Captain, It's Wednesday

I saw this meme going around the socials on Wednesday of this week:

Captain Paddock sits there looking shocked and exhausted and he says, "What a week, huh?" Tintin sits next to him trying to be helpful and he says, "Captain, it's Wednesday." (Thanks to 30 Rock and the internet for this meme.)

That pretty much sums up how I felt the day after Election Day. I was surprised that the outcome of the U.S. presidential election was known so quickly. I figured it would take at least until Saturday, but apparently the votes in the swing states were more decisive than four years ago. And so we knew that our 45th president would also be our 47th president.

Sidebar: You know those classroom posters featuring portraits of all the presidents? I'm calling it now: Mr. Trump should only get one slot. Any complaints about this policy should be filed with Grover Cleveland.

Here's another meme that caught my eye on Wednesday:

It's a lovely cross-stich pattern of flowers and skull and the line "What doesn't kill you mutates and tries again." I don't know where this meme comes from. Maybe it's a COVID-19 reference? Regardless, I've experienced enough hardships in my life to know that there's truth in this meme. Hard stuff has a habit of coming back again and again, and I've learned that we have to learn to live with the trials and with the trauma.

Another thing I've learned from the hard stuff is that we have to lean into our grief. We can't avoid the grief or bottle it up or skip past it. If we want to have what it takes to move forward, even as the hard stuff continues, we have to feel our grief. I have a lot of worries about the next four years and our... chaotic president, but I'm also grieving the country that I once knew, or at least thought I knew. I feel like everything that elementary school and Schoolhouse Rock taught me about American democracy has passed away. Peaceful transfers of executive power? Gone. Checks and balances among the branches of government? Sorry. "The Great American Melting Pot"? Nope.

My wife has been reminding me that the country has had problematic presidents in the past. See Andrew Johnson's record, for instance. That give me some hope. But I also empathize with this Bluesky post from Ted Underwood:

This is the kind of week where I wished the moral arc would bend a little faster. But, hey, it's only Thursday, right?

Some College, No Degree with Josh Steele

Have you heard the descriptor “some college, no degree”? This refers to adults who left postsecondary education without receiving a degree or other credential. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, there are approximately 36.8 million adults in the United States under the age of 65 in this category. Not all of these individual want to go back to college and get a degree, but many do. How can universities meet the needs of these potential students, especially when the traditional approach to college didn’t work for them?

That’s a tough question, and I’m glad there are folks like Josh Steele trying to answer it. Josh is the associate vice dean of digital learning at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, just a few hours away from my home outside Nashville. Josh is helping to lead efforts at UT to reach the “some college, no degree” cohort and help them complete degrees that are meaningful to them. I connected to Josh thanks to UPCEA, the online and professional education association and sponsor of the podcast, in part because Josh was on a really fantastic panel at an UPCEA conference this summer.

I’m excited to bring you this interview with Josh Steele. He talks about the challenges that adult students face in coming back to college, the experiments that are happening at the University of Tennessee to meet those challenges, and how his team works with faculty to design and implement quality online education. Josh cuts through a lot of misconceptions about online ed and discusses how faculty and administrators can make a difference, especially at a public land grant institution.

​You can listen to my interview with Josh Steele here, or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your podcast app.

Curation, Collections, and Collaboration: Insights from UVA's Teaching Hub

You've read about my role in the University of Virginia's Teaching Hub, a website featuring collections of resources on a variety of teaching and learning topics, all curated by experts on those topics. I'm excited to share that Bonni Stachowiak has me on her most excellent podcast, Teaching in Higher Ed, this week to talk about Teaching Hub. Not only do we take an audio tour of the Hub, but we also dive into the roles of collection and curation in teaching and in educational development. We also talk about podcast microphones, to do list apps, board games, and tasty jams, among other topics!

​You can listen to my conversation with Bonni here, or search "Teaching in Higher Ed" in your podcast app.

A Few Inquiries

Speaking of collecting resources, I've recently posted to LinkedIn looking for a few resources that would be useful in my regular work with faculty and other instructors this fall. I'm going to repeat these inquiries here in the newsletter. Thanks in advance for any pointers you can provide! And if I get some really useful resources, I'll share those in a future newsletter.

• I’m looking for examples of ways to be transparent with online about how to communicate with their instructor. Email hours, office hour option, discussion board guidance, that kind of thing. Can anyone point me to something like that?
• Dear writing center colleagues, have your consultations with students changed in quantity or quality with the advent of ChatGPT and similar AI tools? I imagine so, but I haven't heard many anecdotes yet. Have y'all written about this somewhere that I can read?
• Has anyone seen a recent review of journal policies on use of generative AI? I saw one here from a year ago, but I imagine there are different policies today. I'm particularly curious to know how journals are thinking about the use of AI to code qualitative data.

Thanks for reading!

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