Designed for Learning

It used to be that instructors primarily assessed student learning via printed documents that were turned in physically—papers written on actual paper, blue book exams, etc. Over the last couple of decades, those artifacts largely transitioned into digital products, which students submit through an online learning management system. In addition to efficiency gains, the shift reduced the amount of paper being shuffled back and forth between teacher and students. With the presence of AI ever in...

In higher education’s current landscape, many thinkers in teaching and learning are arguing that we need to emphasize that college is more than just the acquisition of knowledge and skills. We want students to recognize the value of learning in community, listening and speaking to the people around them. We want them to feel like they belong, that they have a place in our courses and on our campuses. We want them to develop confidence in their voices, to feel comfortable sharing their unique ...

The words and metaphors we choose to describe our interactions with artificial intelligence are telling. Do we view it as a stochastic parrot? A thought partner? A form of co-intelligence? A sycophantic assistant? Each of these phrases reflects a different set of beliefs and attitudes and likely shapes our engagement with AI. How instructors talk about the technology’s relationship to their teaching goals can be just as revealing. To say we want students to develop AI fluency, for example, me...

For better or worse, much of the talk about AI’s impact on the purposes and processes of an education continues to focus 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 is basically collapsing around us. This month, we’re revisiting our most popular episode to date, a conversation with Tricia Bertram Ga...

It’s something that sounds so basic it’s easy to overlook how daunting it can be: Learning and remembering student names. This month, we’re going back to our very first episode (and one of our most popular ones), a conversation with cognitive psychologist and author Michelle D. Miller about why mastering names isn’t simply a memory exercise—it’s a step toward creating a welcoming, inclusive classroom environment. Key Topics Discussed: The science behind why names are uniquely difficult to rem...