Intentional Teaching, a show about teaching in higher education

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. It’s book release week! The ebook version of The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching publishes on July 1st, the day after this episode drops. I am very excited to have this book, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins, out in the world!  I wanted to put the spotlight on the new book, but I didn’t want to have to interview myself, so I...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Study Hall is back! This is the format where I talk to three fantastic guests about three recent studies on generative AI in higher education.  Guests for this edition of Study Hall are: Flower Darby, incoming director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Estrella Mountain Community College; Josh Eyler, senior director of the Center f...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. On the podcast today, I talk with author and consultant Leon Furze about the ideas found in some of his recent writing on AI and learning. We talk about resistance as a framework for combatting cognitive offloading, the mental models that educators and students have of working with AI (and how they can lead us astray), and classroom activit...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Today on the podcast, I’m excited to welcome Jessa Roisen, professor of philosophy at St. Ambrose University. Jessa teaches those intro to philosophy courses with really challenging primary sources—Plato and Kant and Descartes and the like. She’s seen her students struggle with those readings, and it’s changed her approach to teaching these...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. The total number of students enrolled in US higher education institutions grew steadily in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. However that total peaked in 2011 at around 18 million students. It’s been declining ever since. You can imagine some of what that means—fewer students means less tuition, which means fewer faculty and staff and the clos...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. A few years ago, it was pretty easy for math educators to ignore generative AI. The chatbots of 2022 and 2023 were notoriously bad at math. But that’s no longer true! Today’s frontier AI models are very good at math—to the point of proving mathematical conjectures that have been open for decades.  Today on the show, I have a roundtable of m...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. The Civic Engagement & Voting Rights Teacher Scholars program serves as an avenue for faculty to work together to create classroom teaching materials – by faculty, for faculty – to support a thriving American democracy. The Teacher Scholars are recruited and supported from across the nation to work in cross-institutional, cross-discipli...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. In the last year, we’ve seen many stories of college and university faculty being accused by students of teaching something that the student didn’t think the instructor should be teaching. These incidents have a lot of instructors worried about teaching controversial topics—and just about any topic can be controversial these days. Previousl...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Last November, University of Virginia English professor James Seitz offered a workshop through the UVA Center for Teaching Excellence titled “Teaching in the Age of AI: How Students Can Do All Their Writing in the Classroom.” When I saw the workshop announcement, I have to admit that my initial reaction wasn’t a positive one. Was this anoth...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. This past December, I had the honor of being a guest on the Grading Podcast ("reimagining grading as a tool for student success") hosted by Sharona Krinsky and Robert Bosley. We had such a great conversation that I thought I would return the favor and invite Sharona and Boz on my podcast. Sharona Krinsky is the executive director...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. When I heard my friend Windy Frank, an adjunct faculty at Lipscomb University here in Nashville, talk about an assignment of hers in which students designed custom AI chatbots, I was very interested. Windy teaches in the College of Bible at Lipscomb, and she asked her students to create AI chatbots based on figures in the Old Testament. Stu...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Last fall, I was interviewed on a podcast called Transform Your Teaching from the Cedarville University Center for Teaching and Learning. Hosts Rob McDole and Jared Pyles had me on to talk about my book Intentional Tech six year out from its publication date. I shared the Intentional Tech principles I find most relevant today, especially as...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Annette Vee is an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and co-author (with Marc Watkins and your podcast host) of the forthcoming book The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching . Annette and I met through this writing project, and I invited her on the podcast to get to know her better.  Annette and I cover a lot of gro...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. About a year ago, I appeared on the Ed Up Provost podcast hosted by Gregor Thuswaldner to share some educational technology advice for academic leaders. Topics included strategic planning around edtech adoption to managing innovation and organizational change to investing in faculty and staff, and I think my advice holds up well. Today, I&a...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Ken Bain was the author of What the Best College Teachers Do , a book that has helped many college educators apply the science of learning to their teaching practice. He was also the founding director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, which is why I interviewed him in 2023 for an oral history I was producing about the CFT. K...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. What if your college or university decided that every undergraduate student there would be an entrepreneur, not just studying entrepreneurship but doing it? That’s exactly the decision made a few years ago by the leadership at Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Texas. Paul Quinn is an HBCU with a small student body, just 700 students. This year,...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. I’m back with another “Take It or Leave It” panel! This one is a little different. On October 2nd, in my role as associate director of the UVA Center for Teaching Excellence, I hosted a virtual panel titled “Take It or Leave It: AI’s Role in Online Learning” featuring three fantastic UVA colleagues. The conversation went very well, and the...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. On the show today I talk with Leslie Cramblet Alvarez and Chris Hakala, authors of the new book Understanding Educational Developers: Tales from the Center from Routledge Press. The book blends scholarship and personal narratives to explore the career trajectories of the professionals who work at CTLs. How do academics move into these caree...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Today on the podcast, we learn about one initiative that offers a path forward for AI and writing instruction. It’s called the PAIRR Project, where PAIRR stands for peer and AI review and reflection. This approach takes the well-established peer review pedagogy used in writing instruction and adds a layer of AI-generated feedback on student...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Here in the US, the political environment is more heated than I’ve ever known it in my lifetime, and some of that heat is coming directly at higher ed and its faculty. This episode is all about managing those “hot moments” in our classes when just about any topic can be “hot.”  My guests are Bethany Morrison, assistant director at the Cente...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. In this episode, we explore why digital accessibility can be so important to the student experience. My guest is Amy Lomellini, director of accessibility at Anthology, the company that makes the learning management system Blackboard. Amy teaches educational technology as an adjunct at Boise State University, and she facilitates courses on d...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. The online education wings of most colleges and universities have changed a lot since 2020, with online units moving in from the periphery to the center of operations at most institutions. On the podcast today, we’re going to take a look at the state of online education in the United States, and to do that, we’ll make use of data from the 2...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Today on the podcast, I'm excited to try out a new format. I'm calling it "Study Hall" since we're gathered together to discuss some interesting teaching and learning studies, with this edition's studies exploring the intersection of generative AI and education. The panelists for this edition of study hall are...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Today on the podcast, we’ll get a window into how AI is affecting the teaching and learning landscape at one university, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. My guest today is Alex Ambrose, professor of the practice and director of the Lab for AI in Teaching and Learning at the Kaneb Center for Teaching Excellence at Notre Dame. Alex di...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. On two recent episodes of this podcast, we talked about an essay titled "Higher Ed Is Adrift" by Kevin McClure. In the essay, Kevin outlines some of the many attacks the current U.S. presidential administration is leveraging against higher ed, and he notes that many faculty and staff are finding their institutional leaders' r...