AI Across the Curriculum

This past summer I was at a conference and ran into Flower Darby, co-author of Small Teaching Online and The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching. Flower has been doing a lot of work over the last two years supporting faculty explorations of generative AI in their teaching, and we spent a few minutes swapping resources and citations, since I’ve been doing that work, too. Flower pointed me to a paper from a team of faculty at the University of Florida about an “AI across the curriculum” program there. I thought, sure, that makes sense, lots of universities are trying to grapple with ChatGPT and the like. It sounds like UF is a little ahead of the game. Then Flower pointed out to me that they started planning this program in 2021—a full two years before ChatGPT was released to the world.

This week on the podcast, I’m excited to share an interview with Jane Southworth, professor and chair of geography at the University of Florida and co-chair of the “AI Across the Curriculum” committee that designed this new UF program. Jane shares about her landscape change research, which was using a kind of AI called machine learning long before ChatGPT was launched, and how that work get her involved in AI curriculum initiatives at UF. Jane also provides a lot of details on the new UF program, including the university-wide undergraduate AI certificate, AI-focused undergraduate research opportunities, and what turned into a herculean effort to get AI literacy embedded across the UF curriculum.

I keep thinking about that last part, which Jane described as the hardest part, that is, setting up a system to tag AI literacy courses in a way that can have some impact. I remember efforts at Vanderbilt to encourage faculty to embed more digital media literacy into their courses by having students produce podcasts or make videos or design infographics. Those efforts could never really go beyond a set of early adopters because there was no curricular incentive to design courses like that. Such courses didn’t “count” for students’ general education requirements, because there was no digital media literacy requirement. Although the UF program doesn’t make AI literacy a requirement, by weaving that tag into the course catalog and setting up career advising structures to align with those literacy, they’re well on their way to seeing big changes in the curriculum.

​You can listen to my conversation with Jane Southworth about AI across the curriculum here, or just search for "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app.

Recentering Learning

This week marked the publication date of Recentering Learning: Complexity, Resilience, and Adaptability in Higher Education. This book is edited by Maggie Debelius, Joshua Kim, and Edward Maloney and it features reflections by an all-star team of faculty and faculty developers about lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that higher ed can and should take into future crises and challenges. Contributors include Betsy Barre, Isis Artze-Vega, Jenae Cohn, Peter Felten, Tazin Daniels, Bryan Alexander, and Randy Bass, and those are just the people I've interviewed on my various podcasts!

I'm quite honored to have co-authored the first chapter in the book, "Centering Resiliency: Principles for Academic Leaders and Teaching Center Directors," with Matt Kaplan (University of Michigan) and Mary Wright (Brown University). Our respective centers for teaching and learning played key roles on our campuses during the pandemic helping faculty and other instructors move their teaching online. In our chapter, we identify the ingredients that allowed our centers to be not just centers for teaching but centers for resiliency. We note that there will be other challenges to university teaching missions in the future, and wise investments in teaching centers will help universities be ready to face those challenges.

You can learn more about (and order) Recentering Learning on the Johns Hopkins University Press website. And keep an eye on Josh Kim's Insider Higher Ed blog for interviews with contributors to the book in coming weeks.

Thanks for reading!

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