Bloom's Sixth

Something has been happening with class attendance. Actually, there are several somethings, which I’ll get to shortly. First, though, consider, this: Since the start of the pandemic, many students have treated class attendance as optional, making discussion and group interaction difficult. Online classes tend to fill quickly, and students who enroll in physical classes often ask for an option to “attend” via a video connection. Many K-12 schools report record rates…

KU’s big jump in freshman enrollment this academic year ran counter to broader trends in higher education. Around the country, college enrollment has been trending downward (although there was a slight increase in 2023), many campuses have been closing or consolidating, and a lower birthrate after the 2008-09 recession looms in what has become known as the “enrollment cliff.” That is, with fewer births, there will soon be fewer students graduating from high school and thus fewer potential college applicants…

We don’t know the last time the first day of classes was canceled. We’re guessing it was January 1892, when the temperature fell to minus 23, the bottoms of thermometers shattered, and students started using the phrase “froze my bottom off” (or something approximating that). Of course, everyone was hardier back then, having to walk five miles to campus barefoot through the snow and fend off wolves with their bare, frostbitten hands and all. At least that’s what our elders told us. So everyone may have just shrugged off the lethally cold temperatures in 1892 and showed up for class as usual…

A year after the release of a know-it-all chatbot, educators have yet to find a satisfying answer to a nagging question: What are we supposed to do with generative artificial intelligence? One reason generative AI has been so perplexing to educators is that there is no single step that all instructors can take to make things easier. Here are a few things what we do know, though: The sudden rise of generative AI has felt like the opening of a Pandora’s box Students are using generative AI in far larger numbers than faculty, and some are using it to complete all or parts of assignments…

In addition to asking participants at the Teaching Summit how they created community in their classes, Peter Felten also asked what barriers instructors faced in creating connections with students. Felten shared this word cloud of the responses. Peter Felten’s keynote message about building relationships through teaching found a receptive audience at this year’s Teaching Summit. Felten, a professor of…

In a focus group before the pandemic, I heard some heart-wrenching stories from students. One was from a young, Black woman who felt isolated and lonely. She mostly blamed herself, but the problems went far beyond her. At one point, she said: Peter Felten explains a family picture he shared at the 2023 Teaching Summit. He uses the picture, which shows his father as a young boy, in his classes as a way to connect with students through family history. “There’s some small classes that I’m in and like, some of my teachers don’t know my name. I mean, they don’t know my name. And I just, I…

If you are sitting on the fence, wondering whether to jump into the land of generative AI, take a look at some recent news – and then jump. Three recently released studies say that workers who used generative AI were substantially more productive than those who didn’t. In two of the studies, the quality of work also improved. The consulting company McKinsey said that a…

Instructors have raised widespread concern about the impact of generative artificial intelligence on undergraduate education. As we focus on undergraduate classes, though, we must not lose sight of the profound effect that generative AI is likely to have on graduate education. The question there, though, isn’t how or whether to integrate AI into coursework. Rather, it’s how quickly we can integrate AI into methods courses and help students learn to use AI in finding literature; identifying significant areas of potential research; merging, cleaning, analyzing, visualizing, and interpreting…

Not surprisingly, tools for detecting material written by artificial intelligence have created as much confusion as clarity. Students at several universities say they have been falsely accused of cheating, with accusations delaying graduation for some. Faculty members, chairs, and administrators have said they aren’t sure how to interpret or use the results of AI detectors. Doug Ward, via Bing Image Creator…

The pandemic has taken a heavy mental and emotional toll on faculty members and graduate teaching assistants.   That has been clear in three lunch sessions at CTE over the past few weeks. We called the sessions non-workshops because the only agenda was to share, listen, and offer support. I offered some takeaways from the first session in March. In the most recent sessions, we heard many similar stories: Teaching has grown more complicated, the size of our classes has grown…