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Am I Teaching a Robot? Mapping the Agentic AI Problem

Since the wide release of generative AI (genAI) models over the past few years, the notion that AI is affecting our students’ cognition has been pervasive. While this remains a concern, there have been a lot of productive discussions around genAI, and resources to assist with assignment redesign and open conversations with our students are widespread. Enter agentic AI: just as we’ve begun to thoughtfully integrate genAI into how we teach and how our students learn, AI companies have expanded AI abilities, throwing a wrench into our understanding and prompting new questions about what AI can do and how it will interfere with our students’ learning.  Continue reading →

Illustration of a mother and daughter talking in the front seats of a car while driving toward the Chicago skyline, with the title “What Makes Students Want to Learn? Mother-Daughter Conversations on the Ride to School” displayed above.
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What Makes Students Want to Learn? Mother-Daughter Conversations on the Ride to School

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a webinar on work-family balance for women in leadership. The speaker shared a case of a CEO mom moving from a place near her kid’s school to the suburbs for one hard-to-believe reason — to spend more time with her daughter during the ride to school.

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“Graphic banner with bookshelf illustrations and icons (globe, books, plant, open book, laptop) displaying the title: ‘Decolonizing Your Reading List: A Practical Starting Guide.’”
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Decolonizing Your Reading List: A Practical Starting Guide

In recent years, many faculty have encountered calls to “decolonize the syllabus.  What does it mean to “decolonize the syllabus? How would a faculty member go about accomplishing this? Like other catchphrases, I really don’t know. Is it a matter of eliminating Shakespeare, Milton, Marx, and other white men and replacing them with more “diverse” authors? Or, is it a matter of re-writing the course from scratch? Should faculty start with a clean slate instead of trying to revise what already exists? Continue reading →

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The Algorithm of Good Teaching: AI vs. Human 

I was with a group of faculty members as they watched a live demonstration of a new built-in AI tool in the learning management system. With a single line of command, the vendor representative generated an entire course module in seconds: topic descriptions, learning goals, readings, PowerPoint slides, practice activities, quizzes, and exams. The quizzes and exams could even be graded automatically.

Everything many of us had spent years learning to design appeared instantly.

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“Hard” isn’t Always Rigorous: Rethinking Course Design

When faculty are tasked with designing their courses, they are often starting from scratch. In addition to creating the learning outcomes, they have to source the materials, design course activities and assessments, and develop course policies. While they are doing all of this, a question that is top of mind is: “Is this rigorous enough?” or “Are my standards high enough?” Continue reading →

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Beyond “Death by PowerPoint”: The “Mini-Documentary” Approach to Course Video Lecture

In higher education, we are currently facing a dual crisis in content creation (a tri-crisis if you count AI content creation, but that’s for another day!). On one side, we have the so-called “Zoom Fatigue”—the exhaustion students feel from sitting in endless hours of talking heads in video calls. On the other side, we have “Death by PowerPoint”—the instinct for instructors to put every single spoken word onto a slide, forcing students to split their attention between reading and listening, and worse, doing that in one to two hour long (or longer!) recordings.

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From Student Voices to Course Design Choices: What Student Panels Reveal About Engagement
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From Student Voices to Course Design Choices: What Student Panels Reveal About Engagement 

Most of us are very familiar with the traditional ways colleges gather student feedback and measure student engagement. End-of-course evaluations are nearly universal in higher education, and they can offer helpful information about the student experience. However, these surveys are backward-looking and rarely provide the kind of nuanced, candid insight we need to make meaningful changes in our teaching and course design choices. Recent research backs this up. Becker, Brandt, and Psihopaidas (2021) found that student evaluations often miss the deeper contextual and emotional dimensions of learning that instructors need to make meaningful improvements. Their study demonstrated that when students are asked to talk through their experiences in real-time conversations, such as student panels, instead of rating them on a form, they reveal far more about what supports or hinders their engagement. Continue reading →

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The 15-Minute Course Tune-Up

As a learning experience designer, my to-do list often feels like a living creature, always growing and demanding attention. So I get it. When I sit down with a faculty member, the conversation often shares a common starting point. They know their course needs a refresh and some TLC to help students be more successful, but they feel too overwhelmed to even start. In that moment, I feel a deep sense of recognition. We’re all being asked to do more with less. How do we make progress when a full-scale revision feels impossible? Continue reading →

Stop Guessing: How UX Research Builds Better Educational Experiences
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Stop Guessing: How UX Research Builds Better Educational Experiences

Is your syllabus clearly organized? Will your students understand it? Is your course site laid out intuitively? Can students identify where to start and how to find different kinds of information?

Just because it’s easy for you to navigate and interpret your course materials doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy for your students–you have a wealth of information about the discipline and course structure that students don’t have when they first encounter it. And it’s very difficult to look at your course through the eyes of someone who doesn’t already have that context.

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Spark Bird: What Birding Taught Me About Close Reading

Spark bird, noun
A species that triggers a lifelong passion for birding

It all started with a yellow bird: the American Goldfinch. After seeing a steady stream of Northern Cardinals flit in and out of my backyard for the last couple years, it was exciting to see a bird this vibrant. Within a couple weeks, I put up some new bird feeders, and even got a new pair of binoculars for my birthday. Continue reading →