Intentional Teaching

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 ResourcesPary 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/editBoston'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/intentionalteachingFind 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 ResourcesSravanti 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/intentionalteachingFind 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.phpAuburn 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/intentionalteachingFind 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/intentionalteachingFind 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/intentionalteachingFind 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/intentionalteachingFind 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/intentionalteachingFind 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/intentionalteachingFind 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/intentionalteachingFind 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/intentionalteachingFind 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/intentionalteachingFind 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/intentionalteachingFind 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/intentionalteachingFind 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/intentionalteachingFind 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/intentionalteachingFind 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 Tanner 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/intentionalteachingFind 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: 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/intentionalteachingFind 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.

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: 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/intentionalteachingFind 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 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.htmEnoch Park, https://professional.charlotte.edu/directory/enoch-parkLidija 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: 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/intentionalteachingFind 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.

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: 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/intentionalteachingFind 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.