Designed for Learning

For better or worse, much of the talk about AI’s impact on the purposes and processes of an education continues to focus on cheating: Are students outsourcing their work, and their learning, to tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini? Some high-profile stories have gone so far as to suggest cheating is so rampant that the whole college system is basically collapsing around us. Thi...

It’s something that sounds so basic it’s easy to overlook how daunting it can be: Learning and remembering student names. This month, we’re going back to our very first episode (and one of our most popular ones), a conversation with cognitive psychologist and author Michelle D. Miller about why mastering names isn’t simply a memory exercise—it’s a step toward creating a welcoming, inclusive classr...

For better or worse, the educational theory that seems to have permeated American education more than any other has been the notion of learning styles. Although the definition can vary, the most popular version of the idea argues that people can be categorized as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners. From its earliest origins, though, critics have underscored the very thin and tangled researc...

Faculty who teach online know that it comes with distinct benefits, with the ability to reach learners who might not otherwise have access to your course prominent among them. But as meaningful as that is, the logistical challenges online teaching can present means we don’t necessarily think of it as a “joyful” exercise, particularly in those courses with limited live interaction between instructo...

American higher education has always stood out for its strong commitment to general education courses, or gen ed, the premise being that undergraduates should not necessarily jump directly into a major but instead have the room to learn and explore a variety of fields before choosing a particular path. With that principled purpose comes a practical teaching challenge: Most students enroll in a gen...

Imagine you have a student who starts the semester strong but unexpectedly misses a deadline, and then you don’t see them in class for a few sessions. You reach out and are surprised to learn it isn’t because they lost interest in the course; it’s because they were so ashamed of missing that due date that it prevented them from coming back. Maybe you don’t have to imagine. If you’ve been teaching...

For decades now, the call to college teachers has been to rely less on lecture and to draw more on active learning techniques such as discussions, small group brainstorming, and think-pair-shares. Strategies like these fit well within smaller courses. But in an auditorium with a couple of hundred students, how do we encourage participation and community? To meet this challenge, Notre Dame’s Rachel...

Among the most fundamental promises education makes is this: What you learn here , on campus, will help you when you’re out there , in the world. Learning researchers call this far transfer , describing the process by which students take a skill and apply it in another class, in an internship, or even in their careers after college. But what does it look like when that far transfer is part of the...

With the advent of AI, many are questioning the traditional model of having students do much of the heavy lifting of a course on their own. If outside of class students can prompt AI to do homework, write essays, and create presentation slides, should instructors be using time inside the classroom differently than in the past? An applied ethicist, Lily Abadal has been a vocal proponent of a philos...

When satellite maps became available on our phones, some wondered what we would lose by becoming less oriented to the places we live or visit. But most of us have used these maps for many years now and find them to be incredibly useful. Which begs the question: Does it matter if we’ve lost our sense of direction a bit?  Educators now find themselves asking similar questions about AI and teaching....

When you become a teacher, you commit to a life of learning—not just for your students, but for yourself. You can feel totally comfortable and confident in your teaching practices, and then suddenly some new technology or some new group of students comes along and upends everything you think you know about education. In those moments, instructors often seek out resources and conversations with pee...

Over the last couple of decades, we’ve seen an explosion of books and articles about what’s often called “brain-based learning,” as neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists study and explain what circuits are firing when a student tries to memorize a fact or solve a problem. Without question, this scholarship has been a boon to teachers seeking to improve their practices. But there is a caveat:...

If you follow the conversations about higher education on social media or in the news, a primary topic on people’s minds is the impact of artificial intelligence on the purposes and processes of an education. For better or worse, much of the focus has been on cheating: Are students outsourcing their work, and their learning, to tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini? Some high-pr...

Can you draw lessons from the way you teach and apply them in your writing? Designed for Learning host Jim Lang thinks so—so much so that he’s written a new book about it called Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience . To learn more, we flipped the script and asked Kristi Rudenga, director of Notre Dame Learning’s Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, to interview...

With Notre Dame’s Summer Online courses set to get underway in June, we turn our attention to teaching online—specifically ways to create a sense of community among instructors and students when meeting through screens, and why that matters in the first place. Rebecca Glazier is an ideal person with whom to have this conversation. A professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, she is th...

Although artificial intelligence has been part of higher education for a couple of years now, faculty are still struggling with what this development means for themselves, their students, their courses—and especially their assessments. Notre Dame Learning recently launched the Lab for AI in Teaching & Learning (LAITL), led by Alex Ambrose of our Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence, to help in...

Instructors everywhere responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with new ideas and strategies for teaching students. Georgetown University’s Maggie Debelius is the co-editor of a new book of essays highlighting this work with the intention of helping colleges and universities become more resilient centers of learning. Here, Maggie joins host Jim Lang to discuss the book, titled Recentering Learning: Com...

“Incredibly rich and textured and nuanced.” “Re-energized me to continue working on my teaching.” “Really wonderful and empowering.” These are some of the phrases past attendees have used to describe the Notre Dame Inclusive Teaching Academy (NDITA). To learn more about what makes it so special, Designed for Learning host Jim Lang talks with Horane Diatta-Holgate, one of its organizers, and 2024 p...

In this inaugural episode of Designed for Learning , host Jim Lang sits down with cognitive psychologist and author Michelle D. Miller to explore the challenges and rewards of something that sounds so basic it’s easy to overlook how daunting it can be: Learning and remembering student names. As you prepare to meet students when they return to campus for the new semester, mastering their names isn&...

Designed for Learning is a podcast from Notre Dame Learning, a collaborative unit at the University of Notre Dame that works with faculty and other instructors as they seek to enhance learning for their students. In that spirit, the show features interviews with teachers, experts in teaching and learning in higher education, authors of new books and resources, and anyone else we can learn from. Ne...