418. The Lift

Posted in belonging, higher education, inclusion, learning, learning spaces, professional development, reflective practice, teaching, Uncategorized
November 5, 2025

It’s easy to become discouraged and disconnected in today’s higher ed climate. In this episode, Kelvin Thompson joins us to discuss his new project designed to provide us with a lift in challenging times.

Kelvin is the Vice Provost for Online Strategy and Teaching Innovation at the University of Louisville. Kelvin developed the BlendKit Course open courseware as part of the Blended Learning Toolkit which he developed while at the University of Central Florida. He regularly serves as an invited speaker on issues related to online and blended learning. Kelvin is a co-editor of the Sage Handbook of Online Higher Education and has long served as a co-host of TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast.

Transcript

John: It’s easy to become discouraged and disconnected in today’s higher ed climate. In this episode, we discuss a new project designed to provide us with a lift in challenging times.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Kelvin Thompson. Kelvin is the Vice Provost for Online Strategy and Teaching Innovation at the University of Louisville. Kelvin developed the BlendKit Course open courseware as part of the Blended Learning Toolkit which he developed while at the University of Central Florida. He regularly serves as an invited speaker on issues related to online and blended learning. Kelvin is a co-editor of the Sage Handbook of Online Higher Education and has long served as a co-host of TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast. Welcome back, Kelvin.

Kelvin: Thanks very much. Good to be here. Thanks for having me, Rebecca and John.

John: Good to talk to you again. And today’s teas are… Kelvin, do you have tea or do you have some coffee with you? [LAUGHTER]

Kelvin: You know, I try to… when in Rome… I made tea. This is a jasmine green tea of indistinct provenance. Very nice.

Rebecca: I have English breakfast today. John… stressful morning.

John: And I have a pineapple ginger tea…

Kelvin: Ooh, that sounds good.

John: …from the Republic of tea, so a somewhat more defined provenance.

Kelvin: Yes, upscale, none of this swill like Kelvin drinks.

Rebecca: I’m lucky I have any tea today. We’ve invited you here today to discuss your transition from regular podcast to what you refer to as a not quite a newsletter on LinkedIn called The Lift insights and inspiration for academic innovation, digital learning and leading, which is accompanied by an audio version on SoundCloud. Can you talk a little bit about the origin of this not quite a newsletter?

Kelvin: Sure. Thanks for that. As our existing podcast was reaching some kind of a point where we might be winding it down, I’ve kind of enjoyed, I think you can probably appreciate this, enjoyed the sort of the process of having to think regularly about organizing your thoughts in some way toward a wider audience, outside of, like just the voices in your head. And I was thinking, Well, what might I do to have some kind of contribution to the community? And I’ve been kind of watching some of the podcast numbers, and podcasting seems to be continuing to evolve. And I thought, well, I seem to get a steady flow of newsletters personally and professionally. And I had run across the concept of LinkedIn as a newsletter platform… had sat in on a webinar about LinkedIn newsletters a while back, and I thought, well, let me explore that. I say not quite a newsletter. I don’t know what a newsletter actually is. I mean, the ones that I subscribe to, they vary, but most of them are sort of like straight prose, and I didn’t really quite want to do that. And most are, like, responding in some way to some kind of current event. I didn’t necessarily quite want to do that. So that’s some of the core ingredients.

Rebecca: Yeah, I don’t know how you knew about the voices in my head.

Kelvin: I was just talking about the ones in mine.

John: So we’ve long been fans of TOPCast, and I was really sorry to hear that it’s winding down, but it sounds like you are leaving open the possibility of continuing to some extent, but are going to be going on a hiatus with a countdown to your final official release of that. Could you talk to us a little bit more about that?

Kelvin: We had our 10-year anniversary, and we’re far less prolific with our release schedule and less ambitious than you all are. We started out as once a month, and then in 2020 we thought it was a good idea in January to start doing twice a month, little did we know, and so we’ve continued that on for the last five years. So we had our 10-year anniversary back in April/May of 2025 and it was a good time to take stock. And we noticed that the listens were significantly decreasing. We looked at wide podcast data. We looked at our specific podcast listens. We looked at kind of the state of the field in terms of online digital education, and kind of figured it must be somewhat us. And did we really want to continue to drip and drab this all the way out to the end, or go out strong and being sort of completists and round number enthusiasts, we thought, well, even though we passed the 10-year mark, which was a kind of a round number, episode, 200 was still coming up. So we would just set that as an arbitrary goal, and so we’ll be a little past the 10 and a half year mark when we hit episode 200 and thought that would be a strong thing to really sprint toward, rather than crawl to the finish line. So we do sometimes say wind down, but we’re really trying to maintain a level of enthusiasm and energy, and tried to find little ways to goose a little additional novelty and energy as we get toward that episode number 200 and then, as you say, John, my co-host Tom Cavanagh, in particular, has been a vocal advocate of, well, I mean, don’t unsubscribe, because maybe we’ll want to say something about something, and we’ll show up and just surprise you in the feed. And, I mean, we’ll see. Maybe we can’t stay away. You know, some people retire and they show up for work the next day. I don’t know if that’s going to be us, but probably not on nearly the schedule that we have been on.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about moving to LinkedIn for your not quite a newsletter? A lot of people use Medium and some other formats and deliver it to your inbox. And this is a slightly different format.

Kelvin: It is, and I gave it some thought. I mean, Substack, Medium, and I did mention that LinkedIn newsletter webinar that I really sat through a couple of years ago and made a lot of notes. I had been thinking about this for a while. Sometimes I let things simmer on the back burner for a bit, and the timing wasn’t quite right, but I was interested by LinkedIn as a newsletter platform. And I think what was most appealing was the fact that instead of like starting from scratch on a new platform, that the LinkedIn newsletter thing is basically just tapping into your existing connections and followers on LinkedIn, and especially your first issue through their newsletter tool gives like a one time invitation to all of your followers and connections to subscribe. So I thought that was sort of a running jumpstart, if you will. And then it was an opportunity to sort of unify, because of already engaging on LinkedIn, to some extent, then the newsletter is sort of complementary to that. I thought all of that had a synergy to it, maybe in a way that a Substack or a Medium might not. So I thought it was worth at least trying on LinkedIn.

John: And some advantages of LinkedIn, besides that already large base of followers, is that the listeners do not have to pay for it, as they would, perhaps with Medium. And also, there have been a number of people have been moving away from Substack recently. To be honest, I haven’t found out why, but I’ve seen a lot of people mentioning that they’re transitioning to a new format. And also, going back just to podcasting, we used to get many of our guests from things we saw posted on Twitter or on other social media sites, and that pretty much has dried up. And we get many more comments about our podcast on LinkedIn now than we ever did on any of the other platforms. So it’s become perhaps a better way of sharing information with an academic audience than the other social media sites that used to do a moderately good job of that in the past.

Kelvin: Yeah, I agree with you, and while I have tried to keep a toe in the water of Bluesky and Mastodon, I haven’t ventured out farther than that. I’m not really active on Facebook, so spin offs from that weren’t something I was really interested in, and I haven’t really mastered the kind of visual communication literacy that Instagram might necessitate. But yes, LinkedIn seems to be where I see most of the professional kinds of interaction, certainly more long form than Twitter back in the day, and I think people have less of an appetite for lots of posts,I think. So space out your posts [LAUGHTER] a little bit more and they’re a little bit longer. But that being said, yeah, it seems to be where the professional dialog is coming and the dialog is more substantive post and then comments, kind of like micro blogging, truly. I mean, we used to kind of use that phraseology around Twitter, but I think more so of like key post, and then responses, more than just the little micro post, micro post, micro post. Anyway, I’ve been fascinated, probably like you, to see how the spaces evolve, and yes, I really appreciate you bringing up. I wasn’t a real big fan of the idea of people having to… I mean, I don’t know… people only like me so much, and I’m just happy if they engage at all, and to do it for a fee hmm, that seemed egregious and unlikely to have any kind of positive outcome.

Rebecca: One of the things that I really enjoyed about your opening not newsletter, is the way that you framed The Lift. Can you talk a little bit about the framing of this particular communication strategy that you’re using?

Kelvin: [LAUGHTER] Maybe to a fault, I tried to unpack the metaphor in a multi-faceted way in that opening issue to really say something aspirational about what I was intending to undertake. So, lift, from like an emotional standpoint, to bring a little bit of mood elevation, to raise our gaze more aspirationally to the horizon. A lift in terms of like, I think I told this story in the first issue, I had a colleague who offered me a lift in his car from time to time when I was in my first few years at my former institution. And so sometimes we need to depend on other people a little bit, because maybe we’re not so up for it today. You know, today’s a rough day, and you need to lean on your colleague a little bit, and then maybe tomorrow, I’ll need to lean on you a little bit. So in all of those ways, the lift, as a construct, as a metaphor, started appealing to me. True story, a little back story. Like I said, I had this idea brewing for a while, ever since that LinkedIn newsletter webinar, and so I kept periodically coming back to it and thinking, well, what would I call it? And I told a little bit of this story in that first issue as well. I had always been very inspired by these words from Dr. Dale Whittaker that much of what we aspire to in higher education is about two things that are intertwined, lifting lives and lifting livelihoods. And since coming here to the University of Louisville, I’ve sometimes talked about the lever that is online, digital, schedule flexible kind of options. So for a while there, I thought about the lever as a title. I thought about the lever and the lift, kind of like the Globe and Mail. And then I thought, Well, gee whiz, you are full of yourself, aren’t you? That’s ponderous. That’s not going to work. And shoved it back into the recesses of my mind or down the screen in terms of the brainstorming Google Docs that I maintain. And then as we decided to really set an end date for TOPCast, I really thought, Well, okay, now is the time to do something. And then with just the… there’s a lot of heaviness in the first part of 2025 in higher education. And I thought, well, The Lift, maybe lean into all of that. Maybe it’s a coalescence of events and circumstances. So I don’t know, it worked for me. I hope it works for you.

John: I think it’s a wonderful metaphor for getting that message across at a time when I think we can all use a bit of a lift. And speaking of a lift, one of the things that continues into this, not quite a newsletter, is some reference to coffee in every issue to date, I believe. How did that become part of TOPCast, and is this going to continue through every issue of The Lift?

Kelvin: The short answer to the last question is, yes, I expect there to be some sort of a bean boost. I call it upping your coffee game a little bit in every issue, unless I kind of have this open call out the thought really is to bring about some sort of embodied mood elevation via food or beverage. And I kind of have a somewhat well-earned reputation as a coffee guy. Some people have said that I’m knowledgeable. I don’t know that that’s true. And some people throw around words like connoisseur. I know that’s not true, but I do dabble, and I have learned a few things. And I thought, well, I mean, coffee is definitely a mood elevator. And I’m amazed at the number of folks who just haven’t made fundamental steps to raise their coffee game. There are some key things that I’ve learned that, do a few little changes, and you’re going to be drinking better coffee and having a better benefit. But I have this open invitation, if maybe you’re a gourmet chef and like, here’s the one thing I’ve learned that people do poorly in cooking food on a stove, tell us. Or here’s the key thing to know about tea drinking, like don’t have an indistinct, indeterminate provenance, go to a good supplier. That’s probably a good tip. So if you, John, wanted to write a little blurb, see, I would slide it in there with attribution. That would be the first tea mood elevation in The Lift. Other than that, yeah, by default, I’ll do something about coffee. And the reason that it showed up on TOPCast… I had this local reputation as a coffee person, and when we were recording the pilot episode, or right before that, not unlike how I describe the backstory to The Lift, Tom and I had been interviewing podcasters in late 2014, early 2015 doing concept development, thinking about what we could do. And it was taking on a life of its own. It was going to be very involved. And he had enough one day, I think we might have been sitting in a cafe, and he said, you know, sort of almost metaphorically, like rip the page out of the notebook and crumple up the paper. He said, “How about we don’t do any of this. Why don’t we just get into a room, you bring, like, a thermos of coffee, and we just have a conversation.” I mean, I don’t think anybody’s gonna listen to that, but you’re the boss, and hey, we’ll give it a shot. And we got lucky, because it really sort of worked for us, and we just kind of kept going.

John: And it was a very well timed podcast as online education was spreading, and there weren’t very many other podcasts that addressed it at the time, and I don’t think there still are very many that address online specifically, but all have started to include much more of it, especially since 2020 with that whole mess.

Rebecca: One of the things that I observed in your not newsletter are like a little section of discussion prompts to have with a colleague. Can you talk a little bit about that section?

Kelvin: Sure. Another reason that this is not quite a newsletter is I’ve tried to think in terms of modularity, like little discrete pieces that maybe some of the other pieces wouldn’t work for you, but maybe this piece would be a go to, and one of those is this idea of like reflection or discussion prompts, and a key part of the not quite a newsletter, is that I’ve been… I say often, I don’t do pithy, it’s not completely true. I do. It just takes a heck of a lot of work. But I’ve been collecting little sayings, little idioms from colleagues for years, and we haven’t even gotten to the ones that I’ve derived myself from interacting with smart, wise people, and I kind of wanted to do something about that, sharing it so that didn’t just die with me someday. So the discussion or reflection questions are in relation to sharing one such little wise word saying that I have found useful. So the sharing of those wise words, by itself, is a little nugget, and I do a little brief video where I unpack if you were interested more, you could learn a little bit more. I got a face made for radio. So not a lot of people go over to the YouTube thing and listen further than the one line thing, but I’m hopeful that maybe an individual having read that little one liner of wise words, might be willing to just scroll down a little bit and ponder a little reflection based on those prompts. Or, I think we have such opportunity to dialog with colleagues. And then sometimes it seems like, I mean, we’re surrounded by such smart, capable people, but to dig a little deeper, we don’t always know where to start. So actually, just to have some prompts that you could say, “Hey, we’re going to use this as a warm up for our team meeting,” or, “Hey, can we have a cup of coffee and just kind of springboard off of these questions about that?” I just thought it would be something that might be useful for a subset of people who open the newsletter, and if not, maybe something else. Maybe the coffee bit will be something valuable. I just hope that there’s something in each issue that somebody will find useful.

John: As we talked about briefly before, you’re releasing this also in an audio version. How has that been received? What’s the sort of mix you get? And also, what is the process there? Do you start with a text version and go to audio or do you start with an audio one and then generate the text from that?

Kelvin: All good questions. I didn’t really set out to do another podcast of any sort. I kind of thought that the idea of even pursuing newsletter as a genre or a venue. The reason I did that is I kind of thought that not everybody is going to listen to a podcast. Boy, there were certainly a lot of Substacks and Mediums and so forth, as you say, and people on LinkedIn. And so I thought, well, something that’s text, text visual primarily, might have a better uptake. And then, if I can make it modular, as I discussed, maybe that’s useful. But then, after I did the first one, then I took the contrary view. See the rebuttal came from the voices in my head, Rebecca. And I thought, Well, I kind of miss speaking into a microphone. And then I thought, I’m not always up for reading one of these newsletters that comes into my inbox. I did skip the fact, by the way, that while on the LinkedIn newsletter platform, while you get, like, a posting with a link, anybody who subscribes to the newsletter, they do get the little email prompting in the same way that you might with those other platforms. I thought when those things come into my email box, sometimes I just let them sit there. I’m like, I don’t feel like reading, or I’m about to get in the car, and I love listening to podcasts or the occasional audio book while I’m doing something else, driving down the road, or walking the dog, or that kind of a thing. I thought, well, I’ve got all this stuff anyway. And John, to your point, I develop out the textual graphic thing. And then I thought, well, what would an audio edition of this thing be like? And it’s primarily an audio performance of the sort of the opening essay, and then sort of a description of some of the other elements. And I mean, it’s brief, they’re about like 15 minutes, give or take, which is half the length of the run time of TOPCast at about 30 minutes. But based on the data that I’ve got, which admittedly is not tremendous on LinkedIn… no offense to LinkedIn… the analytics are kind of rough hewn, but there’s many, many, many, many, many more people who have article accesses in that textual graphic format than the data from SoundCloud would indicate are listening to that audio edition. It’s more of a niche. Maybe it is just the odd person who I’m not going to read your thing, I can’t be bothered to scroll or I want to listen in the car. So there’s definitely people that are steadily accessing the audio edition, but there’s no comparison. And maybe that’s because it’s sort of the audio edition of this textual, graphic newsletter, rather than a true podcast. And maybe it’s because on TOPCast, it’s all very conversational, and not unlike your podcast here, it’s more of a scripted format in this 15 minute audio edition of The Lift. So will it stay around? I don’t know, and unless it becomes burdensome in some way, probably, but I don’t know if that’s gonna become the tail that wags the dog.

Rebecca: It does seem like you use the multimodal lens in thinking about online teaching and learning and the way that you designed this experience, and that there’s like text and visual in video and audio components. I mean, it feels very UDL of you.

Kelvin: Well, yes, I mean, I think that’s an occupational hazard. In fact, I reached out to, I kind of put a little advisory group together to the prototype pilot issue and asked for some feedback. And that was very scientific. I went to, like, the last 10 or 15 people that I had individual messages with on LinkedIn, and I just reached out to them and said, “Will you take a look at this and see what you think?” And one colleague pushed me a little bit on the accessibility part, even though I had done alt text and so forth, just even making more explicit, which I have mixed feelings about, but for images, in the caption for images, taking more of alt text kind of approach, even though actual alt text was already there, so that’s interesting, but it is sort of an occupational hazard in this field to think about things from a multimodal, UDL kind of a standpoint. So here’s hoping that it’s walking the talk.

John: One thing that surprised me with our podcast from the beginning is the number of people who only look at the transcripts. I never expected that. I will look at a transcript if someone referred to something that I want to look up later, or if there’s some reference that I want to go back and pay more attention to. But the advantage of podcasts for me is that you can listen while you’re doing all those things that you said, while you’re driving, while you’re doing other things where you don’t need continuous focus, but we get a lot on both. So it’s nice to have both options.

Rebecca: I though he was going to point me out as someone who likes to read transcripts.

Kelvin: I’ll tell you, I’ve been sort of a loyalist to Apple podcasts, I guess, through the years, out of habit than anything else. And when a year or two ago, Apple podcasts started just sliding in AI generated transcripts, regardless of whether the podcaster had an actual, carefully constructed transcript or not, I have found a lot of affordance in that. There’s too many times I’ve been listening to a podcast and then driving down the road, used my interface with my phone to do a voice activated voice to text text message to try to capture one little phrase at a time, like a quote from a podcast, pause the thing and then “send message to Kelvin.” “What would you like to say to Kelvin,” “from Tea for teaching podcast episode number one zillion and six quote.” The key thing to remember is comma…” You want to send it or re-record it?” “Send it.” “What did they say?” So getting to that transcript now and actually pulling it up and like, oh, that’s what they said, you know, copy, paste, put it into my notes folder. I like it.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s handy, for sure.

John: It’s really nice to have it. At the time of this recording, the most recent issue of the lift is Issue five. We’re recording a bit further ahead than we generally have in the past, so there may be more issues by the time you listen to this.

KELVON: Here’s hoping.

John: And one of the things you mentioned in there was the starfish story that we hear at so many professional development workshops about someone seeing all these dying starfish on the beach and throwing them back in and… well, I’ll let you tell the story. And one of the things you note, though, is that story is flawed in some fundamental ways. Can you share that argument with our listeners? I thought it was an interesting argument.

Kelvin: Picking up the typical story from where you left off all the starfish dead or lying there wounded or whatever on the beach, and an individual is seen hurling individual starfish back into the ocean waves, and some sort of outsider figure comes up and says, “Well, you know, you’re not making any kind of a difference,” kind of gesturing into the field of view of these countless starfish littering the beach, and then the protagonist, stoically reaches down, picks up a starfish, throws it into the ocean, and says, “Well, made a difference to that one,” and boom, that’s the mic drop punch line. And I’ve held on to that story. I have found it compelling. I have shared that in individual one-on-one conversations, in conference presentations or keynote engagements, but I’ve adopted over time in the podcast or in writing, if I’m about to put back out some sort of commonly used quote or idiom, I’ve started trying to source check myself. I mean, fact check may not be quite the right word, because I don’t know that there ever was, like a person on the beach with the starfish. Somebody devised that. And like, before I propagate this further, is that actually good? And then I was also pondering this whole idea about making a difference. And I started going there. I was going to do something with that. I mean, call it hackneyed, if you want, with that often used story illustration. And it turns out, step one, it’s wrong, ecologically, that’s bad. Don’t do it if you find yourself on a shoreline somewhere littered with starfish, the best move you can make as a human with compassion for living creatures and for the planet and its ecosystem, sadly, best I can tell… Google it, check for yourself… the best thing you can do, walk away, let everything just be the way it is. Google it, you’ll find out. And I’m like, well, dang, that messed up a perfectly good story illustration, but then I was pondering that further. And the reason I’ve held on to that illustration, personally, in so many individual conversations, is sometimes it’s what I found it most useful for is, you’ve got this internal locus of control. You can do something. And in my old institution, a couple of presidents back there were two lines that a historic president said that got woven into the fabric at the University of Central Florida, and there’s still vestiges of these today, I think. This President said, “accent on excellence, accent on the individual.” And that individual centrality thing made a difference to that one. You can’t do everything, but you can do something. That idea, I always found very salient, very powerful, and I’m like, wow. Well, that messes up everything, if it’s not a good thing to propagate. And here’s where I got to, John and Rebecca, is I think that internal locus of control thing is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for making a difference via academic Innovation, digital learning, leading any of the various important work that we aspire to in higher education. It’s necessary. You have to take responsibility for doing something in your purview. But it’s not sufficient. You will not, personally by yourself, accomplish the kind of scale of impact that is necessary, that we are aspiring to, in the, shall we say, currently fraught sector of at least American higher education. It’s going to take partnering, and it’s going to take this emphasis on the human, this emphasis on vulnerability and compromise and working together and finding common ground, and maybe be willing to set aside my priority to connect with your priority and be in service of that, because we’re going in the same direction, and that kind of a thing, that’s what’s going to be important to make a difference, and the starfish story, by itself, won’t get you there.

John: And it’s all too common for people to be working in their own silos, ignoring the fact that everyone else is having their own struggles. And by working together, the impact can be much larger. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a time in higher education where there have been so many threats to our continued existence.

Rebecca: Yeah, and I think you can find it difficult to figure out what you can do individually sometimes too. And so I think the ecosystem that you’re suggesting within an institution and across institutions is a really powerful way to think about it, rather than kind of an individual. This ecosystem model is key. I think that’s why your reflection questions were resonating with me when I was re-reading some of your not so newsletters. And that’s because I feel like right now, people feel really drained with so much going on that the conversations that I’m often having in the hallway… they don’t have any content. [LAUGHTER] It’s like, “Hi, how are you?” “Fine?” …but not really, but we’re just going to say fine, because that’s what you do, and then you kind of move forward to kind of remind us that could have more substantive conversations on a regular basis, even though we feel really drained.

Kelvin: Yeah, I think that’s a slightly troubling but cogent observation of situations across so very many of our institutions, higher ed wise.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the topics you’re hoping to… we’ve hinted at some of the ones that you’ve already talked about in your not so newsletter. But what are some of the ways that you see the not so newsletter going forward, or the kinds of things you might address?

Kelvin: Yeah, I suppose the short answer is, I really don’t know. The longer answer is I have pretty deep bench of wise word expressions, sayings, either the ones that I’ve collected or the ones that I’ve coined through my decades in K-12 education and then higher education. So I’m constantly thumbing through those. And then I guess what I look for is an intersection of wise word expression, current moment in time that we’re living through in higher ed, not so much like a discrete news item, but like dynamics, like listening to the conversations that I’m hearing at my institution, or I’m seeing on LinkedIn, or there’s several daily news feeds… higher ed related… that I scroll through, and I’m sort of like using that as a bit of a filter when it’s time to gin up the next issue. So I’m sometimes thinking like an issue or two ahead, but I try not to get too far ahead of it, and try to stay somewhat grounded in the now with an eye toward the more timeless, which I would say is the nature of those wise word expressions, but that’s a long way of saying. One, don’t know for sure, but two, everything I think so far will be in service of our collective multifaceted ability to work together in service of important, aspirational higher ed goals that serve an ever expanding, widening range of potential learners. So that’s a lot to unpack, but it’s got to line up with that, because that’s what keeps me coming back in what I hope we’re doing increasingly better job of serving those potentially wider conceptualized group of learners, not just the same students that we had last year, but how can we do better serving a wider range of students.

John: And speaking of a changing mix of students, could you talk a little bit about how your new position at Louisville differs from your prior role at UCF?

Kelvin: Yeah, happy to. I currently serve here at the University of Louisville as Vice Provost for Online Strategy and Teaching Innovation, as you said. And honestly, I was for the record, happy where I was, doing what I was doing, and who I was doing it with. And on August 30, 2022, I happened to open the email that day, but when I did, the juxtaposition of roles in that title got my attention. Not all positions that have responsibility for online learning or that have responsibility for teaching and learning centers juxtapose online strategy and teaching innovation in that way. So I was intrigued. I’ve always liked to have a kind of a foot in both of those worlds. Where I came from at UCF, there was a bit of a division, for historical reasons, between the Karen L. Smith Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and the Center for Distributed Learning. Although those organizations have worked really well for a long time, I found myself often as the little…. whatever they call, those things on the Lego bricks that allow one brick to connect to the next, those little protrusions… I found myself to be that protrusion from the Center for Distributed Learning that was always connecting with the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning. So I was always interested in that holistic work. So this is a more overarching, holistic role. But then also, of course, my former role, I was Executive Director for the Center for Distributed Learning. I had this multifaceted, but still very online, blended digital learning focus. And in that role, I reported to Vice Provost for Digital Learning, Dr. Tom Cavanagh, who is still currently my TOPCast co-host. So here I have a Vice Provost title. The organization’s quite different, a little bit smaller, more diverse mission than my former one. The institution as a whole here is about a third the size of UCF. But interestingly, both R1s, both community engaged, both in that recent Carnegie classification new description, higher access, higher earnings. Both institutions share all of those and there’s only eight institutions nationwide that share all three of those descriptors. So the nature of the work broadly is similar, and a metropolitan research university context, that’s all similar, but then the organizational context is quite different. UCF celebrated its 60th birthday after I left, and the University of Louisville claims over 225 years of history. So as you can imagine, there’s a bit of traditionalism and friction and steadiness that has both upsides and downsides when you’re engaging in academic innovation kind of work.

John: One other difference, I would think, is that UCF has long been involved with online and blended learning, and I think that’s a relatively more recent area for Louisville. Is that correct?

Kelvin: Certainly does not go back as far at U of L as it does at UCF, but there has been activity in this space for a good 20 plus years. But it certainly is some kind of a signifier that this role that I am in currently was newly conceptualized in order to be searched for. So it reflects a little bit of a new strategic focus. What else can we do in this area more thoughtfully? So we’re working on it for sure. But yes, that is absolutely true. So the first online class was taught at UCF in the summer of 1996 so for the sake of argument, call it 66 to 96 there’s 30 years. So for if we just want to be just really rough hewn about it, for nearly half of its existence, UCF has relied heavily on online, blended, and digital education. It’s a relative drop in the pan… the University of Louisville if we say 20 years and it’s 225 plus years old. I mean, that’s what, less than 10% of its history. [LAUGHTER] So that puts things in perspective, I guess.

Rebecca: Like, it’s always helpful as we’re thinking about ways to reach across universities, as we’re thinking about this ecosystem that we’re talking about earlier, to better understand how institutions are quite different from one another. And just to get a feel for institutions that have similarities and differences from your own.

John: And I think it’s really nice to see that combination of focus on teaching and learning as well as distributed learning in one location, because when they’re done separately, you often have somewhat different directions that may not always align, or a duplication of effort that could be avoided. I think a lot of institutions have been moving in that direction.

Rebecca: We always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Kelvin: What’s next? Well, I plan to see TOPCast through its 200th episode, and if Tom has his way, the occasional beyond, I hope to continue to release The Lift on a steady schedule. I’ve reached some sort of an intersection of priorities that has slowed down the current month’s release, but I’m committed to keeping that going for at least through a year. And I guess I would welcome, if you don’t mind, your listeners to check it out and send some feedback. What do you like? What do you not like? What would make it more useful as a personal resource? If you don’t mind a shout out using the URL shortening service dub, you can get to the lift on the LinkedIn newsletter platform by going to dub.sh/thelift, all lowercase, no spaces. I’d love to hear what listeners of t for teaching find. Just one and done. Just try it out. Just take a look. Pick one of the issues that you like, and shoot a little note over on LinkedIn, or hit me up on Gmail, drkelvinthompson@gmail.com. I would love to hear, “you know, I’m never coming back to this, and here’s why.” Or, “you know, it’d be a little better if you did this.” Or “I’m going to share this with five friends today.” I mean, I’d love to hear any of that. It’d be okay. Is that all right? You’re going to edit that part out, aren’t you?

John: No. In fact, we will include a link to those in the show notes as well. So if anyone didn’t quite write it down, you can always go back to the show notes for the episode and find those links to both The Lift itself as well as to the SoundCloud version of it.

Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for joining us. It’s always a pleasure to have the opportunity to talk to you.

Kelvin: Oh, likewise. I mean, you all are a delight. I continue to peruse the Tea for Teaching feed. I routinely share episodes from your podcast out through our faculty facing teaching related newsletter here and with colleagues via email and elsewhere. You all are doing great work, and people probably don’t tell you that nearly enough, but thank you.

John: Well, thank you. And we’ve often shared many episodes of TOPCast out to our faculty as well, so I’m hoping we’ll still see some more of those coming out. And one other thing we should mention is your last official episode is the one that’s going to be recorded at OLC, I believe.

Kelvin: Yes, in November of 2025 at OLC Accelerate Tom and I’ve been invited to do a plenary panel of sorts where we’re going to just do an episode. We’re calling it last call at the TOPCast Cafe, and we’re going to look back across the 10 and a half years a little bit for distilling some kind of insights, and look forward a little bit and try to have some kind of encouraging word for the community broadly. And then that session that we record, it might have some light editing on it, but it will then release in January of 2026 as TOPCast episode 200.

Rebecca: Mark your calendars.

John: Thanks again.

Kelvin: Pleasure being with you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing Assistance provided by Ryan Metzler.

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