“Zip! Zap! Zop!” my 15-year-old son cried as he wildly waved his arms. “My math teacher makes us do this exercise halfway through class. You should try it with your students.”
While higher education focuses on how to prevent AI from diminishing student learning, over the past few months a number of major AI players have released study modes focused on helping students learn. This development has the potential to close the learning gap by providing
Large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Llama have become powerful tools that can boost productivity and learning support, but they also undermine academic integrity by making it easier for students to submit unoriginal or automated work. How can we keep assessments purposeful, relevant, and
One major impediment to learning is the “forgetting curve,” the fact that people rapidly forget what they learn without reinforcement (Smolen et al., 2016). Assessments are a good method of combating the forgetting curve as they call up past information and, in doing so, encode
When students come to class without understanding the assigned reading, I often assume that they didn’t do it. While this can be the case, I have also found that many students simply didn’t get the needed information out of the assigned texts. Being an expert
Like many college instructors, I approached this summer with one goal in mind: to figure out my approach to AI once and for all. I assembled a sizable stack of AI-related teaching books and embarked upon my reading program.
Online teaching inherently involves technology. It is part of the deal. But all too often, technology can make us feel more distant from our students. It can be a barrier preventing connection instead of a tool to facilitate connection. If you have ever faced a
John lost both his parents by the time he was 12. He moved around between different families, got himself into a lot of trouble, and eventually was expelled from high school. Fast-forward many years, and John, after earning degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and Yale, went
As coauthor Joe Keller prepared to revise his syllabus for the upcoming semester, he kept thinking about a moment from a previous course. A student turned in a research paper so polished he assumed they had help—and he was right. It was not plagiarism, but
As I examined students’ work and tracked their progress in the past few years, I observed a consistent pattern: many students were still repeating the same mistakes, showing limited improvement in conceptual understanding, and struggling with the language of mathematics. It became increasingly clear that
