All the Things with Paul Hanstedt High-impact practices. Student agency. General education. Authentic audiences. Rhetorical triangles. The liberal arts. In this week's podcast episode, I talk with Paul Hanstedt about all the things! Earlier this year, I wanted to provide some bonus resources for my Patreon supporters who were participating in a slow read of my 2019 book Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching. The last chapter in the book...
14 days ago • 1 min read
High Structure Course Design with Justin Shaffer This week on the podcast, I'm excited to have Justin Shaffer back on. Justin is a teaching professor in chemical and biological engineering and associate dean of undergraduate studies at the Colorado School of Mines. He's the author of the forthcoming book High Structure Course Design for STEM as well as numerous discipline-based educational research articles, and he's frequent speaker to groups of faculty, particularly STEM faculty, on topics...
21 days ago • 3 min read
Multimodal AI Projects with Emily Bruff Back in the spring of 2023, when faculty and other instructors were justifiably worried about students having ChatGPT write their papers for them, I would give this advice: "Turn your paper into a multimodal project! ChatGPT can't help with those!" That advice is sadly no longer true. The newest versions of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are no longer just text generators, but multimodal in nature. That is, they can work with text and images and...
27 days ago • 2 min read
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...
about 1 month 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...
about 1 month 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...
about 2 months 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...
about 2 months 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)...
2 months 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...
3 months ago • 4 min read