Teaching and Learning
6 Approaches for Sharing Assignment Due Dates (Laura Schisler and Melissa Locher, Faculty Focus, September 13, 2023): Taking steps to ensure that students stay on track with assigned course work.
3 Ways to Improve Student Group Work (Christina Katopodis, Inside Higher Ed, September 13, 2023): Throwing students into groups without an accountability system rigs such work against them, but they can be transformed by thoughtfully structuring it in equitable ways.
Climate Optimism in an Anxious Classroom (Stephen Porder, Inside Higher Ed, September 13, 2023): To reach more students, environmental scientists and studies should rework curricula to focus more on solutions, not (just) problems.
AI Means Professors Need to Raise Their Grading Standards (Michael W. Clune, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 12, 2023): ChatGPT has transformed grade inflation from a minor corruption to an enterprise-destroying blight.
The Beating Heart of Gen Ed (Louis E. Newman, Inside Higher Ed, September 11, 2023): Critical thinking skills should be placed at the center of general education programs.
What Will Determine AI’s Impact on College Teaching? 5 Signs to Watch (Beth McMurtrie, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 8, 2023): Academics have been consumed by the technology’s potential to disrupt education, but recent analyses present a more complicated picture.
A.I. and Higher Ed
‘On Bullshit’ and AI (A.G. Elrod, Inside Higher Ed, September 14, 2023): The rise of generative AI heralds the dawn of a golden age for bullshit in education. (Note: I didn’t make this up!)
Why Professors Are Polarized on AI (Susan D’Agostino, Inside Higher Ed, September 13, 2023): Academics who perceive threats to education from AI band together as a survival mechanism. The resulting alliances echo divisions formed during online learning’s emergence.
Free Speech and Academic Freedom
Has a Ticking Time Bomb for Academic Freedom Finally Exploded? (Len Gutkin, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 11, 2023): On intramural speech and the First Amendment.
Extra Credit Reading
Among Chinese Students at U.S. Colleges, Political Pressures and Discrimination Grow More Acute (Karin Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 13, 2023): More than half of Chinese students studying in the US who graduated after 2016 reported discriminatory incidents compared to less than 15% of those who graduated before 2004.
Which Path Forward? (Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Ed, September 12, 2023): Toward a conception of college that is spartan and transactional or that is developmental and transformative?
The Value of an Education That Never Ends (Michael S. Roth, The New York Times, September 12, 2023): To be a student is to be alive to the world and to oneself. Why would anyone want to graduate from that?
For Selective Institutions, Progress and Backsliding on Socioeconomic Diversity (Jessica Blake, Inside Higher Ed, September 11, 2023): New York Times database shows some colleges have gained in socioeconomic diversity, but many have declined. See, as well, Explore How Income Influences Attendance at 139 Top Colleges (Aatish Bhatia and Clair Cain Miller, New York Times, September 11, 2023): Students with parents earning in the top 1 percent attend at much higher rates than other similarly qualified students, new data shows.
On the Bookshelf
Mary C. Wright, Centers for Teaching and Learning: The New Landscape in Higher Education (John Hopkins University Press, 2023): The central goals and responsibilities of centers for teaching and learning have shifted in recent years. Interview with Wright by Johanna Alonso in Inside Higher Ed, September 13, 2023.
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)