CTL Workshop: No Robot Left Behind: AI and Our Fall Classes
Are you unsure how to integrate AI in your classroom? Concerned about managing AI usage among your students? Join us for the one-hour online seminar, Wednesday, August 28, from 12:15-1:15 EDT.
This session is specifically tailored for liberal arts divisions in Art, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences. We’ll begin with discussing AI with your students, providing you with tools to establish clear and effective AI policies. Following that, we’ll break into groups by academic division, allowing for in-depth engagement with AI strategies and insights relevant to your field. Discover how faculty in various disciplines are already using AI tools to enhance teaching. Share your insights, pose questions, and prepare yourself with the knowledge to create a balanced, fair, and academically rigorous environment for the upcoming semester.
Please note, due to the division-specific breakouts, we will not be able to record this session for later viewing. We will provide a webpage link with resources to all registrants. Sign up HERE for this online event (a Zoom link will be sent the day before).
Teaching and Learning
Facilitating Contentious Conversations in Your Classroom (Bonni Stachowiak, Teaching in Higher Education, August 22, 2024): A 45-minute podcast in which Mylien Duong discusses various strategies for handling contentious classroom conversations.
Retrieval Practice: How to Encourage Long-Term Retention (Monica White, The Learning Scientists, August 22, 2024): The author, a high school math teacher, writes that “The shift from seeing retrieval practice as an assessment tool to seeing it as a pedagogical practice altered how I incorporated this strategy into my classroom and the overall purpose of it. The act of retrieving was now at the forefront of my instruction rather than at the end.”
Simple Ways to Support Student Mental Health in Class (Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 22, 2024): Supiano reports on how one university is using large-enrollment courses to reach many students with a set of strategies meant to help them flourish.
A Case Against Rubrics (Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Inside Higher Ed, August 21, 2024): Rubrics are not the path to intellectual liberation.
Tell Students the “Why” (Tony’s Teaching Tips, August 21, 2024): Transparent In Learning & Teaching (TILT), a set of teaching principles heavily built around making the invisible visible, is particularly important for students who don’t know the unwritten rules of the higher education landscape, frequently students from underrepresented or marginalized backgrounds.
All Things AI
Struggling to Create AI Policies? Ask Your Students (Lauren Coffey, Inside Higher Ed, August 22, 2024): A professor at Florida International University tasked her students with devising an ethical guide to using AI in their classes—and found them to be stricter than she would have been.
AI Cheating Is Getting Worse (Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, August 19, 2024): Colleges still don’t have a plan.
AI Hacks for Educators (Kevin Yee, Laurie Uttich, Eric Main, and Elizabeth Giltner, University of Central Florida, 2024): Dozens of AI uses with detailed prompts that you can copy and edit for your purposes. (Thanks to Lew Ludwig for pointing this resource out.)
AAC&U, Elon University Launch AI Guide for Students (Lauren Coffey, Inside Higher Ed, August 19, 2024): The organizations released their AI–U guide today, calling it a “student guide to navigating college in the artificial intelligence era.”
At the Crossroads of Innovation: Embracing AI to Foster Deep Learning in the College Classroom (Dan Sarofian-Butin, Educause, July 17, 2024): AI is here to stay. How can we, as educators, accept this change and use it to help our students learn?
Back to School
The Secret to a Meaningful Start: Miss Your Mark (David R. Bowne, Inside Higher Ed, August 23, 2024): The author has developed an unusual, yet successful, way to set the tone for the entire semester—with M&Ms.
A Faculty Survival Guide for the New Academic Year (Kevin Gannon, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 21, 2024): Four ways to approach what may be yet another “unprecedented” year in higher education.
Academic Boycotts and the AAUP
Why the AAUP Changed Its Stance on Academic Boycotts (Adrienne Lu, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 16, 2024). And here are various opinion articles (by date):
The AAUP Has Always Defended Academic Freedom. We Still Do (Rana Jaleel and Todd Wolfson, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 21, 2024): The AAUP’s president and chair of its Committee A on Academic Freedom defend the organization’s new policy
The AAUP Is Right. Supporting Boycotts Is Academic Freedom (Joan Scott, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 20, 2024).
The AAUP’s Incoherent New Boycott Policy (Jeffrey Sachs, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 16, 2024).
The AAUP Abandons Academic Freedom (Cary Nelson, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 13, 2024).
Affirmative Action
MIT: Newest Students Less Diverse Due to Supreme Court Affirmative Action Decision (Lexi Lonas, The Hill, August 21, 2024): Black, Hispanic, and/or Native American and Pacific Islander students make up only 16 percent of the class of 2028, down from 25 percent in recent years.
Campus Protests and the New School Year
Suspended Protesters Fight Back With Lawsuits (Johanna Alonso, Inside Higher Ed, August 23, 2024): Student protesters at three universities, suspended for violating campus codes of conduct, are suing their institutions to end punishments or expunge their records.
Anticipating More Unrest, Colleges Prioritize Civic Dialogue (Jessica Blake and Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed, August 21, 2024): As institutions across the country brace for new protests over the war in Gaza and a testy presidential election, many are looking to third-party consultants for guidance.
The Head of Vanderbilt on the Upcoming School Year (Alisa Chang, Kathryn Fink, and Jeanette Woods, NPR-All Things Considered, August 21, 2024): The chancellor of Vanderbilt, Daniel Diermeier, discusses the university’s approach to free speech and student protests.
Colleges Face Growing Demand to Step Up Enforcement on Student Protesters Who Cross a Line (Amelia Benavides-Colón and Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 19, 2024): A Republican congresswoman had choice words for what she said were Columbia’s failures to discipline activists, while the UC system president said its campuses would tighten their protocols.
An Awkward False Neutrality (Abiya Ahmed and Alexander Key, Inside Higher Ed, August 20, 2024: Authors argue that false binaries and assumptions contribute to distortions of campus discourse on Palestine.
Zero Tolerance at UC Campuses in New Order Banning Encampments, Masking, Blocking Paths (Teresa Watanabe and Jaweed Kaleem, Los Angeles Times, August 19, 2024: The University of California president also affirmed that the right to protest, exercise free speech and voice diverse viewpoints was fundamental to the mission of the university.
US Colleges Revise Rules on Free Speech in Hopes of Containing Anti-War Demonstrations (Nick Perry, Jake Offenhartz, and Jocelyn Gecker, AP, August 15, 2024): Some schools are adopting rules to limit the kind of protests that swept campuses last spring.
Extra Credit Reading
Most College Students Aren’t Hostile Towards Jews or Israel (Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed, August 23, 2024): A new study from Brandeis found that about one-third of college students surveyed agreed with at least one negative statement about Jews or Israel.
Report Finds Higher Ed Sector Shrank by 2 Percent (Josh Moody, Inside Higher Ed, August 22, 2024): Data from National Center for Education Statistics shows that nearly 100 institutions closed between 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years.
Shafik’s Columbia: 13 Months and 13 Days of a Campus Spiraling Into Crisis (Sarah Huddleston and Shea Vance, Columbia Spectator, August 20, 2024): A timeline of Minouche Shafik’s presidency.
Future Imperfect
Columbia University Subpoenaed for Records in Antisemitism Investigation (Katherine Knott, Inside Higher Ed, August 21, 2024): After investigating antisemitism at Columbia University for six months and receiving thousands of pages of documents, Republicans on the House Education and Workforce Committee say the university has failed to turn over necessary documents that would aid its inquiry.
Supreme Court Blocks Biden Administration Rules Against Sex Discrimination in Schools (Nina Totenberg and Jordan Thomas, NPR, August 16, 2024): The U.S. Supreme Court refused on Friday to partially limit two lower-court orders that blocked the Biden administration’s new rules barring sex discrimination in schools that get federal aid.
Have a short article or some news related to teaching and learning at your institution that you’d like to share with colleagues? Send your contribution along to us. Also, please email Colleen Monahan Smith (smith@glca.org) if you have colleagues who would like to receive this weekly report.
Steven Volk (steven.volk@oberlin.edu), Editor
GLCA/GLAA Consortium for Teaching and Learning
Co-Directors:
Lew Ludwig (ludwigl@denison.edu)
Colleen Monahan Smith (smith@glca.org)