Learning Innovation staff regularly share articles and other media in a section at the bottom of our main page titled “What We’re Reading.” These articles pique our interest and often spark discussion among our team. ICYMI, here’s what we read last month. We hope some of these articles inspire and challenge your thinking around teaching and learning.
How Instructors Are Rethinking Late Work
Chronicle of Higher Education’s Teaching Newsletter
This week I:
- Turn the top spot in the newsletter over to Carolyn Kuimelis, a Chronicle intern who’s written about instructors’ rethinking of course deadlines.
- Ask how you balance the need to provide students with both flexibility and structure.
- Share examples of how readers have adjusted their final exams. Continue reading >>>
Disability as a Valuable Form of Diversity, Not a Deficit
Faculty Focus
Typically, educational professionals focus on how to help students better access what is considered ‘typical’ learning (Ong-Dean, 2005). This is considered ‘deficit thinking,’ or thinking that defines a diagnosis by its challenges, in order to treat, fix, or minimize specific features of a student’s… Continue reading >>>
Resources for exploring ChatGPT and higher education
Bryan Alexander
What might ChatGPT mean for higher education and society? … To begin with, here’s the OpenAI page introducing the bot and a button to press to start it up. Next, resources, including readings, podcasts, videos, and projects. Each has a few words about why I found them to be useful… Continue reading >>>
Will ChatGPT Change the Way You Teach?
Chronicle of Higher Education’s Teaching Newsletter
This week, I:
- Fill you in on the conversation around new AI writing and research tools.
- Point you to resources to get you up to speed and involved in the conversation around AI.
- Tell you about a two-part virtual forum Beckie and I will be moderating. Continue reading >>>
ChatGPT: A Must-See Before the Semester Begins
Faculty Focus
Ihave seen friends on Facebook create decent songs and stunning artistic creations with little knowledge of music or art, all after spending a bit of time getting to know an AI art or music generator. But since the grammar assistants in my word processors often flag what is already correct… Continue reading >>>
David’s New Year Resolutions
Grading for Growth
Welcome to 2023! To start the year, Robert and I will be posting our new year resolutions for alternative grading: Things we’re planning to do or change about our grading in 2023. This week, I’m bringing you two of my new year’s resolutions. To give a concrete example of my own reflective process… Continue reading >>>
What factors help active learning classrooms succeed?
Robert Talbert
The idea that the space in which you do something, affects the thing you do is the basic premise behind active learning classrooms (ALCs). These are classroom spaces with features meant to promote and amplify the effects of active learning, including moveable furniture that can be… Continue reading >>>
Science exams don’t have to be demoralizing: A practical guide
Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching
Why do you teach? It probably has something to do with a love for your subject matter and a desire to help others come to know and love it as well. Ideally, exams won’t get in the way of that, but they often do–particularly in larger classes where exams are in-class and… Continue reading >>>
How Can STEM Instructors Show Students They Belong?
Chronicle of Higher Education’s Teaching Newsletter
This week I:
- Tell you about an effort to make STEM instruction more inclusive and antiracist.
- Invite you to attend the first session in our new Keep on Teaching webinar series next week.
- Pass along some recent reading material you may have missed. Continue reading >>>
Contingency Planning for the Semester Ahead
Tips for Teaching Professors
Winter into spring 2023 promises to be a rough health season with the ongoing “tripledemic” of flu, RSV, and COVID and students continuing to experience mental health struggles at concerning rates. Rather than just writing my syllabus and hoping for the best, I prefer to plan… Continue reading >>>
Let’s Not Bring Back the F
Inside Higher Ed
In a recent article for Inside Higher Ed, Louis Haas wrote that we as faculty members should “bring the F back fully into our grading scheme … and … assign it more frequently when a student deserves it.” He argues that doing so is the necessary response to students’ actual “refusal—not inability—to… Continue reading >>>
Embrace the Bot: Designing Writing Assignments in the Face of AI
Faculty Focus
Just as pocket calculators, personal computers, and smartphones have posed threats to students learning math skills, AI (artificial intelligence) seems to be the new tool poised to undermine the use of writing assignments to assess student learning. In November 2022, a tool called ChatGPT… Continue reading >>>
Tip: ChatGPT Edition…
Tips for Teaching Professors
Artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced content production is not new, but there’s certainly been a change in the landscape over the past six weeks, leaving us each to figure out what exactly it is, what it does, and what are the possible implications for us and our students. My personal views… Continue reading >>>