New Collections on UVA's Teaching Hub

You may remember a piece in the newsletter earlier this year about Teaching Hub, a new website from the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia. Teaching Hub is designed to crowdsource the best teaching and learning resources around higher ed, resources useful for instructors, educational developers, and instructional designers.

Each collection on Teaching Hub features a relatively small number of resources (usually between four and eight) that have been curated by an expert on a particular teaching topic. These best-of-the-best resources include journal articles, teaching guides, books, podcasts, and more, all selected to help folks dig into the topic. Most of the curators are staff at the CTE or faculty at UVA, but Teaching Hub is open to external curators, too!

I have two collections on Teaching Hub: "The First Day of Class," which features ideas for engaging first class sessions from James Lang, Stephanie Chasteen, Michelle Pacansky-Brock, and more; and "Alternatives to Traditional Essays," which draws on my students-as-producers work as well as pieces from Paul Hanstedt and Nancy Chick.

​You can explore all of the Teaching Hub collections here, and if you're interested in curating a collection on a topic you know well, let me know! I'm working with the UVA CTE team to recruit more curators to Teaching Hub.

Learning Assistants with Katie Johnson and Katarya Johnson-Williams

In a Learning Assistants program, students who did well in a course in the past are invited to come back to attend class and help current students learn the course material. I knew these programs could be effective from my time at Vanderbilt University, where the LA program was so successful the dean of the College of Arts and Science actually poured money into the program! For details on the Vanderbilt program, see this news article or this journal article.

Last fall when I was at the POD Network conference, I just happened to sit at a table during a session next to Katie Johnson, associate professor of mathematics at Florida Gulf Coast University. I learned that not only did Katie lead a Learning Assistants program at her institution, but also that she was actively involved in the Learning Assistant Alliance, an international group of educators involved with LA programs. I reached out to Katie after the conference to see if she and one of her experienced LAs would come on the podcast to talk about their experiences with their LA program, and they were happy to do so.

In this week's Intentional Teaching podcast episode, I talk with Katie and with Katarya Johnson-Williams, a senior in software engineering with a minor in marketing at Florida Gulf Coast University. We talked about the Learning Assistants model, the impact this kind of program can have on faculty and students, and advice for instructors who are interested in starting up an LA program in their department or on their campus.

​You can listen to our conversation about this fantastic program here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app.

Takeaways from Six Conversations on Teaching and AI

With April's two episodes on teaching with and about generative artificial intelligence (AI), the Intentional Teaching podcast has now devoted six episodes to this topic. Since we're about a year and a half out from the launch of ChatGPT, which brought these technologies into mainstream use, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on those six episodes and share what those interviews taught me about teaching and AI.

Over on my Agile Learning blog, you'll find a post with those reflections: "Takeaways from Six Conversations on Teaching and AI." I share some lessons learned from my interviews with Robert Cummings, Brett Becker, James Lang, Michelle D. Miller, Garret Westlake, Sravanti Kantheti, and Pary Fassihi. These lessons continue to inform my work on this topic, and I hope you find them helpful.

Thanks for reading!

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