Bloom's Sixth

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…

By Doug WardNot 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…

When Turnitin activated its artificial intelligence detector this month, it provided a substantial amount of nuanced guidance. Trying to keep ahead of artificial intelligence is like playing a bizarre game of whack-a-mole. The company did a laudable job of explaining the strengths and the weaknesses of its new tool, saying that it would rather be cautious and have its tool miss some questionable material than to falsely accuse someone of unethical behavior. It will make mistakes, though, and “…

We called it a non-workshop. Infinite Flexibility (Futuristic) No. 1, via Catbird.ai The goal of the session earlier this month was to offer lunch to faculty members and let them talk about the challenges they continue to face three years into the pandemic. We also invited Sarah Kirk, director of the KU Psychological Clinic, and Heather Frost, assistant director of Counseling and Psychological Services, to offer perspectives on students. In an hour of conversation, our non-workshop ended up being a sort of academic stone soup…

Martha Oakley couldn’t ignore the data. The statistics about student success in her discipline were damning, and the success rates elsewhere were just as troubling: Martha Oakley, a professor of chemistry and associate vice provost at Indiana University, speaks at Beren Auditorium on the KU campus. Women do worse than men in STEM courses but do better than men in other university courses. Students of color, first-generation students, and low-income students have lower success rates than women. The richer students’ parents are, the higher the students’ GPAs are. “We have no problem…

We just looked at our office clock and realized that it was already March. After we did some deep-breathing exercises and some puzzling over what happened to February, we realized the upside of losing track of time: Spring break is only days – yes, days! – away. We know how time can drag when you use an office clock as a calendar, though. So to help you get over those extra-long days before break, we offer the latest issue of Pupil magazine. This is a themed issue, focusing on artificial intelligence, a topic that has generated almost as much academic froth as Prince Harry’s biography…