annotation in learning contexts, particularly social and collaborative annotation. It’s an interview I find myself referencing again and again, and I’m glad to have it in a podcast feed once again!
And the timing of this episode is intentional, as Remi has a new book out the day this episode of Intentional Teaching airs. The book is called Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice. Here’s the tag line from the MIT Press website: “An interdisciplinary exploration of annotation that shows how this participatory act marks public memory, struggles for justice, and social change.” So if you like what you hear from Remi about annotation and learning, then follow the links in the show notes to learn more about his new book.
Episode Resources
· Remi Kalir’s website
· Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice
· Reading Re/Marks, Remi’s newsletter
· Annotation in Teaching and Learning, a collection of resources on the topic that I curated for the University of Virginia Teaching Hub
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Christopher McVey is a master lecturer in the writing program at Boston University. Neeza Singh is a senior at BU majoring in data science. Last year, the two were partnered through the BU writing program's AI Affiliate Fellowship program, giving Neeza a role in Christopher's class supporting both Christopher and his students in responsible and effective use of generative AI in writing.
On this episode, I talk with Chris and Neeza about this innovative, AI-focused students-as-partners program. They share about Neeza's role in Chris' writing course, how her work as an AI affiliate benefitted both Chris and his students, and the potential for this kind of program to work in other disciplines. Chris and Neeza have lots to say about the role of AI in learning.
Episode Resources
· Christopher McVey’s faculty page
· Neeza Singh’s LinkedIn page
· Undergraduate AI Writing Affiliate Fellowship, Boston University Writing Program
· Syllabus for The Philosophy and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
· AI Mini-Games for Peer Review, an activity by Neeza Singh and Christopher McVey
· The Case for Slowing Down, by Christopher McVey
· AI-Enhanced Learning with Pary Fassihi, Intentional Teaching episode 35
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Kristine Johnson and Michael Rifenburg are the authors of the new book A Long View of Undergraduate Research: Alumni Perspectives on Inquiry, Belonging, and Vocation. They tracked down alumni who had participated in undergraduate research years earlier. They wanted to know what kinds of impacts these experiences had on students over the long term. What they heard from these alumni was fascinating.
Kristine Johnson is an associate professor of English at Calvin University, and Michael Rifenburg is a professor of English at the University of North Georgia. They were undergraduate researchers as students, and they now mentor students in undergrad research. In our conversation, we talk about the importance of student-mentor relationships, the impact of working on big and meaningful projects, how undergrad research can help students find a vocation, and how these experiences can both enhance and challenge a student’s sense of belonging.
Episode Resources
· Kristine Johnson’s faculty page
· Michael Rifenburg’s faculty page
· A Long View of Undergraduate Researchby Kristine Johnson and Michael Rifenburg
· The Meaningful Writing Project by Michele Eodice, Anne Ellen Gellar, and Neal Lerner
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We’re back with another Take It or Leave It panel. I invited three colleagues whose work and thinking I admire very much to come on the show and to compress their complex and nuanced thoughts on teaching and learning into artificial binaries!
The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are… Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi; Betsy Barre, assistant provost and executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University; and Bryan Dewsbury, associate professor of biology and associate director of the STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University.
We discuss three recent essays on class participation, learning management systems, and generative AI and weigh in with a "Take it!" or "Leave it!" for each one.
Episode Resources
- Liz Norell’s website, https://www.liznorell.com/
- Betsy Barre’s website, https://www.elizabethbarre.com/
- Bryan Dewsbury’s website, http://www.seasprogram.net/
- Essay 1: “Making Class Participation Grades Meaningful” by Benjamin Rikfin
- Essay 2: “College as a To-Do List” by Susan D. Blum
- Essay 3: “Saying No to Generative AI” by Cate Denial
- “But How Do I Participate?” by Olivia Bailey
- Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
- “The Workload Paradox with Betsy Barre and Karen Costa,” Leading Lines podcast
- OpenAI Operator, https://openai.com/index/introducing-operator/
- Goblin Tools, https://goblin.tools/
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Greg Loring-Albright is the designer of Keep the Faith, a storytelling game about a religion in transition and about how religious institutions change over time. Greg is also an assistant professor of game, media, and culture at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, where he teaches game design and game studies.
Greg is also the co-designer of Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, a game about revolutionaries trying to liberate their city from an oppressive police state. He's a proponent of purposeful games, and I invited him on the podcast to talk about the connections between game design and learning design.
Keep the Faith is currently seeking crowdfunding for its first edition through Central Michigan University Press, an academic press that publishes peer-reviewed tabletop games with educational utility. If you're listening to this before March 6, 2025, please consider backing the game by following the link below.
Episode Resources
· Keep the Faith (crowdfunding), https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/central-michigan-university-press/keep-the-faith
· Greg Loring-Albright’s website, https://www.gloringalbright.com/
· Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, https://outlandishgames.com/blocbybloc/
· Central Michigan University Press, https://cmichpress.com/
· “Daybreak: Learning at Play with Kerry Whittaker and Matteo Menapace,” Intentional Teaching episode 43, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/episodes/15393666-daybreak-learning-at-play-with-kerry-whittaker-and-matteo-menapace
· First Player Token, my short podcast about board games, https://www.buzzsprout.com/2292265
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Back in August, I had the opportunity to hear a short presentation from Heidi Nobles, assistant professor in writing and rhetoric and director of Writing Across the Curriculum at the University of Virginia. The presentation was part of a two-day institute on teaching and generative AI, and Heidi leveraged her background as an editor to provide a different way of thinking about working with generative AI.
Heidi pointed out that when we ask ChatGPT or some other AI chatbot to polish a draft essay, we’re asking for copyediting. That’s useful, yes, but there are other, earlier stages to an editing process. Might AI be useful during those other stages? Heidi argued for yes. A chatbot won’t be as good as a human editor, but most writers don’t have access to a human editor, so it’s worth exploring what AI can do.
On today's podcast, Heidi Nobles talks about writing and teaching writing from an editor's perspective.
Episode Resources
· Heidi Nobles faculty page, https://wac.virginia.edu/people/heidi-nobles
· Edits on the Record, https://editsontherecord.com/
· Choose Your Own Adventure maps, https://www.cyoa.com/pages/choose-your-own-adventure-these-maps-reveal-the-hidden-structures-behind-the-books
· One Book, Many Readings by Christian Swinehart, https://samizdat.co/cyoa/
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How can generative AI help students develop creative and critical thinking skills? Doing means treating AI as more than a super Google search.
Ryan Wetzel is manager of creative learning initiatives for Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State. He and his team have developed a number of structured experiences for students (and their instructors) to increase their generative AI knowhow and to use AI to help them pursue course learning goals. While the students work in teams to design board games, create hit singles, or build their personal brands, they learn about AI and about creative and collaborative design.
Episode Resources
· Ryan Wetzel on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlwetzel/
· My visit to the Dreamery, https://derekbruff.kit.com/posts/learning-with-and-about-technology
· Intentional Teaching Ep. 21: Design Thinking and AI with Garrett Westlake, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/episodes/13619437-design-thinking-and-ai-with-garret-westlake
Support the show
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Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
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See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
Doctoral education in the United States works really well... when it works. Many doctoral students experience a significant mismatch between their career goals and the goals of their graduate programs, which is one reason completion rates for doctoral programs are so low.
Why is doctoral education this broken? And what can higher education do about it? Today on the podcast, we hear some answers to those questions from Leonard Cassuto, professor of English at Fordham University and author of the book The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education with Robert Weisbuch.
I'm joined by special guest interviewer Emily Donahoe, associate director at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. Emily heads up the center's programs and services for graduate students, and she spends a lot of time in the world of doctoral education.
Episode Resources
Leonard Cassuto’s website, https://www.lcassuto.com/
Len on the Future U podcast, https://www.futureupodcast.com/episodes/the-future-of-the-phd/
Len on the Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning podcast, https://blubrry.com/dead_ideas/131080109/why-is-there-no-training-on-how-to-teach-graduate-students-with-leonard-cassuto/
Emily Donahoe’s Unmaking the Grade blog, https://emilypittsdonahoe.substack.com/
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Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
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Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
Today on the podcast, I’m excited to share an interview with Jane Southworth, professor and chair of geography at the University of Florida and co-chair of the committee that designed UF's "AI Across the Curriculum" program. That program was designed in 2021, two full years before the launch of ChatGPT!
Jane shares about the role of artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning, in her landscape change research, and how that work get her involved in AI curriculum initiatives at UF. Jane also provides a lot of details on the new UF program, including the university-wide undergraduate AI certificate, AI-focused undergraduate research opportunities, and what turned into a herculean effort to get AI literacy embedded across the UF curriculum. I also asked Jane how the launch of ChatGPT affected this big project as it was being launched.
Episode Resources
· Jane Southworth’s faculty page, https://geog.ufl.edu/faculty/southworth/
· AI at the University of Florida, https://ai.ufl.edu/
· “Developing a model for AI Across the Curriculum: Transforming the higher education landscape via innovation in AI literacy,” Southworth et al., https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X23000061?via%3Dihub
· “Building an AI University: An Administrator’s Guide,” Joe Glover, https://www.ufl.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2023/11/Building-an-AI-university-An-administrators-guide.pdf
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In my new job at the University of Virginia, I recently met Jingjing Li, Andersen Alumni associate professor of commerce. Jingjing teaches business intelligence at both the undergraduate and Master’s levels, and her research interests include artificial intelligence and data analytics. She has conducted some very thoughtful experiments in her courses in using generative artificial intelligence to teach about machine learning in business analysis.
In our interview, we talk about her scaffolded assignments, the metaphors her students use to describe working with generative AI, and the relationships between conceptual understanding and AI literacy.
Episode Resources
· Jingjing Li’s faculty page, https://www.commerce.virginia.edu/faculty/jl9rf
· ChatGPT in Technical Courses, a Teaching Hub collection curated by Jingjing Li, https://teaching.virginia.edu/collections/chatgpt-in-technical-courses
· UVA’s Faculty AI Guides program, https://cte.virginia.edu/programs/faculty-ai-guides/
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Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
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Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
In 1986, Vanderbilt University established a new Center for Teaching, a unit that would help thousands of faculty and other instructors at Vanderbilt and across higher education develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching and learning. I’m Derek Bruff, and I worked at the CFT, as we called it, from 2005 to 2022, serving as its director for over a decade.
When I left Vanderbilt, I wanted to find some way to honor the good work of the Center for Teaching. It played an important role in my professional career and in the careers of the faculty and staff who passed through its doors. I decided to produce this oral history of the CFT as a way to document and celebrate the CFT’s story. I reached out to a number of former CFT staff, including all of its directors, to interview them about their time at the CFT.
You’ll hear from Ken Bain, Darlene Panvini, Linda Nilson, Allison Pingree, Peter Felten, and others CFT alumni, and I hope these stories capture just a bit of the CFT magic.
Additional Resources:Vanderbilt Center for Teaching's 35th Anniversary Panel (video)
StoryCorps: Derek Bruff and Stacey Johnson on the CFT's work navigating the COVID-19 pandemic (audio)
This audio documentary is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
Music: "Isola Bella" and "Contemplation" by Purple Planet.
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According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, there are approximately 36.8 million adults in the United States under the age of 65 who have completed some college but left before obtaining a degree. How can universities meet the needs of these potential students, especially when the traditional approach to college didn’t work for them?
Josh Steele is working to answer that question. Josh is the associate vice dean of digital learning at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Josh is helping to lead efforts at UT to reach the “some college, no degree” cohort and help them complete degrees that are meaningful to them. Josh talks about the challenges that adult students face in coming back to college, the experiments that are happening at the University of Tennessee to meet those challenges, and how his team works with faculty to design and implement quality online education.
Episode Resources
· Josh Steele on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuabsteele/
· Vols Online, https://volsonline.utk.edu/
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Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
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Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.
I see a lot of scholarly work on active learning in the STEM fields, but much less about active learning in the humanities. So when I read an article about active learning in a large-enrollment Greek myths course at Cornell University, I wanted to learn more.
In this episode, I talk with the authors of that paper: Todd Clary, senior lecturer in classics at Cornell University; Stephen Sansom, assistant professor of classics at Florida State University; and Carolyn Aslan, senior associate director at the Center for Teaching Innovation at Cornell. All three were involved in redesigning Cornell’s Greek myths course as part of Cornell’s Active Learning Initiative.
The interview digs into active learning in this course, especially the use of classroom response systems, as well as pre-class assignments, revised assessments, and more.
Episode Resources
· Todd Clary’s faculty page, https://classics.cornell.edu/todd-c-clary
· Stephen Sansom’s website, https://www.stephensansom.com/
· Carolyn Aslan’s CTI page, https://teaching.cornell.edu/person/carolyn-aslan
· Cornell University’s Active Learning Initiative, https://teaching.cornell.edu/programs/faculty-instructors/active-learning-initiative
· “Active Learning Techniques to Enhance Conceptual Learning in Greek Mythology,” https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/870835
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This episode features a conversation with another faculty colleague from my time at the University of Mississippi. Becky Marchiel is an associate professor of history there, and she teaches a very interesting history survey course. In our conversation, Becky shares how she goes about teaching the habits of mind of historians, as well as her use of labor-based grading, unessays, and classroom response systems.
Episode Resources
· Becky Marchiel’s faculty page, https://history.olemiss.edu/rebecca-marchiel/
· Michael Bess on teaching with Wikipedia (from 2007), https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/2007/12/episode-1-an-interview-with-michael-bess/
· More examples of clickable image questions for classroom response systems, https://derekbruff.ck.page/posts/clickable-image-polling-questions
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Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
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Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
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See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
Listeners in the United States might have noticed that there’s a presidential election coming up, and we know that can make for a challenging teaching environment. Fortunately, I have an interview to share that addresses just this moment. Bethany Morrison is a political scientist and an assistant director at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan, and she has been working with colleagues at Michigan to support faculty teaching in this election year.
In the interview, Bethany shares ideas for making connections between course material and the election, managing high-stakes discussions and hot moments in the classroom, and encouraging voting and civic engagement skills among our students.
Episode Resources
· Bethany Morrison on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/bethanynmorrisonphd/
· “Preparing to Teach During the 2024 Election” on the CRLT blog, https://crlt.umich.edu/blog/preparing-teach-during-2024-election
· Promoting Democracy Teaching Series, https://ginsberg.umich.edu/teach-democracy
· “In the Eye of the Storm: Students’ Perceptions of Helpful Faculty Actions Following a Collective Tragedy,” Therese Huston & Michele DiPietro, https://podnetwork.org/content/uploads/In_the_Eye.pdf
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
This is a story about institutional change. The product of that change—a new framework for assessing teaching quality now in use at Appalachian State University—is important, but the process that led to that change is just as important because it's by analyzing change processes that academic leaders can affect change on their campuses.
In this episode, I talk with Lindsay Masland, interim executive director at the teaching center at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, who not only helped shape the new teaching quality framework at App State but also launched a grant program that has helped multiple departments do some really important work aligning their programs and policies and procedures with the framework.
Episode Resources
· The Teaching Quality Framework at Appalachian State University, https://cetlss.appstate.edu/teaching-learning/teaching-quality-framework-0
· Lindsay Masland on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsay-masland-25b04511/
· “Assessing Teaching with Beate Brunow and Shawn Simonson,” Intentional Teaching episode 27, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/episodes/14189134-assessing-teaching-with-beate-brunow-and-shawn-simonson
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
Today on the podcast I talk with Mariel Pfeifer, assistant professor of biology. Mariel started at Ole Miss just about a year ago as part of a cluster hire of three STEM faculty who are on the tenure track at UM doing disciplinary based education research. I was excited to hear Mariel was coming to the university because I was already familiar with her work. Back in the spring of 2023, I lead a faculty learning community on the topic of active learning in large enrollment STEM courses, and we read her study on the experiences of neurodivergent students in active learning STEM classes.
As Mariel points out in our conversation, a lot of the traditional accommodations we use for students with learning disabilities assume that a college course is full of lectures and exams, but that’s not as true for STEM courses as it once was. Mariel shares lots of insight into the student experience in these courses and has practical advice for instructors interested in helping more students succeed.
Episode Resources
· Mariel Pfeifer’s lab website, https://www.pfeiferlab.com/
· "What I Wish My Instructor Knew,” Mariel’s paper on students with ADHD and specific learning disabilities in active learning STEM courses, https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe.21-12-0329
· “Structured Reading Groups,” Derek’s November 2022 blog post about group roles, https://derekbruff.org/?p=3934
· “Teaching Students with ADHD with Cathryn Friel,” Intentional Teaching episode 16, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/13140564-teaching-students-with-adhd-with-cathryn-friel
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
Emily Affolter teaches in the PhD program in sustainability education at Prescott College in Arizona. Her students come from all different professions, some even already have PhDs. They’re in the program to pursue what Emily describes as “social and environmental justice as enacted in teaching, learning, and leading.” How do Emily and her colleagues meet these diverse students where they are and help them achieve their goals? That’s where culturally responsive teaching comes in, which Emily describes as reimagining a class with equity at the center.
Emily talks with me about what culturally responsive teaching looks like in her program at Prescott, how to build trust with one's students, the unique position an instructor has in fostering equity, how to work toward equity even in large lecture courses, and what it means to decolonize marine biology.
Episode Resources
· Emily Affolter’s faculty page, https://prescott.edu/people/emily-affolter-ph-d/
· Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice, Geneva Gay, https://www.tcpress.com/culturally-responsive-teaching-9780807758762
· Relationship-rich education with Isis Artze-Vega, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/14292897-relationship-rich-education-with-isis-artze-vega
· Universal Design for Learning at scale with Thomas Tobin, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/14935277-universal-design-for-learning-at-scale-with-thomas-j-tobin
· “The Importance of Indigenous Knowledge in Curbing the Loss of Language and Biodiversity,” Wilder, O’Meara, Monti, & Nabhan, https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/6/499/2754233
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
Back in February 2024, as part of a slow read of my book Intentional Tech, I reached out to Paul Hanstedt, author of Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World, to talk about the "rhetorical triangle" as a way for thinking intentionally about writing assignments and other types of assignments. We had a fantastic conversation that I shared on Patreon at the time, and I’m now very glad to share the interview here on the main podcast feed.
Paul is the vice chancellor for academic affairs and innovation at the University of Minnesota Rochester. We talk about how UMR is not like other institutions, then we talk about Paul's new book, the second edition of General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty. Paul has so much wisdom on the design of general education curricula and on the process of designing those curricula. Finally we get around to talking about authentic audiences and rhetorical triangles.
Episode Resources
· Paul Hanstedt on Bluesky, https://bsky.app/profile/curriculargeek.bsky.social
· General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty, https://www.aacu.org/publication/general-education-essentials-a-guide-for-college-faculty
· Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World, https://www.routledge.com/Creating-Wicked-Students-Designing-Courses-for-a-Complex-World/Hanstedt/p/book/9781620366974?srsltid=AfmBOoqsAbLJZT5zCC9UovFUp9sTbqZJkd8KgRD0V_vFflZdQ1Wdb6H_
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
During these late summer episodes of the podcast, I’m sharing some interviews I conducted in much cooler times. Back in February as part of a slow read of my book Intentional Tech, I talked with Justin Shaffer, teaching professor in chemical and biological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Chapter three of the book deals with using technology to make visible “thin slices” of student learning. I reached out to Justin, who is also associate dean of undergraduate studies at Mines, to learn about some of the ways he uses technology both in and out of the classroom to learn more about his students’ learning.
That topic quite naturally led to discussions of Justin’s high-structure approach to course design. Justin has a book coming later this year (or maybe early 2025) from Macmillan Learning “High Structure Course Design for STEM” that will incredibly useful to STEM instructors of all experience levels. Justin is now officially the first repeat guest on Intentional Teaching. He was part of a panel way back in episode 9 on studio-style biology courses!
Episode Resources
· Justin Shaffer’s website, https://www.recombinanteducation.com/
· Sign-up for updates about Justin’s forthcoming book on high-structure course design, https://forms.gle/PEew6AsgFpijopm96
· High Structure Course Design on the UVA Teaching Hub, https://teaching.virginia.edu/collections/high-structure-course-design
· Getting Started with Discipline-Based Education Research on the UVA Teaching Hub, https://teaching.virginia.edu/collections/getting-started-with-discipline-based-education-research
· Intentional Teaching Episode 9 on Studio-Style Biology Courses, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/12409419-studio-biology-with-scott-chirhart-robbie-bear-and-justin-shaffer
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
A few episodes ago, I talked with Marc Watkins of the University of Mississippi about the many ways that generative AI is beginning to intersect with student learning. Marc noted that the newest versions of ChatGPT and similar tools are no longer just text generators, but multimodal in nature. That is, they can work with text and images and audio and in some cases video, too.
To help us better understand what roles these AI tools might play in multimodal assignments, this episode features an interview I conducted earlier this year as part of the slow read I ran of my 2019 book, Intentional Tech. One chapter of that book is about using technology for multimodal assignments, and to bring some fresh perspectives to that topic, I talked my wife, Emily Bruff.
Emily is a marketer for Zondervan Academic, and earlier this year she completed an interesting multimodal project to support the release of a new book called Know the Theologians. In the interview, Emily shares her experience using an AI image generator to make theologian trading cards, and we extrapolate from that experience to working with students with AI.
Episode Resources
· Emily Bruff’s website, https://emilyhbruff.com/
· Know the Theologians, https://www.zondervan.com/p/know-the-theologians/
· Visio Divina conference, https://emilyhbruff.com/visio-divina-conference
· The Parthenon digital restoration project, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBHYVIyEVjg
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
This episode is all about games as learning experiences, with not one but two interviews about the 2023 cooperative board game Daybreak, a game about climate action. Daybreak puts players in the roles of world powers building the technologies and societies needed for a warming planet. The goal of the game is to cut carbon emissions before it gets too hot or too many communities are put into crisis.
You’ll hear from Kerry Whittaker, assistant professor of coastal and marine environmental science at Maine Maritime Academy, who has the students in her global environmental change course play Daybreak as a final learning experience in the course. You’ll also hear from Matteo Menapace, co-designer of Daybreak, about the design of the game as a learning experience.
Whether you teach about climate change and might use Daybreak in your courses or you’re looking for a deeper understanding of how learning experiences can be designed, I think you’ll find both of these conversations interesting.
Episode Resources
Daybreak’s website
Kerry Whittaker’s faculty page
Matteo Menapace’s website
Two Leading Lines interviews about RePlay Health: Kimberly Rogers and Max Seidman
One Leading Lines interview about games as counterfactuals: Patrick Rael
“Final Exams or Epic Finales” by Anthony Crider
"Collaborative Strategic Board Games as a Site for Distributed Computational Thinking" by Matthew Berland and Victor Lee
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
This spring Holly Tilbrook presented as part of a panel titled “Neurodivergent Learners (and Earners!) in Postsecondary Education” at the UPCEA annual conference. Holly is a deputy director of the Academic Centres at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education. That institute offers a variety of postsecondary learning opportunities for students of all ages, from onsite weekend courses to online certificate programs to degree programs offered across various modalities. Many of Holly’s students aren’t just learners, they’re earners, in the sense that they are active participants in the workforce.
I wanted to know what Holly has been learning about supporting students with ADHD and other types of neurodivergence, particularly adult students and online students. I reached out to Holly via LinkedIn, where she posts thoughtful reflections on her work on a regular basis, and she was glad to talk with me. In our conversation, we discuss ways to build trust with neurodivergent students, accommodations that can more authentically meet these students’ needs, and helping neurodivergent students enter or re-enter the workforce.
Episode Resources
· Holly Tilbrook on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/hebtilbook/
· Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge, https://www.ice.cam.ac.uk/
· Still Distracted After All These Years: Help and Support for Older Adults with ADHD by Kathleen Nadeau, https://amzn.to/3ze0pt8
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
Inspired by a recent episode of the American Birding Podcast, this episode of Intentional Teaching features a "Take It or Leave It" Panel. I spent some quality time with recent essays published online looking for arguments about teaching and learning in higher education that would be open to debate. For each of these hot takes, I asked our three panelists to take it (that is, agree with the hot take) or leave it (disagree), forcing them into an artificial binary that, I think, led to some robust discussion.
We have three fantastic panelists for our first “Take It or Leave It” panel. Stacey M. Johnson is director of learning and engagement at the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan University. Emily Pitts Donahoe is an associate director of instructional support at the University of Mississippi Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. Lance Eaton is director of faculty development and innovation at College Unbound.
Episode Resources:"How Accommodating Can (Should) I Be?" by David Galef, Inside Higher Ed, May 2024
"It's Time to Start Teaching Your Students How to Be a Student" by Emily Isaacs, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2024
"Is AI Finally a Way to Reduce Higher Ed Costs?" by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson, Inside Higher Ed, April 2024
"No One Is Talking about AI's Impact on Reading" by Marc Watkins, Rhetorica, May 2024
Stacey M. Johnson's website, https://staceymargarita.wordpress.com/
Emily Pitts Donahoe's Substack, https://emilypittsdonahoe.substack.com/
Lance Eaton's Substack, https://aiedusimplified.substack.com/
"Take It or Leave It - Seawatching, Records Committees, and Owls" on the American Birding Podcast
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
Worried about your students asking ChatGPT to write their essays for them? That's so 2023. Generative AI technology is changing fast, and now these tools have the potential to disrupt many different aspects of learning, from reading to notetaking to feedback.
To help us explore those changes, this episode features a conversation with Marc Watkins, lecturer in writing and rhetoric and academic innovation fellow at the University of Mississippi. Marc's blog, Rhetorica, is a must read, and his workshops on teaching and AI for UM faculty have been incredibly helpful.
Marc has a new series on his blog called “Beyond ChatGPT” that explores the many ways that generative AI is affecting learning—far beyond the now-typical use of having ChatGPT write an essay on behalf of a student—and we talked about those changes to the learning landscape.
Episode Resources
Rhetorica, Marc Watkins’ blog, https://marcwatkins.substack.com/
Marc Watkins’ website, https://marcwatkins.org/
ChatGPT 4o demo reels, https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/
Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI, https://www.npr.org/2024/05/20/1252495087/openai-pulls-ai-voice-that-was-compared-to-scarlett-johansson-in-the-movie-her
Explainpaper, https://www.explainpaper.com/
Student Notetaking for Recall and Understanding, https://derekbruff.org/?p=2848
Why Use Sketchnotes in the Classroom?, https://derekbruff.org/?p=2902
Mike Sharples’ May 2022 essay on AI in teaching and learning, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2022/05/17/new-ai-tools-that-can-write-student-essays-require-educators-to-rethink-teaching-and-assessment/
AnswersAi, “School on Easy Mode,” https://answersai.com/
DevinAI, “The First AI Software Engineer,” https://www.cognition.ai/blog/introducing-devin
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
Jennifer M. Harrison and Vickey Rey Williams are the authors of the book A Guide to Curriculum Mapping: Creating a Collaborative, Transformative, and Learner-Centered Curriculum, published by Routledge in late 2023. Jennifer is the associate director for assessment at the Faculty Development Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (or UMBC), and Vickie is a senior lecturer in education at UMBC.
In their book and in our conversation, they share the ways that a curriculum map can take the learning design principles we often use at the course level and apply them to the design of an entire program. The goal is to make the program more learner-centered by mapping learning outcomes against both curricular and co-curricular learning opportunities. That, in turn, can help convince all kinds of stakeholders, from students to parents to politicians, of the value colleges and universities place on teaching and learning.
Episode Resources
A Guide to Curriculum Mapping: Creating a Collaborative, Transformative, and Learner-Centered Curriculumby Jennifer M. Harrison and Vickie Rey Williams, https://amzn.to/44SdZhC
Faculty Development Center, University of Maryland Baltimore County, https://calt.umbc.edu/
Transparent Teaching with Mary-Ann Winkelmes, Intentional Teaching Ep. 5, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/11997464-transparent-teaching-with-mary-ann-winkelmes
“American Value Good Teaching. Do Colleges?” by Beth McMurtrie, https://www.chronicle.com/article/americans-value-good-teaching-do-colleges?sra=true
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text massage.
With the advent of easy-to-use generative AI like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, many instructors have been looking into alternatives to traditional written essays, which are often easy to write with AI assistance. Last fall, I led a webinar on authentic assignments for GoReact, an educational technology company that provides video feedback tool that can be really useful for certain authentic assignments, particularly ones that are performance-based. I asked GoReact if they could connect me with faculty who they knew to be using their platform intentionally, and they were happy to oblige.
On today’s episode, I talk with Jeff Przybylo, chair of communications arts and head coach of the speech and debate team at Harper College in Illinois, and Thomas Fisher, clinical associate professor of education and university supervisor for student teachers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Both of these faculty have incorporated GoReact into their teaching in really thoughtful ways, and I think you’ll get some ideas for using more video in your teaching, whether or not you teach in a performance field like Jeff and Tom.
Episode ResourcesJeff Przybylo on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-przybylo-1a500a90/
Thomas Fisher’s faculty page, https://oscp.charlotte.edu/directory/thomas-fisher/
GoReact, https://get.goreact.com/
Swivl, https://www.swivl.com/
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
In a Learning Assistants program, students who did well in a course in the past are invited to come back to attend class and help current students learn the course material. I knew these programs could be effective from my time at Vanderbilt University. Last fall when I was at the POD Network conference, I just happened to sit at a table during a session next to Katie Johnson, associate professor of mathematics at Florida Gulf Coast University. I learned that not only did Katie lead a Learning Assistants program at her institution, but also that she was actively involved in the Learning Assistant Alliance, an international group of educators involved with LA programs.
I reached out to Katie after the conference to see if she and one of her experienced LAs would come on the podcast to talk about their experiences with their LA program, and they were happy to do so. I talked with Katie and with Katarya Johnson-Williams, a senior in software engineering with a minor in marketing at Florida Gulf Coast University. We talked about the Learning Assistants model, the impact this kind of program can have on faculty and students, and advice for instructors who are interested in starting up an LA program in their department or on their campus.
Episode Resources
Katie Johnson’s website, https://mathdrkj.wixsite.com/home
Katarya Johnson-Williams on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/katarya-johnson-williams/
Learning Assistant Program at Florida Gulf Coast University, https://www.fgcu.edu/about/leadership/officeoftheprovost/la-program/
Learning Assistant Alliance, https://www.learningassistantalliance.org/
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework for improving learning for all learners based on the science of how humans learn. It involves providing learners with multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression. We’ve mentioned the framework on the show from time to time, and I thought it was time to dig in a little deeper.
Naturally, I thought of inviting Thomas J. Tobin on the podcast. Tom helped found the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Teaching, Learning, & Mentoring, and he is an internationally recognized scholar, author, and speaker on technology-mediated education—especially copyright, evaluation of teaching practices, academic integrity, accessibility, and universal design for learning.
Tom is the co-author (with Kirsten Behling) of the 2018 book Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education, one of the best introductions to UDL around. And then I saw a social media post of Tom’s mentioning that he was working on a new book about UDL at scale. I had to talk to him to about that!
In our conversation, we talk about the “Plus One Principle” as a way to understand and get started with UDL, the relationship between UDL and the myth of learning styles, the value that UDL can have on student retention and student success, strategics that academic leaders (or would-be leaders!) can use to help their campuses adopt UDL practices, and more!
Episode Resources
· Thomas Tobin’s website, https://thomasjtobin.com/
· CAST, https://www.cast.org/
· UDL on Campus, http://udloncampus.cast.org/home
· Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone, https://wvupressonline.com/node/757
· Derek’s sketchnotes of Tom’s 2015 POD Network keynote, https://www.flickr.com/photos/derekbruff/22911027632
· "Understanding and Evaluating Online Course Accessibility," Limed: Teaching with a Twist [podcast], https://open.spotify.com/episode/2EFmNWWG0JetSaV6uiRyH7
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
I talked recently with Pary Fassihi, senior lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University, about her use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Adobe Firefly in her writing and research courses. I’ve known Pary a long time… She’s in my first book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems, about using clickers in the language instruction courses she was teaching back around 2007. These days, she still teaches some language courses, but most of her teaching is for the writing program at Boston. And she’s been sharing some very interesting things on LinkedIn about the ways she has integrated generative AI in her courses! In the interview, she talks about using AI-generated images with her students, having ChatGPT play the role of peer reviewer for student work, getting AI to help students with course readings, and much more.
Episode Resources
Pary Fassihi on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/pary-fassihi/
Pary’s Human vs. AI-Generated Summary and Response assignment, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NxkqM8yrLJAPLwYdEB8gcng8qqJZP9AzCEpkj8fTfZQ/edit
Pary’s Peer Review Papers with ChatGPT assignment, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1db1_LtM2d5ijGx25unLFcxHbfpPjCl2iOB1DoL_gqT0/edit
Pary's AI-Inspired Art Creation activity, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SkVtwGKwqF0M4rzlOYo-xyesseTotkNfZy4uNi2MVN8/edit
Boston's AI-Intensive Writing, Research, and Inquiry Courses, https://www.bu.edu/dli/projects/ai-intensive-writing-research-inquiry-courses/
Adobe Firefly, https://www.adobe.com/products/firefly.html
Claire Silver, AI collaborative artist, https://www.clairesilver.com/
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
We know that having students go to the free version of ChatGPT and ask it questions about course content can lead to some… inaccurate answers. But what if we could send students to an AI chatbot that was actually trained on our course content? Might that be a useful tool for learning?
These are no longer hypothetical questions. Top Hat has rolled out a new AI tool called Ace, an AI chatbot that reads your own course materials and answers student questions using those materials. How well does Top Hat Ace work? I reached out to Top Hat super-user Sravanti Kantheti to find out.
Sravanti is the program director for anatomy and physiology at Lanier Technical College in Georgia, as well as an adjunct biology professor at Georgia State University. She recently introduced Ace to her students. In our conversation, Sravanti shares how her students have been using Ace and what they think of it and we talk about how a tool like Ace can help students succeed in a challenging course like anatomy and physiology.
Episode Resources
Sravanti Kantheti on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/sravanti-kantheti-9874a261/
Top Hat Ace, https://tophat.com/features/ace-ai/
"The ChatGPT Effect and Transforming Nursing Education with Generative AI," Gosak, Pruinelli, Topaz, & Stiglic (2024), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1471595324000179
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
David Hinson is the R. Hugh Daniel professor of architecture at Auburn University. David teaches a course in professional practice, a course that covers such things as running a business, marketing and communication, and professional ethics. When he realized that his lecture course needed an overhaul, he reached out to Auburn’s center for teaching and learning, the Biggio Center, for an instructional design consultation.
Shawndra Bowers is the associate director of learning experience design at the Biggio Center, where she manages a team of 40 people who support online education at Auburn. Shawndra has her hand in a variety of interesting teaching projects at Auburn. She started working with David to take his onsite lecture course and turn it into an active learning course that leverages the best of online teaching and learning.
In the interview with David and Shawndra, we talk about what motivated David to redesign his course, the big changes David and Shawndra made to the course, how the two have leveraged student feedback to continue to improve the course over time, and what its like to work with an online education unit to redesign an onsite course.
Episode ResourcesDavid Hinson's faculty page, https://cadc.auburn.edu/people/david-hinson/
Shawndra Bower's staff page, https://www.auburn.edu/academic/provost/bios/shawndra-bowers.php
Auburn Biggio Center, https://biggio.auburn.edu/
"Blurring the Lines for Faculty Development," Derek's recent UPCEA blog post, https://upcea.edu/blurring-the-lines-for-faculty-development/
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Students as Partners programs have been on my radar for years now. These are programs that pair faculty with thoughtful students who provide input and feedback into the faculty member’s teaching and course design. The programs seem to have incredible benefits to the student partners, to the faculty partners, and to the faculty partner’s students, but I never figured out a way to get one started while I was at Vanderbilt.
Thanks to a fireworks show during the 2023 POD Network conference, I learned that Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University has a recently started a very popular Students as Partners Program. On the podcast, I talk with two people who know the program there well: Aimee Fleming, associate director for the Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, or CTLE, at Embry-Riddle, and Maren Rice, student partner for the CTLE. We had a great conversation about the Students as Partners program, how it started, how it works, and what benefits it brings to all involved.
Episode Resources
· Students as Partners, Center for Engaged Learning, Elon University, https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/resources/students-as-partners/
· Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, https://prescott.erau.edu/ctle
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
The Inclusive STEM Teaching Project is a free, online, six-week course “designed to advance the awareness, self-efficacy, and ability of faculty, postdocs, and doctoral students to cultivate inclusive STEM learning environments for all their students and to develop themselves as reflective, inclusive practitioners.”
On the podcast today, I talk with two of the project team members. Tershia Pinder-Grover is director of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching in Engineering at the University of Michigan, and Sarah Hokanson is assistant vice president and assistant provost for research development and PhD and postdoc affairs at Boston University. We talk about what makes this online course about inclusive teaching unique, including the use of local learning communities, affinity groups, and a troupe of actors, as well as the challenges of putting together such an impactful course.
And in case you don’t listen to the end of the interview, you should know that the course is being offered again this spring, starting on March 3rd, 2024. See below for a link to register.
Episode Resources
· Inclusive STEM Teaching Project, https://www.inclusivestemteaching.org/
· Spring 2024 course offering on edX, https://www.edx.org/learn/teacher-training/boston-university-the-inclusive-stem-teaching-project
· Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching courses, https://www.stemteachingcourse.org/
· “Ten Years of Preparing Future Faculty through STEM Teaching Courses,” Derek Bruff, https://derekbruff.org/?p=4162
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Tracie Addy, Derek Dube, and Khadijah Mitchell are authors of a new book called Enhancing Inclusive Instruction: Student Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Advancing Equity in Higher Education. It’s a sequel to their 2021 book, What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching, both from Routledge.
In this episode, the three co-authors talk about the origins of the book series, the importance of hearing student voices when practicing inclusive teaching, and how someone like me, who has been practicing active learning instruction for a couple of decades, might want to reconsider a few of his teaching practices.
Episode Resources
· Enhancing Inclusive Instruction: Student Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Advancing Equity in Higher Education (Routledge, 2024), https://www.routledge.com/Enhancing-Inclusive-Instruction-Student-Perspectives-and-Practical-App/Addy-Dube-Mitchell/p/book/9781642675719
· Book launch on February 27th, https://lafayette.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtcuCtqDorE9KK1RnODlhWBBf4IsV7g9iR#/registration
· “A Tool to Advance Inclusive Teaching Efforts: The ‘Who’s in Class?’ Form,” Addy, Mitchell, & Dube, Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education (2021), https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jmbe.00183-21
· “The Development of the Protocol for Advancing Inclusive Teaching Efforts (PAITE),” Addy, Younas, Cetin, Rizk, Cham, Nwankpa, & Borzone, Journal of Educational Research and Practice (2022), https://ldr.lafayette.edu/concern/publications/q237ht28c
· Inclusive Teaching Visualization Project, https://inclusiveteachingvisualization.com/
· Tomorrow’s Professor Today at UVA, https://cte.virginia.edu/programs/tomorrows-professor-today
· “What Really Matters for Instructors Implementing Equitable and Inclusive Teaching Approaches,” Addy, Reeves, Dube, & Mitchell, To Improve the Academy (2021), https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/tia/article/id/182/
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
CourseSource is an open-access journal now entering its tenth year that has a variety of peer-reviewed teaching resources for biology, primarily detailed lesson plans tagged by course and topic for easy searching. I found out about CourseSource years ago, and I was amazed at the catalog of high-quality lesson plans and other teaching resources there. I keep running into biology faculty who don’t know about this great resource, which is also kind of amazing. What I haven’t found are resources like CourseSource in other disciplines.
I reached out to the editorial team at CourseSource to find out more about the project and try to figure out why biology has a resource like this but other disciplines don’t. On the podcast today I talk with Jenny Knight, associate professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology at the University of Colorado Boulder and editor-in-chief of CourseSource, and with Sharleen Flowers, postdoctoral fellow at CU Boulder and managing editor at CourseSource.
We talk about the kinds of teaching resources that educators can find at CourseSource, the origins of the project, what it takes to make a project like this work, and how a peer-reviewed publication like CourseSource can help higher ed value teaching in more concrete ways.
Episode Resources
· CourseSource, https://qubeshub.org/community/groups/coursesource
· Jenny Knight’s faculty page, https://www.colorado.edu/mcdb/jenny-knight
· 2024 Intentional Teaching slow read, https://derekbruff.ck.page/posts/relationship-rich-education-and-the-start-of-the-intentional-tech-slow-read
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Isis Artze-Vega is college provost and vice president for academic affairs at Valencia College, a public college in Florida with over 40,000 students. Isis is also the co-author of a book on relationship-rich education, which was the topic of her closing plenary session at the 2024 POD Network conference in November. That plenary was fantastic and before it was even over, I made plans to invite Isis on the podcast to talk about the value of relationships in learning.
Isis is the co-author of Connections Are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education, which she wrote with Peter Felten, Leo Lambert, and Oscar Miranda Tapia. You might also know her as a co-author, along with Flower Darby, Bryan Dewsbury, and Mays Imad, of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. In our conversation, Isis and I talk about the two books and her involvement in them, the value of trusting relationships in the learning context, ways that instructors can help students cultivate relationships in college, and how online learning and generative AI might actually be used to foster relationships.
Episode Resources
· Isis Artze-Vega on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/isis-artze-vega-69952418/
· Connections Are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education, https://press.jhu.edu/books/title/12845/connections-are-everything
· Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, https://press.jhu.edu/books/title/12146/relationship-rich-education
· The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching, https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393893717
· The Liquid Syllabus from Michelle Pacansky-Brock, https://brocansky.com/humanizing/liquidsyllabus
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
In today’s episode, we dig into an important question for higher ed: How can we improve the evaluation of teaching? Researcher Corbin Campbell was quoted in a Chronicle article recently, saying, “Folks will say quality teaching is hard to measure. Quality research is hard to measure, but we do it.” I’m excited to bring a conversation with two academics who are contributing to efforts on their campuses to assess and evaluate teaching in more meaningful ways.
Beate Brunow is the associate director at the Schreyer Institute for Teaching at Penn State, and Shawn Simonson is a professor of kinesiology at Boise State University. Both have been involved in the development of new frameworks for defining effective teaching, and both are using those frameworks to change how teaching is evaluated at their institutions. We cover a lot of ground in our conversation, and if you care about teaching and learning in higher ed, I think you’ll find it interesting.
Episode Resources
· Penn State’s new Faculty Teaching Assessment Framework, https://www.schreyerinstitute.psu.edu/assessment_of_teaching
· “Establishing a Framework for Assessing Teaching Effectiveness,” Simonson, Earl, & Frary, 2021, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/87567555.2021.1909528
· “American Value Good Teaching. Do Colleges?”, McMurtrie, 2022, https://www.chronicle.com/article/americans-value-good-teaching-do-colleges
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
One of the themes I’ve been exploring here on the podcast is how teaching and learning in higher education has changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Months of emergency remote teaching followed by more planned online and blended teaching has resulted in an acceleration of the role of online teaching in higher education.
Safary Wa-Mbaleka is associate professor of leadership in higher education at Bethel University in Minnesota, and Leni Casimiro is professor and chair of education at the Adventist International Institute for Advanced Studies in the Philippines. They, along with Kelvin Thompson are editors of the new Sage Handbook of Online Higher Education out this month.
On this episode, I talk with Safary and Leni. We had a lively conversation about the changing state of online education around the world and how higher education faculty and staff can respond to those changes.
Episode Resources
· Safary Wa-Mbeleka’s faculty page, https://www.bethel.edu/academics/faculty/safary-wa-mbaleka
· Leni Casimiro’s faculty page, https://www.aiias.edu/education-department/name/leni-casimiro/
· The Sage Handbook of Online Higher Education, https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/the-sage-handbook-of-online-higher-education/book281802
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
On this episode, I talk with Greg Edwards, head of learning at Rize Education. Rize is a for-profit company that works with a consortium of over 135 colleges and universities to help them quickly launch new, career-oriented majors and other programs. The institutions partner with Rize, which can provide half a dozen core online courses for these majors, sourced from the consortium, that layer on existing courses at the home institution to get these new programs up and running in a semester or two.
As head of learning at Rize, Greg is involved in all aspects of course design and development. In our conversation, he shares how Rize goes about identifying new programs to create, how course design works at a consortium scale, and the roles that faculty play in this new model.
Episode Resources
· Greg Edwards on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorytedwards/
· Rize Education, https://www.rize.education/
· Lower Cost Models for Independent Colleges Consortium, https://www.thelcmc.org/
· LCMC programs, https://www.thelcmc.org/programs
· “The New Learning Economy” white paper by Jeff Selingo, https://info.cengage.com/learning-economy_wp_2738580
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
In this episode, I talk with Anne Reed, director of micro-credentials at the University of Buffalo. Her office oversees over one hundred different micro-credentials that can be earned by University of Buffalo students. Micro-credentials at Buffalo are learning experiences that are larger than a course but smaller than a minor that students can use to differentiate themselves on the job market by making clear the workforce relevant knowledge and skills they’ve gained.
Anne and I had a fascinating conversation about micro-credentials at the University of Buffalo, how they’re structured and aligned with workforce needs, the roles faculty play in them, and why students pursue them. She also taught me how to create my own micro-credential, an "Outstanding Podcast Guest" badge that I awarded to Anne!
Episode Resources:
· Office of Micro-Credentials at Buffalo, https://www.buffalo.edu/micro-credentials.html
· University of Buffalo’s badges, https://www.credly.com/organizations/university-at-buffalo/badges
· Anne Reed on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-reed/
· Anne’s “Outstanding Podcast Guest” badge, https://badgelist.com/Intentional-Teaching/Outstanding-Podcast-Guest/u/anne_reed
· Badge List, https://badgelist.com/
· National Association of Colleges and Employers, https://www.naceweb.org/
· O*NET, https://www.onetonline.org/
· “The New Learning Economy” white paper by Jeff Selingo, https://info.cengage.com/learning-economy_wp_2738580
· Texas Credentials for the Future, https://www.utsystem.edu/sites/texas-microcredentials
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Traditionally, college students who don’t have ACT or math placement exam scores high enough to place into college algebra are placed into intermediate algebra, a developmental math course that serves as a perquisite to college algebra for those students. However, this prerequisite approach has chronically low student success rates at many institutions.
Enter the corequisite approach, in which these students take college algebra along with a second, support course concurrently. The idea is that students who aren’t quite ready for college algebra will get the just-in-time support they need in their support course. The coreq approach is so successful that an increasing number of states are mandating that colleges and university at least offer the option and in some cases, do away with the prereq approach altogether.
What does it take to make a successful corequisite college algebra course? I wanted to find out, so I reached out to a few colleagues who have been doing this for a while. On this episode, you’ll hear from Tina Ragsdale, teaching enhancement coordinator at West Kentucky Community and Technical College; James Kimball, master instructor and assistant department head in mathematics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette; and Kathy Almy, longtime math educator and currently CEO of Almy Education. We have a fantastic conversation about the coreq approach to college algebra, and I think that anyone with an interest in college students success will find it enlightening.
Episode Resources:
· “Co-requisite Redesign Leads to Increased College Algebra Success and College Completion,” Tina Ragsdale, Renea Akin, and Geelyn Warren, https://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/jarihe/vol4/iss1/5/
· Almy Education, https://www.almyeducation.com/
· James Kimball’s faculty website, https://math.louisiana.edu/node/122
· College Algebra with Corequisite Support, an OpenStax textbook by Jay Abramson and Sharon North, https://openstax.org/details/books/college-algebra-corequisite-support-2e?Book%20details
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
I recently saw that Brielle Harbin received the 2023 Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Political Science Association. Brielle was a graduate teaching fellow at the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching from 2014 to 2016, which is how I know her. She was actively involved in our learning communities on the theme of teaching, difference, and power, work which resulted in two co-authored publications, including the award-winning article “Teaching Race and Racial Justice: Developing Students’ Cognitive and Affective Understanding of Race” in the journal Teaching & Learning Inquiry.
Brielle is now an assistant professor of political science at the United States Naval Academy, where she has taught courses on politics, race, and media, and has led workshops for her peers on inclusive and anti-racist teaching. Thanks to this and other work, Brielle is now the first pre-tenure faculty member to win the Distinguished Teaching Award from the APSA!
I reached out to Brielle to invite her on the podcast, and we had a wonderful conversation about her teaching philosophy and practices and how she continues to develop herself as a teacher over time.
Episode ResourcesBrielle Harbin’s website, https://www.mbharbin.com/
APSA Distinguish Teaching Award announcement, https://politicalsciencenow.com/brielle-harbin-receives-the-2023-apsa-distinguished-teaching-award/
Brielle's teaching publications, https://www.mbharbin.com/teaching.html
State of Nature game, https://sites.google.com/site/howtodosimulationgames/examples-of-simulations/political-studies/state-of-nature
Please note that in this interview, Brielle Harbin speaks as an individual and not on behalf of her organization.
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about “assignment makeovers” in this new age of AI, and a key part of rethinking assignments is exploring what we and our students can do with AI technologies in our fields.
To help in those explorations, I reached to Garret Westlake. He is the associate vice provost for innovation and executive director of the da Vinci Center for Innovation at Virginia Commonwealth University. I know Garret because I helped the da Vinci Center build and launch an online short course on design thinking and human-centered design. I learned that Garret has been actively exploring the use of AI technologies in design thinking, and I was really interested in hearing from Garret how AI might serve as a catalyst for creative thinking and a supportive tool for entrepreneurship.
If you’re interested in teaching creativity or critical thinking or having students tackle open-ended problems, I think you’ll get some great ideas for integrating AI into your courses from my conversation with Garret.
Episode Resources:
· Garret Westlake on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/garretwestlake/
· Garret’s TEDx talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxXuhHB093I
· da Vinci Center for Innovation at VCU, https://davincicenter.vcu.edu/
· Introduction to Design Thinking, a free short course from the VCU da Vinci Center, https://davincicenter.catalog.vcu.edu/courses/introduction-to-design-thinking
· Assignment Makeovers in the AI Age: Essay Edition, https://derekbruff.org/?p=4105
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
On today’s episode, I talk with Eden about her experiment with mastery assessment. Eden is an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Mississippi.
Eden had been changing up her grading practices for a few semesters, and this spring she leaned into mastery assessment. The students in her 170-seat general chemistry course could retake a new version of each of the four exams in her course basically as many times as they wanted.
In the interview, Eden shares her motivations for moving away from traditional grading practices, as well as lots of nuts and bolts about her mastery assessment practices this spring.
Episode Resources:
· Eden Tanner’s faculty page, https://chemistry.olemiss.edu/eden-tanner/
· Episode 19: Talking about Inclusive Teaching with Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/13445883
· Episode 15: Grading for Growth with Robert Talbert and David Clark, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/13041036
Podcast Links:
Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
In March 2023, educators Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy wrote a piece for the Chronicle titled “How Can ‘Inclusion’ Be a Bad Word?” At the time, they both worked at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and they had been asked by North Carolina state lawmakers to provide data about DEI programming at their institution. In their op-ed, they wrote:
“How does it feel to have your work in this kind of political spotlight? Frustrating. In large part because of the disconnect between how these topics are discussed on social media and on the news versus what we know to be true about them based on evidence, research, and practice.”
I reached out to Viji and Kelly to ask them about that disconnect and about how they communicate with a variety of audiences, including with their own students and with faculty colleagues, about inclusive teaching. Kelly Hogan is a professor of the practice of biology at Duke University, having recently moved there from UNC-Chapel Hill, and Viji Sathy is the associate dean for evaluation and assessment at the Office of Undergraduate Education at UNC-Chapel Hill as well as professor of psychology and neuroscience. The two are authors of the 2022 book Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom and speak frequently at colleges and universities about inclusive teaching and student success.
The three of us had a wide-ranging conversation about inclusive teaching and what it looks like in practice in higher education. I hope you’ll listen to it and share it with friends and colleagues who are interested in a practical understanding of this work.
Episode Resources
“How Can ‘Inclusion’ Be a Bad Word?” by Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy, https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-can-inclusion-be-a-bad-word
Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom by Kelly Hogan and Viji Sathy, West Virginia University Press, https://wvupressonline.com/inclusive-teaching
Viji Sathy’s website, https://sites.google.com/view/vijisathy
Kelly Hogan’s faculty page, https://scholars.duke.edu/person/kelly.hogan
inclusifiED, Kelly and Viji’s joint website, https://sites.google.com/view/inclusified
DEI Legislation Tracker, Chronicle of Higher Education, https://www.chronicle.com/article/here-are-the-states-where-lawmakers-are-seeking-to-ban-colleges-dei-efforts
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to speak at a teaching conference hosted by Hofstra University in Long Island, New York. My favorite presenter at that conference was a sociology professor named Rosemary McGunnigle-Gonzales. Not only did she go on a beautiful rant about the deficiencies of our traditional classroom spaces, she also shared a fantastic story about taking her students outside to draw chalk timelines on the sidewalks around her classroom building. Rosemary is an adjunct assistant professor in sociology at both Hofstra University and Columbia University, and I am very excited to have her on the podcast today.
We talk about embodied learning, classroom design, teaching hard topics like human rights, getting students to do the reading, and, yes, sidewalk chalk as an educational technology.
Episode Resources:
· “Getting students to do the reading.. and to talk about it!” Derek Bruff, November 2022, https://derekbruff.org/?p=3934.
· “Transparent Teaching with Mary-Ann Winkelmes,” Intentional Teaching podcast, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/11997464-transparent-teaching-with-mary-ann-winkelmes.
· “Embodied Learning with Susan Hrach,” Intentional Teaching podcast, https://intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com/2069949/11558821-embodied-learning-with-susan-hrach.
· “Episode 96: Jenae Cohn,” Leading Lines podcast, https://leadinglinespod.com/uncategorized/episode-96jenae-cohn/.
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
In the summer of 2020, the Oregon State University Ecampus launched a research seminar that gathered educational researchers from around the world who were curious about the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. After all, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, most online education was asynchronous. How important were all those Zoom meetings for student learning, really?
Today on the podcast, I welcome three members of that research group who are presenting their findings at the Distance Teaching & Learning Conference hosted by UPCEA, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My guests are Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, director of the Ecampus research unit at Oregon State; Enoch Park, senior instructional designer and online learning specialist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and Lidija Krebs-Lazendic, lecturer in psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
These three represent a group that conducted an extensive meta-analysis of the existing literature about online learning, looking for studies that examined the role of synchronous instructor presence in online courses. Spoiler alert: They didn’t find much! So if you’re looking for an answer to this big question about synchronous instructor presence, you won’t hear it. But we do have a great conversation about the question itself, their research methods, and what advice they have for others engaged in educational research.
Episode Resources:
Mary Ellen Dello Stritto, https://ecampus.oregonstate.edu/staff/bio/dellostm.htm
Enoch Park, https://professional.charlotte.edu/directory/enoch-park
Lidija Krebs-Lazendic, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lidija-krebs-lazendic-3a4a8323/?originalSubdomain=au
Distance Teaching & Learning (DT&L) and Summit for Online Leadership and Administration + Roundtable (SOLA+R), https://conferences.upcea.edu/DTL-SOLAR2023/
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
If you’ve taught in higher education for any length of time, you’ve probably had one or more students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, better known as ADHD, in your courses. You might not have known it, however, since some students with ADHD haven’t been diagnosed yet and some choose not to disclose it to their instructors. This type of neurodivergence can be a little invisible to instructors, which is why it’s important we learn more about it and how we can design and teach courses that support these students.
Cathryn Friel knows a lot about teaching students with ADHD. Catt is a senior instructional designer at Missouri Online, and she completed her PhD last year with a qualitative study examining the experiences of students with ADHD in online courses. I reached out to Catt to learn more about her study and her own experiences as a student with ADHD. I learned a lot from our conversation about how students with ADHD experience and cope with college courses and about how instructors can make their courses, especially their online courses, more welcoming to neurodiverse students.
Episode Resources:
· “Experiences of students with ADHD in online learning environments: A multi-case study,” Cathryn Friel, https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/91567
· “What I wish my instructor knew: How active learning influences the classroom experiences and self-advocacy of STEM majors with ADHD and specific learning disabilities,” Mariel Pfeifer, Julio Cordero, and Julie Dangremond Stanton, https://www.lifescied.org/doi/full/10.1187/cbe.21-12-0329
· “Supporting ADHD Learners with Karen Costa,” Teaching in Higher Ed podcast ep. 384, https://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/supporting-adhd-learners/
· Distance Teaching & Learning (DT&L) and Summit for Online Leadership and Administration + Roundtable (SOLA+R), https://conferences.upcea.edu/DTL-SOLAR2023/
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Robert Talbert and David Clark are both mathematics faculty members at Grand Valley State University and authors of the forthcoming book Grading for Growth. They are both incredibly thoughtful and effective teachers who share their experiences, insights, and advice widely. Their new book based on dozens of case studies from instructors across the disciplines who are questioning some of the assumptions baked into higher education and finding better ways to assess students—and to help them grow.
In our conversation, we discuss some of the problems with traditional grading systems, the ways that teaching college students is not like competitive gymnastics, the four pillars of alternative grading that Robert and David inferred from their case studies, and strategies for putting those pillars into practice. I also ask them if maybe it’s possible to not hate grading so much?
Episode ResourcesGrading for Growth (Stylus, 2023), https://styluspub.presswarehouse.com/browse/book/9781642673814/Grading-for-Growth
Grading for Growth blog, https://gradingforgrowth.com/
Robert Talbert's website, https://rtalbert.org/
David Clark's website, https://sites.google.com/mail.gvsu.edu/clarkdav/
Podcast Links:
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Correspondence courses. Night classes. Extension schools. Distance education. Continuing education. Professional education. There’s always been a lot happening in higher education for working adults outside the traditional residential undergraduate experience. And for the last couple of decades, those areas of higher education have increasingly moved online. Three years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic greatly accelerated the growth of online education, both for working adults and for traditionally aged college students.
To get a better handle on the changes in online education caused by the pandemic, I reached out to a couple folks who know online education well. Robert Hansen is the chief executive officer of the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, better known as UPCEA, and Julie Uranis is the senior vice president for online and strategic initiatives at UPCEA. UPCEA is a professional association for higher education faculty and staff who are involved in professional, continuing, and online education, and Bob and Julie been busy the last few years helping their members adapt to higher education’s new landscape.
During our conversation, we talk about UPCEA's mission and how its work has changed over time, the state of online education as we leave the COVID-19 pandemic, the changing role of online program managers (OPMs) in higher ed, and UPCEA's summer conference, which is actually two conferences combined.
Episode Resources:
· UPCEA, https://upcea.edu/
· Distance Teaching & Learning (DT&L) and Summit for Online Leadership and Administration + Roundtable (SOLA+R), https://conferences.upcea.edu/DTL-SOLAR2023/
· “Guidance on outsourcing spurs anxiety about ‘collateral damage,’” in which Inside Higher Ed covers the Dear Colleague Letter about online program managers (OPMs), https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/02/28/amid-pushback-us-delays-guidance-outsourcing
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
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Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
In her 2022 book Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology, Michelle D. Miller writes about the "moral panics" that often happen in response to new technologies. In his 2013 book Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, James M. Lang argues that the best way to reduce cheating is through better course design. What do these authors have to say about teaching in an age of generative AI tools like ChatGPT? Lots!
I asked Jim and Michelle on the podcast to discuss generative AI from their different perspectives, and the three of us had a wide-ranging conversation about how faculty and other instructors might respond to these new tools. Michelle is a professor of psychological sciences at Northern Arizona University and a prolific writer and speaker on teaching and learning in higher ed. Jim is a former professor of English at Assumption College and also a prolific writer and speaker on teaching and learning in higher ed. In the conversation, they raise some important questions for educators to consider this summer as we retool courses and assignments for the fall to account for AI technology.
Episode ResourcesJames M. Lang's website, https://www.jamesmlang.com/
Michelle D. Miller's website, https://www.michellemillerphd.com/
Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty, https://amzn.to/3q8Lxr8
Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology, https://amzn.to/431YEcj
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
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Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
On today’s podcast, I talk with the authors of a new book that can help college teachers better understand their students as whole people, while also providing lots of advice for instructors who want to better support their students’ learning. Robert Eaton and Bonnie Moon are authors, along with Steven Hunsaker, of Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom, the latest in West Virginia University Press’s Teaching and Learning in Higher Education series edited by James Lang and Michelle Miller. Rob Eaton is a professor of religious education at Brigham Young University-Idaho, and Bonnie Moon is a professor of mathematics, also at BYU-Idaho.
Rates of anxiety and depression among college students are higher than they’ve ever been, and Rob and Bonnie share lots of strategies in our conversation for instructors who don’t want to make learning harder than it needs to be for their students. As Rob says near the end of the conversation, “Not every difficulty is desirable.” Rob and Bonnie have talked to a lot of students about their learning experiences in college, and the two of them have very practical advice for designing courses and assignments with compassion and respect for students.
Episode Resources:
· Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom by Robert Eaton, Steven Hunsaker, and Bonnie Moon, https://wvupressonline.com/node/920
· The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens after High School, by Tim Clydesdale, https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo5298911.html
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Since November 2022, higher education has been trying to wrap its collective mind around the advent of AI text generators like ChatGPT. For those of us who teach courses where we might ask students to respond to a prompt by writing a short essay, ChatGPT and similar tools certainly seem to provide students a way out of doing that writing themselves.
However, our colleagues who teach computer science and computer programming often ask their students to write computer code in respond to a prompt. As it turns out, there are a number of generative AI tools that pre-date ChatGPT that can pretty much answer any coding question you might ask a student in a first- or second-semester programming class.
This means that computer science education has had a bit more time to figure out how to respond to new AI tools that can short circuit the learning process for their students. In this episode, I talk with Brett Becker, assistant professor at University College Dublin in the School of Computer Science. He has co-authored at least two papers on the use of AI code generation tools in computer science education, and he is deep in these discussions in his field.
In our conversation, Brett explores how new AI tools are leading computer science educators to rethink their learning goals, their assessments, and how they teach their students the ethics of computer programming. There are a lot of lessons here for educators in other fields figuring out what to do with AI tools!
Episode Resources:Brett Becker's website, https://www.brettbecker.com/
"Programming Is Hard--Or At Least It Used to Be: Educational Opportunities and Challenges of AI Code Generation," co-authored by Brett Becker, https://www.brettbecker.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/becker2023programming.pdf
"'It's Weird That It Knows What I Want': Usability and Interactions with Copilot for Novice Programmers," co-authored by Brett Becker, https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02491
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
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Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Picture a calculus textbook. You’re probably picturing a hardback book an inch and a half thick, full of mathematical notation. The traditional calculus textbook can be intimidating for students, like five and a half pounds of pure confusion.
On today’s episode, I’m excited to share a conversation with two mathematics faculty at the College of Charleston: Amy Langville, professor of mathematics, and Kathryn Pedings-Behling, adjunct instructor of mathematics. Amy and Kathryn have designed a very different calculus textbook which they call Deconstruct Calculus. It’s one part textbook, one part journal, and part activity book, and I’ve never seen anything like it in higher ed.
Amy and Kathryn share the inspiration for Deconstruct Calculus, the activities and visual design the book uses to engage students and help them learn, and teaching principles from Deconstruct Calculus that can apply to any discipline.
Episode Resources:
· Deconstruct Calculus, https://www.deconstructcalc.com/
· Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith, https://kerismith.squarespace.com/books
· Small Teaching by James Lang, https://www.jamesmlang.com/books
· Leading Lines interview with Remi Kalir about annotation, https://leadinglinespod.com/uncategorized/episode-114remi-kalir/
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
On today’s podcast, I’m happy to share a roundtable discussion with three faculty who teach introductory biology courses using a non-traditional model. All three teach what is called studio-style biology, where the lecture and lab portions are not just coordinated, but actually integrated into the same time and space. The course might meet two hours at a shot three times a week, which each class session featuring a mix of mini-lectures and wet lab activities.
My guests are Scott Chirhart, professor and chair of biology at Centenary College; Robbie Bear, senior instructor in biology at Kansas State University; and Justin Shaffer, teaching associate professor in chemical and biological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Their approaches to studio-style biology are all a little different, and I was glad I could get all three of them on together to compare and contrast their courses.
My three guests have lots to share with anyone interested in how a department can put together an introductory course with lots of moving pieces and a strong emphasis on active learning.
Episode Resources:
Scott Chirhart’s faculty page, https://www.centenary.edu/academics/departments-schools/biology/biology-department-faculty/
Robbie Bear’s faculty page, https://www.k-state.edu/biology/about/people/faculty/bear/
Justin Shaffer’s faculty page, https://chemeng.mines.edu/project/shaffer-justin/
Studio biology at Kansas State, https://www.k-state.edu/biology/pob/index.html
Assessment of the effectiveness of the studio format in introductory undergraduate biology [at Kansas State] by Montelone, Rintoul, & Williams (2017), https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe.06-09-0193
Improving exam performance in introductory biology through the use of preclass reading guides [at Colorado School of Mines] by Lieu, Wong, Asefirad, & Shaffer (2017), https://www.lifescied.org/doi/10.1187/cbe.16-11-0320
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Eric Detweiler is an associate professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University and the director of the public writing and rhetoric program at MTSU. When I saw that Eric had a new book out called Responsible Pedagogy: Moving Beyond Authority and Mastery in Higher Education, I knew I wanted to talk with him here on the podcast.
In the interview, Eric shares the motivation for the book, the problems he sees with the notions of authority and mastery in higher education, and how not to teach about thesis statements. Oh, and we talk about ChatGPT, the AI text generator, because it’s unavoidable.
Episode Resources:
- Eric Detweiler’s website, https://rheteric.org/
- Responsible Pedagogy: Moving Beyond Authority and Mastery in Higher Education, https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-09343-7.html
- Rhetoricity, Eric’s podcast, https://rhetoricity.libsyn.com/
- @EricSDet on Twitter, https://twitter.com/EricSDet
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Thanks to another great podcast, Future U by Jeff Selingo and Michael Horn, I learned about a course at Georgetown University called Mastering the Hidden Curriculum. Part of the Georgetown Scholars Program, the course teaches students things about college that many students, especially first-generation students, don’t know, like what office are and how to interact with faculty. The course also dives into topics like imposter syndrome and how to fight it as a new college student.
I wanted to know more about the course and the Georgetown Scholars Program, which provides programmatic support for high-achieving low-income and first-generation students at Georgetown. I reached out to Missy Foy, executive director of the GSP, to ask her on the podcast. She, in turn, connected me with Anthony Abraham Jack, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. The two of them are a wealth of information about the experiences of low-income and first-gen college students, and they had a lot to share for faculty and administrators about how colleges and universities can better support these students.
Episode Resources:
Anthony Jack’s faculty page, https://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/anthony-jack
Georgetown Scholars Program, https://gsp.georgetown.edu/
“What Students Think of Their College Experience,” Future U podcast, November 23, 2022, https://futureupodcast.com/episodes/what-students-think-of-their-college-experience/
Music:"The Weekend" by chillmore, via Pixabay
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Regan Gurung is associate vice provost and executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State University, as well as a professor of psychology. Dwaine Plaza is a professor of sociology at Oregon State, and the two of them are editing a forthcoming book titled Onward to Better: How Facing a Pandemic Will Improve Higher Education in the 21st Century. Regan and Dwaine are in the interesting position of having read about two dozen chapter submissions for the book, all about lessons learned from teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic authored by faculty, staff, and administrators, including a healthy amount of teaching center directors. Full disclosure: I am one of those contributors! I wrote a chapter on our experiences with pandemic teaching at Vanderbilt University.
I asked Regan and Dwaine on the podcast so I could pick their brains about what they’ve learned reading and editing all those chapters. What lessons has higher education learned from such a challenging time? What lessons should higher ed learn? And how can we get ready for whatever challenge comes next?
Episode Resources:Regan Gurung’s faculty page, https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/users/regan-gurung
Dwaine Plaza’s faculty page, https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/users/dwaine-plaza
Center for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State, https://ctl.oregonstate.edu/
Music:"The Weekend" by chillmore, via Pixabay
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
In this episode, I talk with Mary-Ann Winkelmes, a longtime colleague in the world of educational development. Mary-Ann has worked at teaching centers at Harvard University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and Brandeis University. She’s also the founder and director of the TILT Higher Ed project. TILT stands for “transparency in learning and teaching,” and the project works with instructors and institutions to practice transparent course and assignment design. With all the conversation in higher education today about rigor and flexibility, I thought this would be a perfect time to talk with Mary-Ann about transparency in teaching and learning.
As you’ll hear, Mary-Ann has a lot to say about the value of transparent design and how instructors can make small changes in their teaching that have outsized impact on student learning and student success.
Episode Resources:
TILT Higher Ed: Transparency in Learning and Teaching, https://tilthighered.com/
TILT Examples and Resources, https://tilthighered.com/tiltexamplesandresources
Transparent Design in Higher Education Teaching and Leadership, Stylus 2019, https://styluspub.presswarehouse.com/browse/book/9781620368237/Transparent-Design-in-Higher-Education-Teaching-and-Leadership
“A Crowdsourced Rubric for Evaluating Infographics” on Derek’s Agile Learning blog, https://derekbruff.org/?p=2081
Hausmann, Leslie R. M., Feifei Ye, Janet Ward Schofield and Rochelle L Woods. "Sense of Belonging and Persistence in White and African American First-Year Students. Research in Higher Education (2009) 50, 7: 649-669.
Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. "A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes among minority students." Science 331 (2011): 1447-1451.
Brady, S., Cohen, G. Jarvis, S., Walton, G. "A brief social-belonging intervention in college improves adult outcomes for Black Americans." Sciences Advances vol. 6, no. 118 (20 April 2020).
Music:"The Weekend" by chillmore, via Pixabay
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
“Service courses” are courses like college algebra and calculus that are taught by math departments to students not majoring in math, who take those courses typically to satisfy a major or general ed requirement. These courses are notoriously problematic, often with high drop-fail-withdraw rates or big gaps in student performance across demographic groups. Recently, I went looking for departments who are teaching service courses well. I found the math department at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In just a two-year period, the DFW rate (that’s drop-fail-withdraw) in their service courses dropped from 35% to 25%. That’s a huge improvement in student outcomes, especially for a department that teaches eight or nine thousand students each year.
I reached out to Juan Gutiérrez, professor and chair of mathematics at UTSA, to ask about the changes the department made that lead to this improvement. He very graciously sat down with me for an interview, and I am very excited to share it here on the podcast. Juan shares some of his rather amazing life story, his goals for students success especially for the Hispanic students who attend San Antonio, and the data-driven and highly successful changes his math department made to college algebra, calculus, and other service courses.
Episode Resources:
Juan Gutiérrez’s faculty page, https://math.utsa.edu/directory/juan-gutierrez/
“A Department, Transformed,” https://math.utsa.edu/a-word-from-the-chair/
Music:"The Weekend" by chillmore, via Pixabay
Podcast Links:
Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe
Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching
Find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon, among other places.
See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.
Wouldn't it be interesting to see an analysis of how much time you spent on active learning, right after class ended? DART is a tool created by a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional team of education researchers. DART stands for Decibel Analysis for Research in Teaching. All you have to do is record your class session with your phone and upload the recording to the DART website. DART’s machine learning algorithms will then analyze that audio and let you know how much of your class time was spent on lecturing versus active learning.
I first heard about DART a few years ago, and I’ve been wanting to learn more about it ever since. I reached out to Melinda Owens, assistant teaching professor in neurobiology at the University of California San Diego and one of the lead developers for DART, and she was excited to talk with me about DART. Melinda shares a bit about her journey into education research, the origins of DART, and how college faculty can use DART to better understand and improve their own teaching.
Episode Resources:Melinda Owens’ faculty page, https://biology.ucsd.edu/research/faculty/mtowens.html
DART website, https://sepaldart.herokuapp.com/
“Classroom sound be used to classify teaching practices in college science courses,” Melinda Owens et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114:12, https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1618693114
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Music:"The Weekend" by chillmore, via Pixabay
On today’s episode of Intentional Teaching, I talk with Robert Cummings, associate professor of writing and rhetoric and executive director of academic innovation at the University of Mississippi. Bob has spent his career exploring what’s coming in terms of teaching and technology, particularly in the field of writing instruction. These days, Bob is collaborating with computer scientists to figure out what role AI technologies might have in writing instruction.
I reached out to Bob to talk with me about the state of affairs in AI and writing, and we had a wide-ranging conversation that I’m excited to share here on the podcast.
Episode Resources:Robert Cummings’ faculty page, https://english.olemiss.edu/robert-cummings/
OpenAI examples, https://beta.openai.com/examples
Fermat Generative AI, https://fermat.ws/
Michael Wooldridge, professor of computer science, University of Oxford, https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/michael.wooldridge/
Peter Elbow, emeritus professor of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst, http://peterelbow.com/
Is There a Text in This Class? by Stanley Fish, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674467262
Emad Mostaque on the Hard Fork podcast, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/podcasts/generative-ai-is-here-who-should-control-it.html
“Moore’s Law for Everything” by Sam Altman, https://moores.samaltman.com/
Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans, https://amzn.to/3UNC1Ed
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Music:"The Weekend" by chillmore, via Pixabay
On today’s episode of Intentional Teaching, I bring you a fantastic interview with educator and author Susan Hrach. Susan is the director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning at Columbus State University and the author of the 2021 book Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning. I knew of Susan’s work in embodied learning, and I discovered recently that we share an interest in active learning spaces and how they can be used to support and enhance teaching and learning. I reached out to Susan to see if she could help me better understand the connections between our bodies and our learning spaces, and she gladly agreed.
In the interview, Susan describes some of the ways we use our bodies for learning, and she shares practical advice for faculty teaching on-site or online for recognizing and fostering embodied learning.
Episode Resources:Susan Hrach’s website: https://susanhrach.com/
Susan Hrach on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SusanHrach
Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning: https://amzn.to/3TEsMFL
“What it’s like to teach in an active learning classroom,” by Robert Talbert: https://rtalbert.org/teaching-in-alc/
“More than mere handwaving: Gesture and embodiment in expert mathematical proof,” by Tyler Marghetis, Laurie D. Edwards, and Rafael Núñez, https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=AAUoDwAAQBAJ
"The push for more active learning spaces on campus," Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09/16/push-more-active-learning-spaces-campus
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Music:"The Weekend" by chillmore, via Pixabay
Welcome to the Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I’m your host, Derek Bruff.
I directed the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University for over a decade, and I’ve worked with faculty and other instructors at dozens of colleges and universities, helping them to become more intentional and effective teachers. I’ve written two books on teaching in higher education: Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments and Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching. It’s that second book, which came out in 2019, that has inspired the title of this podcast and the companion newsletter I send out most Thursdays. I’m using “Intentional Teaching” to indicate that we should be intentional not only in how we teach, but also how we develop as teachers over time. I hope this podcast, featuring interviews with educators and researchers from across higher education, will be a valuable part of your professional development as an educator.
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More on Derek and his work: https://derekbruff.org/
Music: “Dreamcatcher,” https://www.purple-planet.com/.