Learning at Play with Kerry Whittaker and Matteo Menapace Daybreak is a 2023 board game designed by Matt Leacock (designer of the hit game Pandemic) and Matteo Menapace. It's a cooperative game about fighting climate change in which players take on the role of various world powers implementing technological and social initiatives to decarbonize their energy production and build resiliency against the harms of a warming planet. The designers describe the game as "realistic, but not...
9 days ago • 3 min read
New Collections on UVA's Teaching Hub I've been working with the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia to recruit more contributors to Teaching Hub, a CTE website designed to crowdsource the best teaching and learning resources around higher ed, resources useful for instructors, educational developers, and instructional designers. Each collection on Teaching Hub features a relatively small number of resources (usually between four and seven) that have been curated by an...
16 days ago • 3 min read
Neurodivergent Learners and Earners with Holly Tilbrook On this week's podcast episode, I'm continuing an occasional series exploring ways to support neurodivergent students with a focus this time on adult students. I talk with Holly Tilbrook, deputy director of the Academic Centres at the University of Cambridge's Institute of Continuing Education. Her unit provides academic support for students enrolled in the institute's programs, which include onsite weekend courses, online certificate...
24 days ago • 2 min read
Clickable Image Questions Way back in 2009, my first book, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments, was published. At the time, teaching with a classroom response system meant teaching with "clickers," small handheld devices that students could use to respond to multiple-choice questions posed by the instructor during class. The very first clicker systems were actually wired, but those soon gave way to infrared systems (working like a TV remote so that...
30 days ago • 3 min read
Take It or Leave It with Stacey Johnson, Emily Donahoe, and Lance Eaton A couple of months ago, the American Birding Podcast tried out a new format that host Nate Swick called “Take It or Leave It.” Nate put together a list of hot takes from the birdwatching community, noting that “birders are full of strong opinions, some serious and some silly.” He invited on the podcast two experienced birders to discuss those hot takes and, for each one, either take it (that is, agree with the hot take)...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
AI's Impact on Learning with Marc Watkins There was a moment in the summer of 2023 where it seemed all of higher education faculty realized that they would need to rethink their fall assignments in light of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. "Assignment makeovers" then dominated the conversations (and faculty development workshops) for the rest of the summer, as instructors in all kinds of disciplines considered how AI text generation might be used to enhance or subvert their regular...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
How Do We Define Quality Student Work in an Age of AI? As I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, I've been reading Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson. It's a remarkably comprehensive book on the subject given how quickly it was written and published! Bowen and Watson are fairly non-directive in most of the book, laying out the issues and questions higher education must face regarding generative AI and its impact on...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Curriculum Mapping with Jennifer M. Harrison and Vickie Rey Williams Most of the time here on Intentional Teaching, I focus on choices that individual instructors can make to enhance their courses and their teaching within those courses. However, years of consulting with faculty and other instructors has taught me that there are some teaching problems that can't be solved at the individual course level. Often we run into barriers to improvement that require us to move outside the course and...
2 months ago • 4 min read
Creativity, Divergent Thinking, and AI José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson have a new book out called Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning. I am very impressed with Bowen and Watson and their publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, for putting together such a comprehensive book on generative AI in higher education so quickly. I worry it will be out of date in a year, but right now, in the summer of 2024, it's an impressive orientation to teaching and...
2 months ago • 4 min read