Teaching with AI Agents: A Conversation about Cogniti I think the first custom AI chatbot I tried was one called “Are You a Witch?” designed by past podcast guest Marc Watkins. This chatbot would answer your questions like ChatGPT, but unlike ChatGPT it would only do so after accusing you of witchcraft (in the most caricatured way possible) and making you solve a riddle. That chatbot was kind of silly, but I soon heard about faculty and other instructors building chatbots to do all kinds of...
21 days ago • 3 min read
New from the UVA Teaching Hub One of my roles at the University of Virginia Center for Teaching Excellence is supporting the growth of the CTE's Teaching Hub. The Teaching Hub features collections of resources on a variety of teaching and learning topics, with each collection curated by someone with expertise in that topic. The goal isn't to build all the great resources, but to point to the really good ones that are already out there, with recommendations like the staff picks at a good...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Take It or Leave It with Betsy Barre, Bryan Dewsbury, and Emily Donahoe Higher education in the United States has been faced with unique challenges in 2025, largely because of actions taken by the new U.S. presidential administration: federal grants cancelled midstream, bans on DEI programs, thousands of international students losing visas, and so much more. These actions are unprecedented, and they are making it very hard to work or study at a college or university right now. This week on...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
AI-Integrated Assignments with the University of Virginia Faculty AI Guides One of my roles at the University of Virginia this year has been supporting the university’s Faculty AI Guides program. The provost’s office funded fifty-one faculty to explore potential uses of generative AI in their own teaching and to share what they learn with colleagues in their departments and schools through informal consultations as well as presentations, workshops, and lunch-and-learns. The Faculty AI Guides...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
World Building with Generative AI Last fall, Google released a new generative AI tool called NotebookLM. It does a lot of different things, but it's claim to fame (briefly) was its ability to generate an audio overview of one or more documents in the style of a particular kind of podcast. When this feature of NotebookLM hit the social last fall, I saw lots of faculty posting that having students listen to an AI-generated summary of a course text instead of reading the text themselves was...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Integrating Instructional Design and Student Support It can be challenging to design and implement effective online courses and programs in higher ed. Doing so often involves learning new technologies and new skills as well as navigating new teaching contexts, new types of students, and new regulatory environments. But because of all that newness, sometimes an online program can catalyze new thinking about how we go about the work of post-secondary education. On the podcast this week, I have...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Bridging the AI Trust Gap Last month I was on a virtual panel hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "Bridging the AI Trust Gap." Lee Rainie (Elon University), Gemma Garcia (Arizona State University), and I tried to unpack the differences in how higher ed administrators, faculty, and students approach generative AI in teaching and learning. Moderator Ian Wilhelm from the Chronicle asked very good questions and relayed even more good questions from the audience, and my fellow...
2 months ago • 6 min read
Annotation and Learning with Remi Kalir It's one thing to pull a book off a shelf, highlight a passage, and make a note in the margin. That's annotation, and it can be a useful learning tool for an individual. It's another thing to share your annotations in a way that others can read and respond to. That's social annotation, and when I heard years ago about digital tools that would allow a class of students to collaboratively annotate a shared textbook, I thought, well, that's the killer app...
3 months ago • 4 min read
Structure Matters: Custom Chatbot Edition Many years ago when educators were seeing what they could do with Twitter in their teaching, I wrote a blog post noting that structured Twitter assignments for students seemed to work better than more open-ended invitations for students to use Twitter to post about course material. When we walked through my mom's house as it was being built, I couldn't help but take a photo of all those lines. Somewhat more recently, I started sharing the structured...
3 months ago • 2 min read