Claim OwnershipIntentional Teaching, a show about teaching in higher education
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© 2026 Derek Bruff Consulting
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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. (Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.)
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When I heard my friend Windy Frank, an adjunct faculty at Lipscomb University here in Nashville, talk about an assignment of hers in which students designed custom AI chatbots, I was very interested. Windy teaches in the College of Bible at Lipscomb, and she asked her students to create AI chatbots based on figures in the Old Testament. Students then engaged their chatbots in conversation, asking the prophet Jonah about his biggest failure or Daniel to make up some names for the lions he famo...
Last fall, I was interviewed on a podcast called Transform Your Teaching from the Cedarville University Center for Teaching and Learning. Hosts Rob McDole and Jared Pyles had me on to talk about my book Intentional Tech six year out from its publication date. I shared the Intentional Tech principles I find most relevant today, especially as higher ed continues to respond to generative AI, and I talked about what I would put in a second edition of the book were I to write one. Rob and Jared as...
Annette Vee is an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and co-author (with Marc Watkins and your podcast host) of the forthcoming book The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching. Annette and I met through this writing project, and I invited her on the podcast to get to know her better. Annette and I cover a lot of ground in our conversation: how computational literacy is changing in light of AI, whether there is such a thing as “AI literacy,” what she has learned fr...
About a year ago, I appeared on the Ed Up Provost podcast hosted by Gregor Thuswaldner to share some educational technology advice for academic leaders. Topics included strategic planning around edtech adoption to managing innovation and organizational change to investing in faculty and staff, and I think my advice holds up well. Today, I'm sharing that interview here on the Intentional Teaching podcast feed. Whether your job title includes the word provost or not, I hope you find the convers...
Ken Bain was the author of What the Best College Teachers Do, a book that has helped many college educators apply the science of learning to their teaching practice. He was also the founding director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, which is why I interviewed him in 2023 for an oral history I was producing about the CFT. Ken Bain passed away in October 2025, and I wanted to honor his legacy by sharing my full interview with him from 2023. In this episode, Ken talks about his ...
What if your college or university decided that every undergraduate student there would be an entrepreneur, not just studying entrepreneurship but doing it? That’s exactly the decision made a few years ago by the leadership at Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Texas. Paul Quinn is an HBCU with a small student body, just 700 students. This year, the college has launched a new program called Every Quinnite Is an Entrepreneur. The goal? Every student, regardless of major, launches and operates a rea...
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 o...
1On 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 Lear...
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 ...
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 Te...
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 awa...
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 wi...
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;...
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...
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 Nort...
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,...
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 wi...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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