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...
Jul 08, 2025•41 min•Ep. 70
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...
Jun 24, 2025•56 min•Ep. 69
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 high...
Jun 10, 2025•42 min•Ep. 68
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...
May 28, 2025•57 min•Ep. 67
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 ...
May 20, 2025•53 min•Ep. 66
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 ...
May 13, 2025•39 min•Ep. 65
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. In...
Apr 29, 2025•37 min•Ep. 64
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 b...
Apr 15, 2025•53 min•Ep. 63
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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...
Apr 01, 2025•40 min•Ep. 62
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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...
Mar 25, 2025•39 min•Ep. 61
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 ...
Mar 04, 2025•55 min•Ep. 60
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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...
Feb 18, 2025•40 min•Ep. 59
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 whe...
Feb 04, 2025•40 min•Ep. 58
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 c...
Jan 21, 2025•40 min•Ep. 57
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 Cass...
Jan 07, 2025•42 min•Ep. 56
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 t...
Dec 03, 2024•40 min•Ep. 55
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 bu...
Nov 19, 2024•42 min•Ep. 54
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 ...
Nov 12, 2024•1 hr 36 min
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 de...
Nov 05, 2024•38 min•Ep. 53
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 Flor...
Oct 22, 2024•39 min•Ep. 52
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 · B...
Oct 08, 2024•40 min•Ep. 51
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 ...
Sep 24, 2024•39 min•Ep. 50
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 ...
Sep 18, 2024•39 min•Ep. 49
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 to...
Sep 03, 2024•40 min•Ep. 48
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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...
Aug 20, 2024•39 min•Ep. 47
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 he...
Aug 06, 2024•42 min•Ep. 46
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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, w...
Jul 30, 2024•42 min•Ep. 45
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 ...
Jul 23, 2024•27 min•Ep. 44
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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...
Jul 16, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 43
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 prog...
Jul 02, 2024•38 min•Ep. 42
