Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Inspired by a recent episode of the American Birding Podcast, this episode of Intentional Teaching features a "Take It or Leave It" Panel. I spent some quality time with recent essays published online looking for arguments about teaching and learning in higher education that would be open to debate. For each of these hot takes, I asked our three panelists to take it (that is, agree with the hot take) or leave it (disagree), forcin...
Jun 18, 2024•48 min•Ep. 41
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Worried about your students asking ChatGPT to write their essays for them? That's so 2023. Generative AI technology is changing fast, and now these tools have the potential to disrupt many different aspects of learning, from reading to notetaking to feedback. To help us explore those changes, this episode features a conversation with Marc Watkins, lecturer in writing and rhetoric and academic innovation fellow at the University of...
Jun 04, 2024•40 min•Ep. 40
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Jennifer M. Harrison and Vickey Rey Williams are the authors of the book A Guide to Curriculum Mapping: Creating a Collaborative, Transformative, and Learner-Centered Curriculum , published by Routledge in late 2023. Jennifer is the associate director for assessment at the Faculty Development Center at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (or UMBC), and Vickie is a senior lecturer in education at UMBC. In their book and in ...
May 21, 2024•41 min•Ep. 39
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. With the advent of easy-to-use generative AI like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, many instructors have been looking into alternatives to traditional written essays, which are often easy to write with AI assistance. Last fall, I led a webinar on authentic assignments for GoReact, an educational technology company that provides video feedback tool that can be really useful for certain authentic assignments, particularly ones that ar...
May 07, 2024•37 min•Ep. 38
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. In a Learning Assistants program, students who did well in a course in the past are invited to come back to attend class and help current students learn the course material. I knew these programs could be effective from my time at Vanderbilt University. Last fall when I was at the POD Network conference, I just happened to sit at a table during a session next to Katie Johnson, associate professor of mathematics at Florida Gulf Coa...
Apr 30, 2024•40 min•Ep. 37
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a framework for improving learning for all learners based on the science of how humans learn. It involves providing learners with multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression. We’ve mentioned the framework on the show from time to time, and I thought it was time to dig in a little deeper. Naturally, I thought of inviting Thomas J. Tobin on the podcast. Tom helped found...
Apr 23, 2024•40 min•Ep. 36
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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, sh...
Apr 16, 2024•40 min•Ep. 35
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 ...
Apr 09, 2024•38 min•Ep. 34
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 ...
Mar 26, 2024•39 min•Ep. 33
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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...
Mar 12, 2024•39 min•Ep. 32
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 f...
Feb 27, 2024•39 min•Ep. 31
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 ...
Feb 13, 2024•40 min•Ep. 30
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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, whi...
Jan 30, 2024•42 min•Ep. 29
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 th...
Jan 16, 2024•39 min•Ep. 28
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 teachi...
Jan 02, 2024•41 min•Ep. 27
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 Minne...
Dec 12, 2023•38 min•Ep. 26
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 instit...
Nov 28, 2023•40 min•Ep. 25
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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...
Nov 07, 2023•41 min•Ep. 24
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 a...
Oct 24, 2023•41 min•Ep. 23
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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-winnin...
Oct 03, 2023•39 min•Ep. 22
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 out 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 b...
Sep 19, 2023•39 min•Ep. 21
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 basical...
Sep 05, 2023•40 min•Ep. 20
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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? Fr...
Aug 22, 2023•40 min•Ep. 19
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 s...
Aug 08, 2023•39 min•Ep. 18
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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...
Jul 25, 2023•38 min•Ep. 17
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. 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 impor...
Jul 11, 2023•37 min•Ep. 16
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Robert Talbert and David Clark are both mathematics faculty members at Grand Valley State University and authors of the forthcoming book Grading for Growth . They are both incredibly thoughtful and effective teachers who share their experiences, insights, and advice widely. Their new book based on dozens of case studies from instructors across the disciplines who are questioning some of the assumptions baked into higher education ...
Jun 20, 2023•43 min•Ep. 15
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. Correspondence courses. Night classes. Extension schools. Distance education. Continuing education. Professional education. There’s always been a lot happening in higher education for working adults outside the traditional residential undergraduate experience. And for the last couple of decades, those areas of higher education have increasingly moved online. Three years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic greatly accelerated the growth of ...
Jun 06, 2023•37 min•Ep. 14
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. In her 2022 book Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology , Michelle D. Miller writes about the "moral panics" that often happen in response to new technologies. In his 2013 book Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty , James M. Lang argues that the best way to reduce cheating is through better course design. What do these authors have to say about teaching in an age of generative AI tools like ChatGPT? Lot...
May 23, 2023•39 min•Ep. 13
Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message. On today’s podcast, I talk with the authors of a new book that can help college teachers better understand their students as whole people, while also providing lots of advice for instructors who want to better support their students’ learning. Robert Eaton and Bonnie Moon are authors, along with Steven Hunsaker, of Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom , the latest in West Virginia University Press’s Teachi...
May 02, 2023•40 min•Ep. 12
