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Cogniti is a tool developed at the University of Sydney that instructors can use to create custom AI chatbots ("agents") for use in their teaching. Cogniti makes it easy to create a special-purpose agent, invite students to interact with the agent, and have some visibility into how students are using the agent. 

I have a theory that in a few years, teaching-focused custom AI chatbots are going to be standard tools available to higher education instructors. I may be wrong about that, but if it turns out to be the case, it makes sense to start figuring out the affordances and limitations of these tools now.

On this episode, I talk with Danny Liu, professor of educational technology at the University of Sydney and lead developer of Cogniti, about the tools origin and uses. Danny brought along a couple of University of Sydney colleagues who have been experimenting with the tool: Matthew Clemson, senior lecturer of biochemistry, and Isabelle Hesse, senior lecturer of English. We had a great conversation about the current and potential roles of custom chatbots in teaching and learning.

Episode Resources

·       Cogniti website

·       Videos from the 2024 Cogniti Mini-Symposium

·       Matthew Clemson’s faculty page

·       Isabelle Hesse’s faculty page

·       Danny Liu’s faculty page

·       “Dr MattTabolism: An AI Assistant That Helps Me Help Students with Biochemistry” by Matthew Clemson, Minh Huynh, and Alice Huang

·       “AI as a Research and Feedback Assistant in Essay Plans and Annotated Bibliographies” by Isabelle Hesse

·       Are You a Witch?, a custom GPT by Marc Watkins

·       “Structure Matters: Custom Chatbot Edition” by Derek Bruff

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Higher education in the United States has been faced with some unique challenges in 2025, largely because of actions taken by the new U.S. presidential administration. In this "Take It or Leave It" edition of the podcast, I invited three wise colleagues on the show to discuss recent op-eds that address ongoing challenges to the teaching missions of colleges and universities. For each essay, we decide if we want to Take It (that is, agree with the central thesis of the essay) or Leave It. Our judgments might be binary, but our discussion of the essays and the challenges they address is full of nuance and complexity.

The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are Betsy Barre, assistant provost and executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University; Bryan Dewsbury, associate professor of biology and associate director of the STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University; and Emily Donahoe, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. All three are experienced Take It or Leave It panelists, and I am very excited to have them back on the show.

Episode Resources

·       Betsy Barre’s website

·       Bryan Dewsbury’s website

·       Emily Donahoe’s Substack

·       Essay 1: Higher Ed Is Adrift, Kevin McClure, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 2025

·       Essay 2: Institutional Neutrality Is a Copout, John Jenkins, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2025

·       Essay 3: Are You Ready for the AI University?, Scott Latham, April 8, 2025
 
 

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Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.

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See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

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On the podcast today, I talk with four University of Virginia faculty who are serving this year as Faculty AI Guides. This provost-funded program has enlisted 51 faculty to explore potential uses of generative AI in their teaching and to share what they learn with colleagues in their departments and schools. Back in January, we invited the Faculty AI Guides to share assignments from their fall courses that thoughtfully integrated AI to support student learning. I put some of these assignments in a collection on the UVA Teaching Hub website (see the link below), and on this episode of the podcast, I talk with four of the Faculty AI Guides who contributed assignments.

Kiera Allison is an assistant professor of management communication, Jamie Jirout is an associate professor of education, Spyros Simotas is an assistant professor of French, and Jun Wang is a lecturer in Chinese. In our conversation, the four Faculty AI Guides talk about their motivations for being in the program, what they have learned about AI and teaching through their experiments, how they respond to concerns about students outsourcing their learning to AI, and what’s next for their use of AI in teaching.

Episode Resources

·       Faculty AI Guides website

·       “Integrating AI into Assignments to Support Student Learning,” UVA Teaching Hub

·       “Red Lights, Green Lights, and AI-Integrated Assignments,” Derek Bruff, March 4, 2025

·       AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Our Own, Verity Harding, Princeton University Press, 2024

·       “How to Encourage Students to Write without AI,” Beth McMurtrie, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2025

·       “AI Podcast 1.0: Rise of the Machines,” Planet Money, May 26, 2023

·       “Comparing the Quality of Human and ChatGPT Feedback on Students’ Writing,” Jacob Steiss et al., Learning and Instruction, June 2024

·       “Exquisite AI Corpse,” Maria Dikcis, AI Pedagogy Pr

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Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.

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See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

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In this episode, I share a conversation I had recently with Lauren Malone, assistant professor of communication at the University of Tampa. I met Lauren at a conference in Tampa, where she was presenting her ongoing experiments integrating AI into her communications and media studies courses. In particular, she shared about her use of Google NotebookLM in a game studies course that focused on writing for digital games. Lauren was already on her second semester kicking the tires on NotebookLM in this course, and I wanted to learn more, so I invited her on the podcast. In the interview, she talks about creative thinking with AI, the importance of the struggle in learning, very different student responses to AI, and changes she’s already making to her use of AI as this work in progress continues.  

Episode Resources

·       Lauren Malone’s website, https://lmaloneonline.wordpress.com/

·       Google NotebookLM, https://notebooklm.google/

·       There’s an AI for That, https://theresanaiforthat.com/ 

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I recently talked with Pratima Enfield about her work as an instructional designer at Johns Hopkins University. That work involved combining instructional design with student support, two areas that are often siloed. In these bonus clips, Pratima shares how faculty responded to this model and how the work of instructional designers, while focused on supporting faculty, is actually a way to support students.

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Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.

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See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

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Pratima Enfield is the associate dean of instructional design at the United States Naval Community College. Prior to her current position, Pratima was the executive director of online learning at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Pratima and her SAIS colleagues bridged the gap between the instructional design and student support functions that are more typically siloed in online programs. Instructional designers work with faculty and student support staff work with students, so it’s not a given that these two teams will collaborate. But that’s exactly what happened at Johns Hopkins. I’m excited to have Pratima on the show today to tell us about it.

Episode Resources

·       Pratima Enfield’s LinkedIn page

Support the show

Podcast Links:

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.

Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe

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Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.

Today on the podcast, I’m republishing one of my favorite interviews from Leading Lines, the podcast I hosted for the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching from 2016 to 2022. 

In this interview from 2022, I talk with Remi Kalir, who was (at the time) an associate professor of learning design and technology at the University of Colorado. Remi is a scholar of annotation, that simple act of adding a note to a text. Remi takes a broad view of what counts as a “note” and as a “text,” making annotation a powerful lens for examining how we humans make meaning. In the interview, Remi and I focus on the use of annotation in learning contexts, particularly social and collaborative annotation. It’s an interview I find myself referencing again and again, and I’m glad to have it in a podcast feed once again!

And the timing of this episode is intentional, as Remi has a new book out the day this episode of Intentional Teaching airs. The book is called Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice. Here’s the tag line from the MIT Press website: “An interdisciplinary exploration of annotation that shows how this participatory act marks public memory, struggles for justice, and social change.” So if you like what you hear from Remi about annotation and learning, then follow the links in the show notes to learn more about his new book. 

Episode Resources

·       Remi Kalir’s website

·       Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice

·       Reading Re/Marks, Remi’s newsletter

·       Annotation in Teaching and Learning, a collection of resources on the topic that I curated for the University of Virginia Teaching Hub

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I recently talked with Christopher McVey, master lecturer in the writing program at Boston University, and Neeza Singh, a BU senior majoring in data science who served as an AI Affiliate in Christopher's writing course last year. In this bonus clip, Neeza teaches me something I didn't know about ChatGPT, and Christopher has some advice for fellow instructors about how students are thinking about AI.

Podcast Links:

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.

Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe

Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching

Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

Questions or comments about this episode? Send us a text message.

Christopher McVey is a master lecturer in the writing program at Boston University. Neeza Singh is a senior at BU majoring in data science. Last year, the two were partnered through the BU writing program's AI Affiliate Fellowship program, giving Neeza a role in Christopher's class supporting both Christopher and his students in responsible and effective use of generative AI in writing.

On this episode, I talk with Chris and Neeza about this innovative, AI-focused students-as-partners program. They share about Neeza's role in Chris' writing course, how her work as an AI affiliate benefitted both Chris and his students, and the potential for this kind of program to work in other disciplines. Chris and Neeza have lots to say about the role of AI in learning.

Episode Resources

·       Christopher McVey’s faculty page

·       Neeza Singh’s LinkedIn page

·       Undergraduate AI Writing Affiliate Fellowship, Boston University Writing Program

·       Syllabus for The Philosophy and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

·       AI Mini-Games for Peer Review, an activity by Neeza Singh and Christopher McVey

·       The Case for Slowing Down, by Christopher McVey

·       AI-Enhanced Learning with Pary Fassihi, Intentional Teaching episode 35

Support the show

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Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.

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Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.

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I recently talked with Kristine Johnson and Michael Rifenburg, authors of the new book A Long View of Undergraduate Research: Alumni Perspectives on Inquiry, Belonging, and Vocation. In these bonus clips, they share a bit more about what they learned from talking with alumni who had engaged in undergrad research, specifically about broadening access to these opportunities and about practicing good mentoring.

Podcast Links:

Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association.

Subscribe to the Intentional Teaching newsletter: https://derekbruff.ck.page/subscribe

Support Intentional Teaching on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/intentionalteaching

Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

See my website for my "Agile Learning" blog and information about having me speak at your campus or conference.