Transform Your Teaching

In this episode, we celebrate the 50th episode of Transform Your Teaching with a live Q&A. Listen as Jared and Rob answer teaching and learning-related questions from our live audience. Contact us at [email protected] with any questions. You can also visit our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog for additional resources.

In this episode, Rob and Jared chat with Dr. Jules White who has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and serves as Senior Advisor to the Chancellor for Generative AI in Education and Enterprise Solutions at Vanderbilt University. They discuss how instructors can help students become comfortable with generative AI and use it effectively. Contact us at [email protected] with any questions. You can also visit our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog for additional resources.

Dr. Jules White is excited about generative AI and sees it as a “new medium”—fundamentally transformative to how people live their daily lives. More specifically, Dr. White has seen AI’s impact in education. In his current position, he has been able to explore how to use it effectively in higher education through teaching prompt engineering. In these classes, he has seen others become comfortable using generative AI as they have found personal applications, such as analyzing data for lab reports. What would typically take days to do, ChatGPT could do in hours. All it took for those people to become comfortable with using generative AI was the personal connection and creative thought to apply it.

To use generative AI effectively:

1. Find ways of amplifying your own creativity (augmented intelligence), then practice.
2. Ask ChatGPT for three options, then choose one for yourself. This requires you to thoroughly engage with its responses.  
3. Improve on what ChatGPT gives you. Consider everything from it as a “draft.”

Dr. White understands the hesitation around generative AI, but he recommends you deeply understand it before you dismiss it. It’s not beneficial to develop a culture of fear surrounding AI in education. Shape the conversation about how to use it effectively so students are prepared for the future where generative AI is widely integrated. Find examples and methods of using generative AI to make that personal connection with your students.

Resources 

Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT

Innovative Teaching with ChatGPT

In this episode, Rob and Jared explore a generative AI tool called “Whisper.” Whisper plays the role of “guest,” and they ask it to provide helpful strategies for teaching and learning. Contact us at [email protected] with any questions. You can also visit our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog for additional resources.

Jared and Rob explore the capabilities of a generative AI tool created by OpenAI called “Whisper.” According to OpenAI, it is “an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data collected from the web.” To showcase its capabilities, Rob and Jared create a prompt for Whisper to act as a guest on the show. As the “guest” throughout the episode, Whisper provides insights and perspectives on incorporating AI into teaching.

Jared and Rob ask Whisper for practical strategies that teachers can integrate into their teaching practices. Whisper suggests starting with a small, manageable application and familiarizing yourself with Chat GPT's capabilities and limitations. Instructors can experiment with having Chat GPT perform various tasks such as generating quiz questions, explaining complex concepts, or providing supplementary explanations. Whisper also highlights the learning curve involved in integrating new technologies. If instructors encounter struggles or hesitations in their experience with using generative AI in their teaching, Whisper suggests reflecting on what didn't work and making small tweaks or seeking advice from peers.

Resources

Whisper

In this episode, Rob and Jared start a new series on generative AI and its practical usage in higher education. They provide a general overview of generative AI models and discuss possible ways that instructors can begin using these models in their teaching. Contact us at [email protected] with any questions. You can also visit our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog for additional resources.

Generative AI Language models are designed to process large amounts of information and are trained to understand and generate text like a human through a vast amount of data, including books, websites, and articles.  In many ways, OpenAI's ChatGPT has become synonymous with generative AI, however, a wide variety of generative AI models have been created by different companies. Regardless of the company, it's important for the user to understand which model is being used because each of them has different capabilities. Some AI models provide the opportunity to create and train models on a certain set of information. This would enable educators to design chatbots that can assist students in learning class-specific material. An AI model can even be trained to function as a tutor which uses questions to help guide students to solutions.

Helpful next steps for instructors:

• Explore the various generative AI models (see resources below)  
• Practice prompt engineering: think about the desired outcomes, and design a foundation for the AI’s responses  
• Use a sample prompt like this one: Ask ChatGPT to use the Socratic method to train students on a specific area of your content (like writing paragraphs). Ask it to emphasize asking reflective questions, instead of giving answers. 

Resources 

• Bing Chat 
• OpenAI’s ChatGPT 
• Google Bard 
• Anthropic Claude 2 
• Llama 2 

In this coffee drop, Rob and Jared reflect on their first year of doing the podcast and share their big takeaways. If you have questions or comments, contact us at [email protected]. You can also visit our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog for additional resources.

In this episode, Rob and Jared discuss communication with Dr. Sandra Yang who has a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and serves as a professor of Music History at Cedarville University. They discuss the importance of communication with students and instructors. Contact us at [email protected] with any questions. You can also visit our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog for additional resources. We would love to get your feedback! Please fill out our survey to help improve our podcast and serve you better.

Dr. Yang discusses the importance of communication with her students in both face-to-face and virtual environments. She emphasizes the need for clear communication and establishing guidelines at the beginning of a course for both students and instructors. In her syllabi, she addresses her own responsibility as a teacher to be punctual, prepared, and respectful; and she holds her students to the same standards. In online discussions, she reminds students to be respectful of one another, especially when discussing sensitive topics.

As part of her responsibilities as the Introduction to Humanities course coordinator, Dr. Yang maintains communication with a large network of adjunct instructors. To do this, Dr. Yang regularly sends out announcements and updates through an instructors-only course on Canvas. Through this tool, she encourages instructors to provide feedback and suggestions for improvement, making them active participants in the ongoing development of the course. 

In this episode, Rob and Jared discuss instructional management with Dr. Kevin Jones who has an Ed.D. from Spalding University and serves as the Dean of the School of Education and Social Work at Cedarville University. Contact us at [email protected] with any questions. You can also visit our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog for additional resources. We would love to get your feedback! Please fill out our survey to help improve our podcast and serve you better.

Dr. Jones emphasizes the importance of planning and preparation in teaching. As he prepares to teach, he focuses on key tasks such as identifying essential questions and learning objectives, and then he utilizes backward planning to ensure students achieve the intended goals. This kind of preparation enables him to be more effective at meeting the students’ needs.

Dr. Jones also emphasizes the need for teachers to recognize and embrace their own giftings and weaknesses, as well as the importance of showing compassion and praise to students. He encourages instructors to model and teach students about interconnectedness and the value of their unique gifts. Dr. Jones discusses how to handle hard conversations with students while maintaining an encouraging relationship. He emphasizes the importance of grace and provides the students with opportunities for growth and learning.

In this episode, Rob and Jared revisit content delivery with the return of the podcast’s first guest, Dr. Quentin Schultze. Contact us at [email protected] with any questions. You can also visit our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog for additional resources. We would love to get your feedback! Please fill out our survey to help improve our podcast and serve you better. 

Dr. Schultze approaches course content delivery carefully, knowing that content can easily be perceived as “boring.” He wants to make sure the content is the best while still ensuring that the delivery of that content is engaging and inspiring and that students walk away motivated. He does so by using narrative to show the content’s relevancy. In a face-to-face (or ‘incarnate,’ as Dr. Q likes to say) course, this content delivery approach is handled with various pedagogical strategies. In an online course, the delivery is shorter and focuses just on the essentials. 

The basics of Dr. Schultze’s narrative approach to content delivery are anticipation (“what’s going to happen?”) and identification (relevancy, helping students identify with the story). Instructors can pull narratives from different places: their own lives and background of the content itself. The important thing to remember is making the content relevant and personal for the students. 

Resources 

Quentin Schultze’s website 

In this episode, Rob and Jared revisit assessments with Dr. David Mulder, professor of education at Dordt University. Contact us at [email protected] with any questions. You can also visit our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog for additional resources. We would love to get your feedback! Please fill out our survey to help improve our podcast and serve you better.

Dr. David Mulder emphasizes the need for clear learning targets and aligning assessments to those targets. He uses the analogy of an archery range, where the learning targets are the bull's eye and assessments measure how close students come to hitting that mark. These assessments provide opportunities for educators to deliver specific and timely feedback to help students grow and improve.

They also touch upon the challenge of time constraints in education and offer strategies to manage assessments effectively. One approach is to prioritize essential learning targets and to group related assessments together. A standards-based grading approach helps instructors emphasize fewer key concepts for assessment, allowing students to demonstrate their understanding comprehensively. Teaching fewer things well helps ensure students deeply understand essential content. These kinds of assessments serve students and equip them with the skills they need for success in life.

Resources 

Dr. Mulder’s podcast, “Hallway Conversations” 

Subscribe to Dr. Mulder’s newsletter, “Positivity – Passion – Purpose” 

In this episode, Rob and Jared discuss objectives with Dr. Haisong Ye who has a PhD from Indiana State University and is an instructional designer in the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cedarville University. They engage in a thought experiment to create objectives for a course on how to make a good cup of coffee. Contact us at [email protected] with any questions. You can also visit our blog at cedarville.edu/focusblog for additional resources. We would love to get your feedback! Please fill out our survey to help improve our podcast and serve you better.

Dr. Haisong Ye advocates for working through creating course objectives by starting with a simple question: what do you want students to be able to do by the end of this course? This strategy helps instructors begin by defining their end goals. To provide a specific example, Dr. Ye, Jared Pyles, and Rob McDole think about how they would design a course about making a good cup of coffee. The end goal of this type of course is that students would be able to brew a properly extracted cup of coffee. They brainstorm lower-level objectives, such as teaching students how to grind coffee, choose the right coffee beans, and set the proper water temperature. All of these coffee brewing variables build towards the end goal of the course. This thought experiment underscores the benefit of working through objectives for a course.