Lew Ludwig + Todd Zakrajsek uncover themes from The Science of Learning Meets AI on episode 619 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

We could actually create an educational system. Not so that it deals with the problems we have with AI, but so that those problems are no longer relevant.

If you don’t have students attention, they can’t learn because if you don’t attend to something, you can’t learn it.

Keep in mind that you’re the expert. This is your assignment. You know what you’re doing, you know the content, so then you can judge what AI gives you, what works, and what still may need some work.

What this gets down to is backward design; we start with the learning goals. We should figure out how to assess them, and then decide if AI fits in that or not.

Norma Montague shares of her experiences going from awareness to action, interrupting bias in the classroom on episode 618 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

One thing that my work on inclusive teaching focuses on, is really being able to understand your learner’s motivations.

One of the ideas that I learned from a colleague who had recommended a book was the idea of rebranding office hours as student hours.

I think it’s important to help students understand what those student hours are for and how they can get the most out of them.

When students feel safe in the classroom, then they’re going to contribute, invest. That’s when I find that I can really increase their rigor and challenge them more.

Teddy Svoronos describes how today’s agentic AI changes what and how we teach on episode 617 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

An AI agent is an LLM that runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal.

The process of having a task, write a report, use a tool, web search, and do it over and over again until you feel like you’ve gotten the full sort of spectrum of things—that I think is what an agent really is.

These LLMs are now becoming like this intermediary between me and the actual content. And so I’m optimizing in a different way than I used to.

I think there’s an analogy with these tools that I’ve been thinking of as cognitive debt, which is that as you offload to them, there are things that they’ll do that you won’t quite understand.

Nancy Chick, Peter Felten, and Katarina Mårtensson share about The SoTL Guide: (Re)Orienting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning on episode 616 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

We see SOTL as simply inquiry into teaching and learning for the purposes of improving teaching and learning in context and then contributing to what we know about teaching and learning in support of the broader aims of higher education.

What I usually say when I speak to colleagues and academics who are sort of starting a SOTL journey is to start small, small steps, and whatever is a low threshold.

I can’t go through this book and say who wrote this sentence or this section or whose idea this part was, because it really is a product of the three of us.

Matthew Mahavongtrakul and Bonni Stachowiak have a conversation about being kind to our future selves on episode 615 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Not everything that comes your way is an emergency. Not everything that comes your way has to demand your immediate attention.

Once you are comfortable with your system and you’re iterating, it actually starts to become second nature, not only to professional life, but to personal life as well.

An exercise that I did with my supervisor once was to actually go through each of these tasks and to see what I thought was high priority, was it actually high priority for the job that I was in?

Bonni Stachowiak shares how to keep your Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) real simple with RSS on episode 614 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Rather than get that overwhelmed feeling of how hard it’s going to be to keep up, I don’t have to, and neither do you. Enter RSS, Real Simple Syndication.

It’s pretty spectacular how, if somebody knows about RSS, and they’ve subscribed to a blog or a website, how you can find people that you have a lot in common with, and get going with your curiosity.

It’s amazing what happens when, before we start trying to lecture or share information,  we ask people to predict something. Even if they end up predicting incorrectly, there still is that connection where we’ve piqued their curiosity.

Marc Watkins shares about cultivating skepticism and curiosity in an age of AI on Episode 613 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

I do think online education is going to be the focal point for this next year, and how it can survive with an agentic AI. My feeling is, we need to be offering students more embodied experiences and disembodied spaces.

Every technology has its affordances and the things that are negative about it too; your cell phone, the computer, the fact we’re talking about this right now on the systems that we are using, cloud computing, that all has a cost.

For an incoming freshman student in college to take 4 or 5 classes and have 4 or 5 very different AI policies, 4 or 5 very different understandings of what AI is, it is incredibly confusing.

Lynn Meade uncovers how to make learning visible with portfolios on episode 612 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast

An ePortfolio is basically a curated collection of student work. It includes reflection, and it’s usually across the college experience.

Anytime I teach portfolios, it’s really big that we talk about audience and purpose. Who is your audience and what is your purpose?

There’s something particularly lovely about seeing student or faculty members’ written comments about my work. Both the critiques and those comments that build me up, and how very powerful they are, and how much they mean to me.

It’s not about the tech. The most important thing is, am I writing? Am I able to think about myself? Am I able to reflect about myself?

Danny Mann shares about fostering peace, joy, and community in teaching and leading on episode 611 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Great teaching, and I think great life, is this adaptive, responsive thing, pulling out the bugs or getting things back in balance.

Peace and joy are really interrelated, and I gravitated a lot towards these, as I spent time studying and practicing mindfulness practices.

If you discover your why, you could basically feel much more energized and joyful about what you do, if you align your life with that.

Giving students space to speak and share ups and downs. So the ironic leading by listening.

Mike Cross shares about his experiments (big and small) in teaching and learning on episode 610 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

The reason I did it is because I just wanted to better understand what my students were going through.

I love that, that idea of tiny experiments. I think that that is absolutely critical because we’re all so busy.

Anytime you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes, it makes you a better person, right? Whether that’s a better teacher, a better spouse, a better friend, a better citizen, anything.