Shifting Tides with AI in Higher Education

For those who are involved in higher education in any way, there is one blaring question that has been circulating feverishly for the past few months: “How can I be sure if my students are using generative AI (ChatGPT, Bard, Bing, etc.) to write their assignments or not?” Fret not, I have the answer that we’ve all been searching for: you can’t. In fact, and perhaps more distressing for some, it’s actually safer to assume that they are using generative AI to help write and ideate their assignments at this point. Does that mean the learning has left the picture? Or is it time to rethink how we assess student learning?

a block of text sailing to the right and morphing into a boat

Before I get into a long, drawn-out (this is a pun, you’ll see why later) metaphor about higher education’s relationship to artificial intelligence (AI), there are a few things I’d like to raise as points of interest: 

  1. This isn’t a new problem.
  2. It isn’t actually even a problem.
  3. There is a lot to be learned from this moment in time, for all of us.

Continue reading →

The Benefits of Making Small Changes in Your Course Design: An Introduction to the Plus-One Approach
Avatar photo

The Benefits of Making Small Changes in Your Course Design: An Introduction to the Plus-One Approach

One Small Change…

Iterative design isn’t a new concept. It’s been one of my favorite approaches to course development and teaching since my earliest days as an instructional designer. You probably do this in your teaching practice without even thinking – when you tweak something from one term to the next based on how an activity went, or how well students responded to a prompt.

Continue reading →

A Brief History of Academic Integrity Panics about Disruptive Technology
Avatar photo

A Brief History of Academic Integrity Panics about Disruptive Technology

When ChatGPT emerged last year, a segment of academia panicked in response to articles suggesting that students could get an AI to write their term paper and you, the instructor, would be none the wiser. Some are ready to write a eulogy for human authorship altogether. Continue reading →

Educational Technology Before and During the Pandemic

Educational Technology Before and During the Pandemic

Before becoming an instructional designer in 2015, I was a teacher in the K-12 industry for 14 years. I specialized in teaching 3rd and 4th-grade self-contained classes, as well as the middle school classes in the areas of language arts and social studies. Since 2001 until now, teaching practices have changed due to pedagogy and the integration of technology. Kamau Bobb of Google‘s dedication to educational research advances the field. We live in an ever-changing technological society that impacts our lives at home and in our careers. With this being said, many teachers want to keep abreast of the latest pedagogical practices and technology developments, but it can be challenging due to time constraints.

As I compare and contrast the instruction I received in my undergraduate years in the College of Education at ISU vs the instruction I now give to undergraduate students in the College of Education at DePaul, a lot of the foundation is the same, but now there is a wide focus on how to integrate technology properly into the curriculum. Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Using Genre in the Classroom

During the holidays, I spend the majority of the time with my partner’s family, who are predominantly first- and second-generation Polish immigrants. Many of them can speak Polish to each other with ease. Now, I’ve tried a few times to learn Polish so I can participate in conversations (or at least have a marginal understanding of what they are talking about). Really, I can only name a few foods and I can sing Happy Birthday.

But sitting around the table, not being able to speak or understand the Polish they’re speaking, often leaves me feeling isolated and confused. Those moments remind me just how challenging it can be to try and be an active participant in the room, when I fundamentally don’t communicate in the same way.

Continue reading →

Hands typing at a computer with floating interactions
Avatar photo

Post Once, Reply Twice… But Why?

At some point–even prior to the start of COVID-19–most online instructors have relied on the ‘Post Once, Reply Twice’ formula for their online discussions. It is unclear where this formula originated, but like the Pot Roast Principle, there is no real reason we need to be bound by it. Discussions remain a pain point for most online instructors, so what can be done? How do we make our online discussions something students want to engage in? What alternatives exist?
Continue reading →

Michigan field with tractor.
Avatar photo

Identifying our “Oak Savanna”: How HEERF Funds Helped to Regenerate an ID Team Battered by the Pandemic

In January 2021, my husband and I bought a messy piece of land in Michigan. Some of the land is (barely) tillable farmland, and the other parts are weedy prairie, scrubby forest, and swampy muck. This is what we wanted—a biodiverse piece of land that needs support to bring it back to its natural, harmonious state of being. Continue reading →

Brain controlled by puppet strings attached to a hand
Avatar photo

Mind Control: Research on how what we think changes the way our bodies respond

Like many others out there, I’ve become a bit of a podcast obsessive. I know that we can’t really multitask, but when I’m able to go for a run and engage in some learning while I’m running, it almost feels like I’m able to get a two-for-one experience.

Last year, Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast introduced me to Dr. Andrew Huberman, whose Huberman Lab podcast introduced me to Dr. Alia Crum. After hearing Dr. Crum describe the different ways she approaches researching the physiological impacts of mindset shifts, I did a deep(er) dive into her work to better understand how she’s able to empirically capture the ways our bodies respond to our brains learning new information.

Continue reading →

Avatar photo

Reinstating IDDblog: Let What I learned During the Pandemic Inform What I Do After It

This post marks the return of the Instructional Design and Development Blog, known as the IDDblog, after a 29-month hibernation. If you’ve been our blog reader, you may still remember one of our last scheduled posts in March 2020, titled “Videoconferencing Alternatives: How Low-Bandwidth Teaching Will Save Us All.” That very timely post guided administrators and instructors on the selection of remote teaching methodologies when the coronavirus forced schools to move courses online in a matter of days. After that, IDDblog remained mostly static because staff members of DePaul’s Center for Teaching and Learning had to give up blog-writing to respond to the intense needs for faculty and student support as almost all of DePaul’s course offerings switched to remote.

I’ve heard a saying that to say Covid changed our lives is an understatement, and I couldn’t agree more. This global pandemic has brought something bigger than our common understanding of change. It threw us into what Yuval Noal Harari called “a large-scale social experiment” – an experiment that no government, business, and educational board would agree to conduct in normal times. In his article, “The World After Coronavirus,” Harari called for reflections at the global level, but I think it is the change that took place at the individual level that seems to be even more striking and unretractable. From the perspective of teaching and learning, the privilege we’ve lost for in-person instruction, the opportunities we’ve gained to access courses through a few clicks, and the habits we might have formed during this lost-and-found period are all worth reflecting on. As a guinea pig of one, I thought this blog could be a place for me to conduct my own reflection, like Michel de Montaigne did as he drew meanings and reasonings by looking no further than the life of his own.

Continue reading →

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Foundational STEM courses Curated Resources and Action Items

Students watching webinar on computer, studying online.

Authors

Kyle Grice and Margaret Bell

Our faculty learning community (FLC) generated some big ideas to make STEM classrooms more equitable. Below are some big ideas to make STEM classrooms more equitable; we give a brief orientation to the concepts, with links to additional resources, and potential next steps. Of course, this is only a selection of the extensive body of work, and there is more to be done. While there are a lot of ideas within this list, the most important thing is to simply begin. Within some of these ideas are comments from your colleagues at DePaul about their experiences with implementing the ideas. While our FLC focused on STEM, these concepts could be applied to any course at DePaul. Full names of all the participants in the FLC and their contact information are at the end of the document.  

I. Spend some time in social learning and personal reflection

Big ideas: 

Meaningful and sustained change in education and academia can only come from acknowledging several key concepts: 1) Our society was built in a way that disproportionately privileges White / Male / Cis / Hetero / Able-bodied / Young / Neurotypical / Christian / High Socio-economic-status people in education, housing, employment, and health and well-being, at the implicit exclusion or explicit oppression of ‘others’. Therefore, equity, not just equality, is our responsibility in academia. 2) We all have implicit in-group biases developed from existing in our current society and, as instructors, are coming from places of power and privilege. 3) Everyone has equal and infinite potential to learn and grow, and emphasizing a growth mindset in interacting with students can be impactful. Continue reading →