Designed for Learning

When satellite maps became available on our phones, some wondered what we would lose by becoming less oriented to the places we live or visit. But most of us have used these maps for many years now and find them to be incredibly useful. Which begs the question: Does it matter if we’ve lost our sense of direction a bit? Educators now find themselves asking similar questions about AI and teaching. What happens when we stop using a skill and allow technology to do it for us? Do we become d...

When you become a teacher, you commit to a life of learning—not just for your students, but for yourself. You can feel totally comfortable and confident in your teaching practices, and then suddenly some new technology or some new group of students comes along and upends everything you think you know about education. In those moments, instructors often seek out resources and conversations with peers and students to think through how they might adapt their teaching. But actually giving up a be...

Over the last couple of decades, we’ve seen an explosion of books and articles about what’s often called “brain-based learning,” as neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists study and explain what circuits are firing when a student tries to memorize a fact or solve a problem. Without question, this scholarship has been a boon to teachers seeking to improve their practices. But there is a caveat: Not all brains think alike. Researchers call this neurodiversity, and it refers to the notion th...

If you follow the conversations about higher education on social media or in the news, a primary topic on people’s minds is the impact of artificial intelligence on the purposes and processes of an education. For better or worse, much of the focus has been on cheating: Are students outsourcing their work, and their learning, to tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini? Some high-profile stories have gone so far as to suggest cheating is so rampant that the whole college system...

Can you draw lessons from the way you teach and apply them in your writing? Designed for Learning host Jim Lang thinks so—so much so that he’s written a new book about it called Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience. To learn more, we flipped the script and asked Kristi Rudenga, director of Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, to interview Jim, a professor of the practice at the Kaneb Center, about his latest project. He shares his insi...

With Notre Dame’s Summer Online courses set to get underway in June, we turn our attention to teaching online—specifically ways to create a sense of community among instructors and students when meeting through screens, and why that matters in the first place. Rebecca Glazier is an ideal person with whom to have this conversation. A professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, she is the author of Connecting in the Online Classroom: Building Rapport between Teachers and Students. G...

Although artificial intelligence has been part of higher education for a couple of years now, faculty are still struggling with what this development means for themselves, their students, their courses—and especially their assessments. Notre Dame Learning recently launched the Lab for AI in Teaching & Learning (LAITL), led by Alex Ambrose of our Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, to help instructors navigate this terrain. Alex is an eloquent spokesperson for the argument that by buildi...

Instructors everywhere responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with new ideas and strategies for teaching students. Georgetown University’s Maggie Debelius is the co-editor of a new book of essays highlighting this work with the intention of helping colleges and universities become more resilient centers of learning. Here, Maggie joins host Jim Lang to discuss the book, titled Recentering Learning: Complexity, Resilience, and Adaptability in Higher Education, and explore how higher education shou...

“Incredibly rich and textured and nuanced.” “Re-energized me to continue working on my teaching.” “Really wonderful and empowering.” These are some of the phrases past attendees have used to describe the Notre Dame Inclusive Teaching Academy (NDITA). To learn more about what makes it so special, Designed for Learning host Jim Lang talks with Horane Diatta-Holgate, one of its organizers, and 2024 participant Dana Lashley, who is an associate teaching professor of chemistry at Notre Dame. NDITA...

In this inaugural episode of Designed for Learning, host Jim Lang sits down with cognitive psychologist and author Michelle D. Miller to explore the challenges and rewards of something that sounds so basic it’s easy to overlook how daunting it can be: Learning and remembering student names. As you prepare to meet students when they return to campus for the new semester, mastering their names isn't just a memory exercise—it’s a step toward creating a welcoming, inclusive classroom environmen...

Designed for Learning is a podcast from Notre Dame Learning, a collaborative unit at the University of Notre Dame that works with faculty and other instructors as they seek to enhance learning for their students. In that spirit, the show features interviews with teachers, experts in teaching and learning in higher education, authors of new books and resources, and anyone else we can learn from. New episodes are released monthly. Designed for Learning is hosted by Jim Lang, a professor of the ...