Intentional Teaching, a show about teaching in higher education

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. Back in February 2024, as part of a slow read of my book Intentional Tech , I reached out to Paul Hanstedt, author of Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World, to talk about the "rhetorical triangle" as a way for thinking intentionally about writing assignments and other types of assignments. We had a fantas...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. During these late summer episodes of the podcast, I’m sharing some interviews I conducted in much cooler times. Back in February as part of a slow read of my book Intentional Tech , I talked with Justin Shaffer, teaching professor in chemical and biological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Chapter three of the book deals with us...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. A few episodes ago, I talked with Marc Watkins of the University of Mississippi about the many ways that generative AI is beginning to intersect with student learning. Marc noted that the newest versions of ChatGPT and similar tools are no longer just text generators, but multimodal in nature. That is, they can work with text and images and...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. This episode is all about games as learning experiences, with not one but two interviews about the 2023 cooperative board game Daybreak, a game about climate action. Daybreak puts players in the roles of world powers building the technologies and societies needed for a warming planet. The goal of the game is to cut carbon emissions before i...

Share your thoughts about this episode as a text message. This spring Holly Tilbrook presented as part of a panel titled “Neurodivergent Learners (and Earners!) in Postsecondary Education” at the UPCEA annual conference. Holly is a deputy director of the Academic Centres at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education. That institute offers a variety of postsecondary learning op...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 M...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 C...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 du...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 litt...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 cl...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 t...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 stu...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 Routl...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 resou...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 fantas...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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 t...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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-M...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...

Share your thoughts about this episode as 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...