Category: equity

428. The Science of Learning Meets AI

Posted in active learning, cognitive science, diversity, edtech, educational technology, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, feedback, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, teaching, universal design
January 14, 2026

The widespread adoption of and the rapid evolution of generative AI platforms have created substantial challenges for faculty in how we assess student learning. In this episode, Lew Ludwig and Todd Zakrajsek join us to discuss a new resource they have created that is designed to help faculty use AI to efficiently support teaching practices based on the science of learning.

Lew is a Professor of Mathematics at Denison University, where he served as Director of the Center for Learning and Teaching from 2020 to 2025. Much of his recent work has focused on innovative methods for utilizing generative AI. Todd is an Adjunct Associate Research Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from which he just retired a few months ago after 17 years. He is also the Director of the International Teaching Learning Cooperative and the Director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published six books (so far) in the past five years.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The widespread adoption of and the rapid evolution of generative AI platforms have created substantial challenges for faculty in how we assess student learning. In this episode, we explore a new resource designed to help faculty use AI to efficiently support teaching practices based on the science of learning.

[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 guests today are Lew Ludwig and Todd Zakrajsek. Lew is a Professor of Mathematics at Denison University, where he served as Director of the Center for Learning and Teaching from 2020 to 2025. Much of his recent work has focused on innovative methods for utilizing generative AI. Todd is an Adjunct Associate Research Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from which he just retired a few months ago after 17 years. He is also the Director of the International Teaching Learning Cooperative and the Director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published six books (so far) in the past five years. Welcome, Lew, and welcome back, Todd.

Lew: Thank you.

Todd: Thank you, Rebecca,

John: Our teas today are:… Lew, are you drinking tea?

Lew: I am. I’m usually a coffee drinker, but I have a lovely Cha Atiso. This is a Vietnamese artichoke tea, which a student brought back for me from the summer, and I’ve really, really been enjoying that. So that’s my tea for today.

Rebecca: What does it taste like?

Lew: It’s got a little sweetness to it, which I like. I don’t put anything in it, but I really enjoy it. And it’s supposed to be healthy, no caffeine, all that sort of stuff.

John: And Todd, are you drinking tea?

Todd: Yeah, I went with a roasted dandelion spice tea. It says detox on the package, and I can always use a good detoxing. So I’m doing that and sipping it from my favorite cup. Mmmh.

Rebecca: That’s right, the tea for teaching mug.

Todd: I have my tea for teaching mug here. I never leave home without it. Actually, I never left it home. [LAUGHTER]

John: And Rebecca?

Rebecca: I have a Swiss Breakfast tea, John.

John: Very nice… on a chilly morning here in upstate New York. And I have a ginger peach green tea today.

Todd: Wow. Quite a variety.

Rebecca: Nice, this big variety. So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your newest book project, The Science of Learning Meets AI: A Practical Faculty Guide to Purposeful Integration, Student Engagement, and Ethical Practice. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin of this book?

Lew: Yeah, sure. I can get us started on that. So as you know, Todd and I both have backgrounds in teaching centers of faculty development. And our national conference is something called POD, Professional Organizational Development Network. And in 2024 we were at that conference, and here ChatGPT had already been out for about two years, and we were still kind of struggling with the idea of, how are faculty supposed to use this? A lot of the questions we were getting is, “Hey, how can I use AI in my classroom?” And it wasn’t until this conference was up in Chicago in 2024 where we realized we were asking the wrong question. It’s not really how to use AI in the classroom, but instead, maybe we should be thinking about, why are we using AI?

Todd: Yeah, and actually, I’ll jump in too, because Lew went right to that technical part and everything. Another thing that happened, which is why I love it when people get together, is Lew asked me if I would help out or just talk to him a little bit about some of the science of learning, because he wanted to really work on this project with bringing AI into this, explaining why it’s important to use it. And I said, “Well, that’s interesting, because I just started to outline a book that I want to do on AI, and I was going to check with you about the AI part, because I got the learning part down.” [LAUGHTER] So we just said, “What the heck, we’ll do it.” And Lew didn’t know me very well at the time, so he said, “Yes.” [LAUGHTER] Anyway, we made it through. But the big thing was that we really wanted a book that would teach faculty and help them understand the learning theory behind why the learning happens and everything else, and use AI to augment that. So this isn’t like using AI to do things, it’s using AI to help us do the things that we’ve been doing.

John: You start the book by acknowledging that faculty didn’t ask for this AI disruption or for any of the evolutions of this. Why start with this instead of with excitement about AI’s potential?

Lew: Oh, it’s called learning from one’s mistakes. So again, ChatGPT came out in November of 2022, by August of 23, I remember on my campus, we had a fairly large across the board faculty meeting about AI. It was about a half-day session. So administration was there, IT was there. And as the Teaching Center Director, I gave probably a 90-minute session on, “Hey, here’s this new technology and how we might be able to use it in our classroom.” And what happened was, just by saying, “Hey, here’s how we might be able to use it,” some folks labeled me as AI pro. So I was just pro-AI, hey, you talked to Ludwig, and he’s just going to be all in on AI. And that was almost like my scarlet letter [LAUGHTER]that I was wearing around campus to some folks. So I learned from that. So any of the workshops, any of the things I do since then, I start off with this exact phrasing, just to kind of level the playing field here, I say “You didn’t ask for this. You didn’t request an unregulated, untested, and rapidly evolving technology to suddenly upend education and nearly every other sector of society.” Now, I’ve been delivering that, like I said, quite a few workshops. I did it back in August for a group of high school teachers in Richmond, Virginia. They applauded me. [LAUGHTER] So it’s just kind of getting it out there and acknowledging it that, yes, this is a disruptive tool. We kind of have to acknowledge that grief and then kind of move on from there.

Todd: Yeah, I would say too, is really, I really thought Lew had a good handle on that part of it. I wouldn’t have put that in there, quite frankly, for the book here, and Lew was pretty insistent that it go in there. But as we started talking it through, I realized I always started any COVID workshops this way. When we were doing emergency remote teaching, if you just started talking about emergency remote teaching and didn’t acknowledge just all of the stuff that happened with COVID at the time, on the number of deaths, for instance, you can’t just jump into something and ignore it. So I think that Lew had a really good point here, and then I started pulling together what I did with that, with what he was talking about. And I think the whole concept is we started thinking within the book of, how do we do this? To recognize people are grieving, that they’re struggling, and we say it’s hard that we see you there, the frustration is real. Teaching is changing, just as it did with COVID. We don’t have a choice of that, and AI isn’t going to go away, so let’s recognize what’s going on, and recognize even some of the impact of AI, and then from there, then move on with a sense of acknowledging what’s going on.

Rebecca: It’s almost like you’re modeling some good teaching practices there. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Kind of. Periodically it happens.

Lew: We try.

Rebecca: This adapt, create, embed, progression, the ACE model, is used throughout the book. Can you talk a little bit about what this looks like in practice for a faculty member who’s never used AI?

Lew: Yeah, so this work kind of, again, developed that starting point back in November of 24 after we had that initial meeting in Chicago and started to realize we needed some early wins for faculty. So we got a lot of faculty out there who are kind of hesitant about this new technology. And if you gave them something like a prompt or something that didn’t work, they’d be just like, “See, I told you, this AI thing, it’s a disruptive thing. So we’ve been workshopping this quite a bit early January onward, and refining the model. Originally, you ready for this? It was, instead of adapt, create, embed, it was improve, create, integrate, which, as an acronym, is icky. [LAUGHTER] We didn’t think that would land very well, so we went with ACE instead. So for example, the adapt, that’s kind of the easiest win. So what you do is, you take an existing assignment, you have that assignment that it’s a big project, but for some reason, it just doesn’t land with students. They always hand in something a little bit different than what you asked for. Well, that assignment’s begging to be TILTed, right? So Mary-Ann Winkelmes has this idea of transparency in learning and teaching, and it’s a technique that you can do for your assignment to make sure that your students understand why they’re actually doing the assignment. And it’s a kind of a three-step process. And AI is great at TILTing your assignment, and faculty members can take an existing assignment that they have. They’re experts on that assignment. AI can help them TILT that with this framework, and then they can see how that might better fit into their language for their course, and help improve what their students are doing. And the TILT framework has been really good. It kind of raises all student boats. But in particular, it does well for underrepresented and first-gen students do exceptionally well with this. So again, just kind of an early win with the adapt model.

Todd: Should mention quickly that we kind of started out and we based a lot of this on Ruben Puentedura’s model of SAMR, which is the substitution, augmentation, modification, redefinition for all of technology. If you have any new technology out there, you started with substituting it. How can we do this instead? You can augment it. And that’s a really interesting model. Didn’t quite work with what we were after. And so Lew had lots of workshops he had been doing. And so we kind of used that as a foundation. But as Lew just pointed out, the adapt, which would be similar to that original substitution, is to get you rolling. And I’m going to go ahead, Lew and take I’ll take the other two real quickly. So next is create. And essentially, it’s looking at how you can do something that you really couldn’t do before. And there’s lots of things that are out there that we could use for this one. We’ll talk a little bit more about those, probably later on, as we’re looking at some specific examples. But when you think about what you can do and couldn’t do before, one quick thing is a daughter, one time, was struggling with something, and she said, “Can you help me?: And I said, “I’m busy right now. I can help you a little bit.” 15 minutes later, I said, “I can help you now.” She said, “Oh, took care of it.” I said, “How’d you do that?” She says, “Oh, I just got on a group, a small online group, and then we solved it together.” And I said, “Who was it?” And this was years ago. And she said, “Oh, there was a student from Germany, one from South America, somebody from Nebraska, and myself.” That was never possible before. And so many things in AI do things like that. They’ll set up things we could never do before. So the “create” is, how can we do things different? And then once you’ve adapted it and created it, the next thing is, just embed it. Just make it part of the regular aspects of your course. How do you do that? And what we like to point out over and over again is that, you do this wherever you’re at. If you’re just getting started, you just adapt some things you’re doing. And that’s where Lew is really good at setting some of those things up. If you’re a little bit nervous, just take something you’ve always done, do it with AI, do a little bit better, faster, and then just get started, but don’t get overwhelmed with it.

Todd: And the other thing about doing with something you’ve already done is then you’re the expert, and you can critique what AI is doing for you. I wouldn’t go off and learn a brand new subject you learn using the AI, because I’d have no idea. But again, coming from that wheelhouse of your own expertise, don’t forget you are the expert with the content as well as your students and context. So keep that in mind whenever you’re dealing with AI.

John: And that example you use of the TILT model is a good one. I’ve given workshops to faculty about it, and a lot of people were reluctant to put in the effort to make all those changes. But when you show them how AI can do that, or better yet, if you share perhaps a prompt, or if you share a GPT or a chatbot tool that they can plug in their assignments to and their learning objectives, and it can do it for them, or at least give them a starting point on it, it makes it so much more likely that people are going to do that. So you talked a little bit about the ACE model, which is used throughout the book. But could you tell us a little bit about the organization of the book?

Lew: Yeah, sure. So the book’s kind of broken up into three parts. The first part, we call it “Creating your own Gen AI roadmap.” And again, chapter one, you didn’t ask for this, but here it is. So just kind of, again, acknowledging that situation that we find ourselves in and how to move forward with it. Then in chapter two, we start talking about what it means to think about shifting our teaching in the world of generative AI, so the idea of being transparent with our students and how we’re using it and setting up good communication with them, and then also the idea of as faculty members, as we’re embracing this, we really have to be curious and flexible as we work with this technology. We’re always pushing our students to take risks, be flexible, be curious. Well, guess what, that shoe is going to now fit on our foot as we try to move forward with this model.

Todd: So that kind of got things up and running, and then we kind of ran right into the learning aspect of it. Just to give you an idea of the book, I guess is probably the easiest way to do this is. Chapter four is on universal design. I’ve been a long time advocate of universal design, and I think AI can be now done to do things that were really challenging before. So we did dedicate an entire chapter to universal design. Then chapter five, we really thought community was important. So chapter five is about building classroom community and trust, looking at belonging, engagement, and integrity, kinds of issues. Chapter six comes into backward design, a huge aspect of teaching and learning, kind of knowing where you’re going as your goal. And then chapter seven is looking more at learning science of cognitive load, attention, spacing, interleaving, retrieval practice. And that’s the “building the foundation section.” And the last section of the book, section three, is for kind of deeper learning. We looked at some things about teaching and learning that just we know works well. So chapter eight is guiding students from novice to expert. We put together in that section zones of proximal development, scaffolding, and the gradual release of responsibility as ways of helping students kind of go into deeper aspects of learning. Chapter nine is on strategic learning. So we looked at transparency, TILT, cognitive apprenticeships, metacognition and those types of issues. And then we wrapped it up with chapter 10 of persistence and motivation. So there we pulled together the concept of self efficacy, growth mindset and self-determination theory. So the chapters have two or three strong learning principles to them, but they’re put together in ways that not only help explain the individual things, but also overall this concept, like persistence and what kinds of things go into that. And then the last thing I’ll say, since I’m on a roll right now, is overall, I think we really thought it to be helpful, repetition is just helpful for learning, right? We know that. And so we did is we built a book that has strong repetition. So chapter after chapter, we basically started with chapter four, and then we go all the way through chapter 10, and it’s set up so that there’s always an opening story or anecdote to set it up, which we’d want to do for just getting the learning focus there. Then from the model, there’s an improve activity, and then we look at the science components, and from there we might be looking at metacognition or Bloom’s taxonomy or something. So that comes into the second two parts of the model. Here we have a create and then embed, those activities are in there. And then we talk about the ACE model, and we have more activities that come into there. Then we look at risks and guardrails. And again, we’re going to acknowledge everything has risks to it. We’re not going to just pretend like it’s all great. And then we have a conclusion, pull it together, and we finished every chapter with discussion questions and reflection questions. So if you’re a faculty developer and you want to use this as a book group, for instance, we’ve got your discussion questions already built in, but for having faculty work through it, there’s reflection questions in there. The last thing I’ll mention is that we talked really extensively about how to cite this stuff, big APA kind of person, but we really wanted this readable, and so we went with a model where we put everything in as end notes, so as you read through it, you don’t get the standard citations with dates all the way through it, it just reads like a novel, almost, and I think it’s really easy to read. So you don’t have to read it cover to cover, although you should, [LAUGHTER] maybe three times. You can just go through and pick out what you like, but if you do go through, we’ve actually built it so that you start with simple kinds of examples and move to more complex ones. And Lew is masterful at putting together how to like, ask questions and do prompts and specifically with a separate font in there, we just have paste this in and add your components, and it spits out the answer. Pretty cool.

Lew: So what Todd’s explaining there is, we have a lot of different techniques. We have things called activities as well as examples. So each chapter has six activities, which are kind of page-long discussions of how you might use AI. And it’ll start off with some prompting, like he said, in that different font, but you put it in your context. We don’t do this: “Oh, a biologist would do this. Now you do it for yourself.” You actually, in the context of this thing, put in your information so you’re directly dealing with it. So we have, like I said, six of those for seven chapters. So 42 of those things. Each one could be a workshop. And then also we have smaller examples for seven chapters, we have 12 smaller examples, which is another 84 prompts. Those aren’t prompts, those are just more ideas. But Todd mentioned this idea of meta prompting. We give you a way to turn those examples into a prompt for yourself. So you’re using AI to create your prompt for you, and I think it’s called meta prompting, so that’s what he was referring to there.

Rebecca: There’s a lot written about the science of learning and Todd, obviously, you’ve written some books on the subject. How did you decide what science of learning concepts to include?

Todd: I just put a whole bunch of stuff in there. And then Lew started saying, “Nope, nope, nope.” [LAUGHTER] No, we got along great on these things. It basically boiled to Lew does tons of workshops, I do workshops, I think I’ve been at 300 campuses so far. So I looked through the different presentations I’ve given, and when things kind of hit and when they didn’t hit. Cognitive load is something a lot of people just don’t quite understand, and is a huge foundation of learning, because within cognitive load, you’ve got automaticity and schema activation and all kinds of different things that are practicing retrieval kinds of things. So I just went back to the warehouse of stuff and picked the things that worked, which is what I still think is really, really valuable about the book, is that these are things that work, and it’ll help explain them as you go. Big things like the metacognition, Bloom’s Taxonomy, cognitive load, automaticity, practice, retrieval, interleaving, the kinds of things we’ve heard. And it was hard, I will say, Rebecca, it was really hard. There’s a lot out there. I mean, obviously I got what is it a 270 page book on learning. So how do you just fold in some of that? And so, it doesn’t have everything, but I think it has the big things.

John: So you mentioned before that AI allows us to do things that we couldn’t easily do before. Could you give us an example and walk us through that in terms of how AI could be used to create learning activities that could not be done as easily in the past.

Lew: Sure, individualization of instruction. I’m at a pretty small school here at Denison, but I could imagine, wow, what if I was teaching a class of 400. So I might end my class here at my small school with, you know, a muddiest point, I get 20 responses. I look those over, what did students struggle with that day? And then next class, I can kind of address that. Imagine if you had 400 students, what could you do with that? Well, now, with AI, you can take this classroom assessment technique of muddiest moment and, on the spot, have students type their prompt into, say, a Google form or something like that, and as maybe the students are off working on some kind of project or discussion together, within two or three minutes, you could use AI to organize those muddiest points and give me the top three things that these 400 students are struggling with, something that was just was not even feasible before. So I think you know, at scale, this thing can be really useful for those types of examples. And with regards to CATs, the classroom assessment techniques, Todd’s got a book of like, 50 of these things, right? So there’s so many things that you can kind of do on the fly that AI can then help you with, kind of the managerial stuff, just the paperwork thing of keeping track of that stuff so you can respond in the moment for what your students are doing.

Todd: And Lew, I appreciate you mentioning that book, it’s interesting, got me thinking real quickly here. So that book is Classroom Assessment Techniques, which not too many years ago was like the standard. Everybody had a copy of this thing, and they did because the first edition was 1988 I believe it was, second edition was 93 though, and in 93 was right about the time we started talking about learning versus teaching, and how would you know if students are learning? And along comes Angelo and C ross, their book was out, I guess, already, and so it explained it. I mentioned this quickly because I then worked with Tom Angelo to do the updated version, the third edition, which is now out 30 years after the second edition. And the second edition was still selling, but we were removing things like “hand out papers to the students, have them respond on the muddiest point, and then take them home, but make sure you don’t ask questions that you don’t have time to respond to. Don’t ask elaborate things because it will take too much time.” Lots of stuff about CATs was about being careful not to overwhelm yourself. And if you think about that in the old days, that’s what you do. Pieces of paper were handed to, you’d read through them and everything. So we took out things like “share your results on the overhead protector,” and those are gone, and then we replace them with things like Lew was saying is, just put your students into a small think-pair-share, have them respond to this thing with a PollEverywhere or something, and then while they’re talking, then come up with the four muddiest things going on, and then teach those in the second half of class. And so, all of those classroom assessment techniques that we’ve been using for 30 years can now be made easier with AI. So I’m really excited about this.

Rebecca: You mentioned earlier about the chapter on Universal Design for Learning, and I know you’ve been a long time advocate, Todd. Can you talk a little bit about how faculty can use AI to design courses that are better for diverse learners and really have kind of access in mind, rather than retrofitting accommodations.

Todd: Yeah. So number one, I think the thing to point out here is, so I teach, this Lilly teaching conferences. They’ve been around for a long time. There’s different types of sessions that I’ll include in the program, and some of the sessions, and I talk to the presenters about this all the time, some of the sessions are just hot topics that you know are just going to go: engaging students in asynchronous classes, it’s going to fill a room. How to do active learning strategies, going to fill a room. They always have. Sometimes you have topics, though, that you put on the program because you have to talk about them. And if you don’t put them on the program, even though they’re not popular, then it doesn’t get picked up. And I remember putting sessions in the late 1990s, early 2000 about diversity that would have four people in a room, and individuals would say “there’s only four people in there.” And I’d say, “We’re still putting it on the program.” UDL was another one, anything on universal design, I can tell you I’d put in the smallest room in the conference, because it would be a great session, but it would draw like seven people. And one of the reasons it didn’t draw many people, and quite frankly, across all of higher education, people might love the concept, it’s really hard to do. If we’re going to do things like multiple means of expression, which is a key factor of universal design, it can’t just say that you can share your results in one way. What if you’re not good at putting text together, but you really have the idea down. So maybe you create a video, or maybe you have a play, or maybe you get in small group and have a discussion. Multiple means of demonstrating the information, so presentation, how do I explain this in a way that people can get it that’s always been hard, it is now being made really easy because we can go to AI with the correct prompts, and we can come up with multiple ways of expression, multiple ways of presentation. Lew was talking about having a class of 400 with the students in there. You could say to the students: “Here’s what I want to do. We’re teaching metacognition. Everybody think of something you love to do now, type into AI. I love to blank. And I want to learn more about metacognition so that I could explain it to my friend.” So I could type in I love long distance bicycling, and I want to learn metacognition. Rebecca might put in that she loves rock climbing. John might put in like he likes baking, and Lew might probably put in there he likes street fighting. [LAUGHTER] So you put those prompts in there, and then what pops out is everybody in the class gets to learn it in their own… I mean, what could be more universal than that? And so I’m just really excited about it. And we did the whole chapter, and Lew and I talked about it, and I think at the beginning I wasn’t even going to do a whole chapter, and he said, “Yeah, we need to do a whole chapter.” And so I think AI will open the gate so that people can finally do universal design in a way that’s meaningful without overwhelming them.

John: Faculty have been overwhelmed, first with COVID and now with AI, and many other things that are happening externally. How does your book address the reality that faculty don’t have enough time or energy to learn a whole new technology on top of everything else they’ve had to learn in the last several years.

Lew: Fair point. I think the thing we need to start with is the idea that we want to be careful and not this chase the technology, because if you do that’s going to make things worse, you’re going to get frustrated. What you want to do is try to use the tool to make things better. So I often talk about there’s 2, t-w-0, too many shiny objects out there. And one of the ideas with the too many shiny objects is there’s all these little prompts that people: try this, try that, try that, and that’s really frustrating for faculty, because it’s just a little bit beyond their skill set of what they want to do. It’s a biology example, and they have to bring it down into what they want to do. The other thing is, with the shiny object, is the idea of treating AI like this big shiny hammer, and then you’re running around trying to find all these curricular nails to try to beat down of how I’m going to use AI to do that, that is just such the wrong way to address AI, letting the technology lead first, you’re just going to make things worse and you’re going to stress yourself out even more. So what we want to do is we want to go back to basics. We want to think about backward design: at the end of this course, what should my students know? What should they understand? Then how am I going to assess whether they understand that? And then finally, how would I go about teaching that? And that’s where we decide whether AI might fit in or not. So again, it’s not the idea of trying to get AI in the classroom. I think as faculty members, we want to be really careful about how do we use it to be a creative assistant for us and kind of level up and improve our existing teaching practices. And the thing is, the book, all these teaching practices that we’re doing, these are well reasoned research techniques that have been laid out in chapters four through 10, backward design, ZPD, TILT, all the fun letters, UDL, all that stuff. But again, it’s trying to use that in a practical way, trying to develop your teaching skills more, and then just using AI as the tool to help you with that guidance along the way.

Todd: I wrote an article years ago. I was like, we just want to be well, that’s all we want. [LAUGHTER] So this concept of what we’re doing, if we think about what we do as faculty members out, as Lew pointed out, we’re chasing things a lot of times, and that’s just a problem. And this goes back to… remember when clickers came out, student response systems. Everybody’s like, “Oh, I want to use a student response system because my colleague’s using it,” and as faculty development directors, we are constantly trying to talk people out of using technology unless they actually needed it. Backward design. Why do you want to use it? Student response systems are always fun, because it’s like, I want to use student response systems and my friends and I would say, “Okay, so why?” “So we can gather student responses” and I’d say, “Okay, you know, you could just have them raise hands. Like, how many of you think this?” They say, “Well, yeah, but I want to know like anonymous.” I say, “Okay, have them close their eyes and raise their hands well.” “But I want to tally them.” “Alright, well have them close their eyes, raise their hands and then count them.” I mean, these things are not necessary. But then when they start to say, “Okay, but I want to know some qualitative aspects, what are they thinking and why?” Now we can use the technology. So I think that’s helpful. And so when you go back and look at what really takes time in teaching, those types of issues do, I can’t, like have everybody talk about muddiest point, because I don’t have time to read through those. Now you do, because AI can skim through those quickly for you. If you’re prep timed, you put in exhausted in there. I was exhausted because when I taught history and systems of psychology the first time, I would be up from 10 o’clock at night till two in the morning putting together a lecture. And I knew the stuff generally, but I had to go look for it. But I spent all my time looking. I was looking for the information. Then I’d find it, and then I would embed it. With AI I’m going to get the same kind of information, I’m just going to get it really faster, and because I can pull that together with the knowledge base I have, then I can put it out there. So prep time is going to drop, grading time is going to drop in terms of figuring out how to read through these types of things. Underpaid, by the way, I think you might have mentioned that one, just so we can’t do a lot about that. So sorry, yeah, for the underpaid part. But I want to finish with one quick thing here. There’s a book that I did actually get accepted for publication that I have never written. The contract was signed in 1994 and the reason I mentioned this is that what I wanted to do was take a stats book, but I thought we’re teaching statistics without kind of framework. So what if we took the old psych studies that were really the cool studies, took the data set, retrofit a data set basically that would give you the same data. Have students analyze the data, come up with what they’ve got, and then talk about what the data means, and then explain to them how that fits into like, that was the Bobo doll experiment, where Bandura had models hit a bobo doll, a blow up doll, and then they give the same doll to kids and see if the kids would do the same thing. You could replicate these studies while learning statistics. And I was told I couldn’t write that because most faculty members teaching statistics don’t know those studies. And so at the time, there was no way to do it. Now, with AI, you actually could, it would be very easy to say, I want to know more about Bandura’s Bobo doll study. And so I think that’s some changes that we’re going to have that are really going to be helpful.

Rebecca: One of the things that you’ve both underscored is leaning on the faculty member’s expertise because they can validate what’s coming through the AI tools. [LAUGHTER] So you’re not worried about the reliability, because you have that expertise, and the things that you’re suggesting people use are relying on that expertise to some extent.

Todd: Yeah, and that’s the thing. They’ve got the expertise. How can we help them with it? And help them by putting together a book that’s very modular. You can just go through and work through these things. Actually, the activities are set up, and Lew did this, I thought it was fantastic, they’re put in boxes. You could pull the whole thing out and make a workshop out of it. Very, very easy to pull this stuff out and do that, but by making these things very consistent, we know that reduces cognitive load, which is going to reduce some of that exhaustion and extra work.

Lew: And the other thing is, the examples were set up in a way, again, that they relate directly to what you’re doing in your classroom, your assignment, your example, not something that, again, the cognitive load that you have to translate from somebody else’s existing example. And again, that’s one of the neat things that AI allows you to do. Because now, instead of me saying in a book, do this example, I can put a little bracket there and say, insert your example from your discipline here, and all of a sudden you have individualized learning, individualized application for the teaching technique that you’re trying to do using the power of AI to do that.

John: And one of the things I’ve seen is that we have a lot of people attend workshops on AI just to learn how they can block it and how they can ignore it. But when the focus is on activities that actually allow them to do their work more productively or more easily or more efficiently, they get a bit more excited about it and then start thinking about how they could be using it to improve their courses and to improve their lives in general. And I think that’s a nice way of introducing people to AI who are initially somewhat resistant to it.

Lew: Yeah, it’s critical. I don’t think you can walk into a classroom and say, okay, students, we’re going to use AI today without understanding it yourself. And you hit the nail on the head there, the best way to do that is to do something that you are the expert in, and then learn to explore this technology on your own. It’s going to take a couple years for us to kind of get used to what’s going on. I think in a few years, we’ll be ready to think about how we might use this with students and things like that. But as a faculty writ large, we’re going to have to have a better understanding ourselves of just how to use those tools. And I think to your point about students misusing it and things, we can now have better conversations with them if we better understand how to use the tools ourselves for our own work.

Todd: And how people learn. [LAUGHTER] So we have tht published in the book too. That’s what it does. It helps you understand how these processes work, and so you learn about things like cognitive load. So then you can not teach cognitive load, but using that, build assignments that have lower cognitive load. That was one of the things that Lew came up… I love that one assignment that you came up with, Lew, is basically it’s you load the assignment in and says, “Where are students going to have high cognitive load in terms of really struggling with this assignment? And then AI says, “Oh, they’re going to stumble here, here and here.” And then you start rewriting it. It’s not a lot of extra work for you, and it helps the students. You don’t have to go through examples and have all those students lined up outside your door in office hours, saying, “I don’t understand why this thing works.” And so yeah, I think it’d fantastic.

Rebecca: I appreciate the idea of meeting people where they’re at, for sure. You mentioned something about a couple of years, maybe we’ll be ready to really integrate it with student learning. In five years, maybe, what does good teaching with AI look like?

Todd: This is kind of a fun one. I actually was asked to do a workshop recently that they were looking for a speaker, and they said they were interviewing different people, and they said, “We just want somebody come in and talk to us about what teaching will look like in 5 to 10 years.” I said, “If somebody tells you that they know what teaching would look like in 5 to 10 years, I would not ask them to give that presentation.” Because I don’t know, we used to talk five years out. Tom Angelo’s book with CATs was good for 20 years and still kind of worked. That stuff’s not going to handle anymore, because just in the last three to four years. Can you imagine, just before AI took off, go back just a few years and predict that it would look like this? So I don’t think we have a clue about what overall it’s going to look like. I do think we can look at some trends, though, and we can look at some directions we’re taking, because we can’t just throw our hands up and say “we don’t know,” but we want to be careful about what it’s going to be and it’s just going to be difficult, but there’s lots of good stuff coming out. And I’m going to actually ask Lew to do this, because earlier today he was explaining to me an article he’s reading. I think this stuff is fascinating that’s coming out.

Lew: Sure, I’ll jump in. So one of the things, not only do I keep an eye on higher ed and what’s going on with AI, but also the K through 12 space, and I follow a lot of folks on substack, it’s interesting. I think a lot of the discourse right now is going on in substack, as far as with AI and teaching and learning things. But anyway, there’s a fellow I’m going to try to pronounce his name, Nick Potkalitsky from Ohio, and he’s working with our Ohio Public Schools and writing about that. So the state of Ohio has mandated that by July 1, 2026 all school systems are supposed to have some kind of AI policy in place. So Nick is working with some of the larger school systems, Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland and things like that. And in this article he talked about on substack, he’s like, “Listen folks, this is going to be a three to five year rebuild. This is not going to be a quick policy fix. Rebuild means rethinking instruction, assessment, and curriculum, basically from the ground up. And how might we support teachers to make that happen and things like that. But teachers clearly need to be in that conversation. They need to be in that room.” This is the K through 12 space, and I think that’s only going to translate to higher ed as well. So the sooner faculty can get out there and start engaging in this technology and seeing what it works for them, then they will be able to kind of think down the road of how that’s going to affect their students in their classroom.

Todd: We have an epilogue in the book we did too after chapter 10, there’s a section in terms of what we think is coming along. And I just want to add one more quick thing here, when I think about what good teaching is, throughout my career… so I started teaching in 1984 so I’ve been teaching for a minute… and the concept here is that throughout all of that time, when I think about things I wanted to do, and what frustrated me were things that I couldn’t do because I didn’t have time or I didn’t have a way to do them. Universal design was just one example of that, but lots of things. With 400 students, I would love to ask them an essay question, but there was no way to look at that, even to get a sense of what they were writing. I would like to put students in small groups and looked at multiple versions of what they were talking about. There’s so many things out there. And now, as I start looking at what the future of teaching might look like, it’s kind of like one after another we just remove those barriers. So I don’t know what it will look like, but I know it will look better because it is removing things that we can’t do. And I will just end with my chunk of saying this is that we so quickly, when this came out, went right to cheating. Just immediately, the first articles out were, how are we going to stop students from cheating? How are we going to stop them? Students were cheating before AI came along. Don McCabe did a lot of work on this, and the proportion of students cheating in some way was off the chart. It made it easier, no doubt about that, and it does create a real problem, because if students can just jump in and do AI, then there’re many that will do that. But I don’t think we have to go there. And Lew and I talked a lot about this too, is that we shouldn’t just go there. We should start looking at opportunities. And I just talked to someone the other day who said, like, “How are we going to know when we can fully trust AI when it gives us an answer?” And that’s the kind of stuff that just drives me nuts, because when we talked about hallucinations, and so many faculty immediately say, “Oh, I put that in and it made a mistake.” So do I, sometimes. There are times when I make mistakes. I’ve heard my colleagues say stuff and I say, “That’s not true.” And so it’s no different than humans in that respect. We’re going to be able to trust it when we can look at it and we know it’s right, but it is getting better all the time. And Lew said it earlier in this discussion we’ve had here today too, is we can’t focus on what it was. We have to focus on what it can be. And I think looking forward for teaching, there’s some really cool stuff coming.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that you’re highlighting, both in your book and how you responded, is it remains anchored in the science of learning and just how we’re using the technology, and things might shift, but if we keep focusing on good teaching and learning practices [LAUGHTER] and just get them better, it’s not a surprise.

Lew: Well, it’s interesting, especially at the higher ed. We’re all trained in a very specific discipline, a very specific area. We’re experts in that field. We were never trained to teach, or very few of us maybe had that one course as we were TAs or something like that. And again, what the AI is allowing us to do is to further our expertise and our teaching and to kind of push the boundaries where we just didn’t have that training before. So I think, as Todd pointed out, I think there’s going to be a lot of opportunities just to make things better, hopefully.

Todd: Before we wrap up this question too, I’m just going to kind of put a charge out there, because Lew mentioned a little bit earlier, but in the model we have for adapt and stuff, for those of you who are listening, if you haven’t done it yet, just try dumping one of your assignments in for a topic or an area that you know students struggle with a little bit put into the AI. And the book’s got some examples on how to do this, but you could just say, “Where will the students struggle with this?” When I teach statistics, distribution of sample means, always give them fits. It took me years to figure out how to get around that, but if I was a brand new teacher and never taught before, I could put distributional sample means in there and say, Where will my students struggle? And it will tell you, here’s some places. And then, if you want to set that off to the side and then teach it and see where they struggled and make a comparison. And if it kind of lines up a little bit, you know it’s a gateway to kind of figuring out where the problems are going to be before they emerge. Wouldn’t that be cool?

John: So this is the first time you’ve worked together on a project like this. Could you talk a little bit about the working relationship and how that evolved?

Todd: Yeah, let me jump in there real quickly. Number one is writing a book is hard. I mean, it is really, really hard. And AI actually has helped us out with this too. So I wrote a book, this New Science of Learning first edition took two and a half years to write that thing. This book was nowhere near that, six, seven months, and we put a lot of time and energy into it. But the point is, it’s hard. Working with somebody is even harder because now you got to talk about what you’re doing and look at different points of view and everything else. And I think what was really cool with the way Lew and I kind of set it up is that we were coming from different directions. I had the learning theory. He was coming in from the AI, I would write a bunch of stuff, and he’d say, that’s really cool about all that metacognition. Maybe we can change it from like 3000 words down to, I think, 42, one time. And I said, I’m not explaining metacognition in 42 words. And then he gave me like 150 so we had to compromise and go through that. I would just say, working with him, he gets stuff done fast. He is really, really good at things in terms of understanding AI component. His prompting was amazing. I don’t know he’s a little mathematician-ey for me sometimes, but, you know, it was alright working with him. So all in all it was a positive experience. And I think Lew would say the same thing. So what’s the next question? [LAUGHTER]

Lew: No, it was a lot of fun. I really appreciated, as you’ve already mentioned, Todd is a very prolific author, so he was able to help us navigate all of those rough and challenging waters. So I was so much appreciative. But I think we complemented each other well, as far as what we brought to the table, and it’s exactly you know, what the book needed. And in particular, I remember Todd that GLCA, the Great Lakes College Association talk that you gave, what was the title of that? You remember something about neurodiverse learners?

Todd: It was basically how AI can help neurodiverse learners to be better learners. The title is way better than that.

Lew: Right, and Todd, he graciously used himself as an example, I will say. So a lot of things made sense to me [LAUGHTER] after that presentation Todd, [LAUGHTER] I’ll just leave it at that.

Todd: So, let me just say this. Yeah, I explained a little bit about ADHD and some of the characteristics of people who have ADHD, like time blindness, where you think something’s gonna take 40 minutes, but you don’t have a clue? Might be 10 minutes. Might be 17 hours. Who knows. You set up your task list, but you’ve never, ever finished a to-do list. I have never finished to-do list. And yeah, I went through all of those types of things and a couple of other things that I kind of struggle with. And then Lew when we finished, he says, it’s been great working with you, but I’m not sure if I’d heard that presentation first I would have signed the contract. [LAUGHTER] Well, you did it.

Lew: No, it was fine. It was fine.

Rebecca: So Todd, some of our long-term listeners might be curious what role opera played in this book. Didn’t you listen to a lot of opera last time?

Todd: Yeah, you know what? Let’s just throw this in there real quickly, because this is part of the ADH stuff that I’m learning, to whatever extent this fits in with this whole interview here. So ADHD is one of those things that, much like dealing with gluten intolerance and several other things, people think, if you’ve really got it, you must have known it your whole life. There are people who find out later in life that they have this thing. I always knew that kind of general things with ADHD which always struggled with a little bit. And I knew I had some of it. But, I mean, I was 60 years old when I was diagnosed, and so that concept there is suddenly I started to realize and read bunch of books about things like time blindness and some other things, but I had a terrible time writing. And a person, Tamara Rosier, who wrote a fantastic book, Your Brain’s Not Broken. It’s been reviewed in the New York Times and stuff, she said, “listen to opera, like, crank it up. Don’t do ear damage, but crank it up and do that while you’re writing.” And I said, “that will never work, because I have to have it quiet.” And she said, “Just try it.” And I put opera on and cranked it up, and I churned out work like I’d never turned it out in my life. And she pointed out to me that my brain’s always looking for stuff. Part of it would settle on that, and then it just kind of left this focus for the rest. Still had to have absolute quiet when I read. But for writing, that worked. I got put on some ADHD medicine, and two days after I started the medicine, I cannot listen to anything while I write. [LAUGHTER] To me, that’s fascinating, because what it now means is my brain’s actually kind of slowed down enough that that becomes a distraction. But that to me as a cognitive person, that differentiation is fascinating.

Rebecca: That is fascinating,

John: And that’s a nice preview of our next podcast that will be coming out next week. We’re talking to Karen Costa about ADHD and her experiences with that.

Todd: She’s really good.

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

Lew: So I’m a mathematician by training, and I was just at a recent large gathering of many of our professional organizations, and for years now, they’ve been calling for, especially in like the high school setting, that we need to teach more statistics, data analytics, modeling, in other words, creating mathematical pathways, kind of beyond the calculus curriculum. The rub is, is that the way folks are trained, they’re basically trained for the calculus curriculum and not these other things. So what I’m doing is, I’m actually working with some organizations like Math for America to consider how we might take frameworks to increase the number of teachers that were able to develop these courses in these different areas. So what we’re doing is we’re looking at something I like to call AI-assisted retooling, so teachers are learning new content alongside an AI partner to expand their mathematical pathways. So, that’s kind of a really exciting thing that I’m starting to work with. We got a few case examples that we’ve been doing. I’ve been a case study myself of doing that. So, I’m really excited about that. And of course, you know, I’m continuing to work with teaching centers on workshops and things around the book.

Todd: Nice. For me, so I got another book started, because why not? These are always fun. This particular one’s going to be different, though. So I’ve probably said about as much as I can in terms of some of the teaching tips and kinds of things we do. I really think that what’s going to happen pretty soon is there’s so much stuff coming out with AI, real life stuff is going to become something I think people are going to cherish. So the project I’m working on right now is looking more at how I’ve taught in different aspects of it, but what it really is going to boil down to are things that I experienced in the classroom. They’re really kind of unique, interesting things, and then how it played out and how it could be different. And so I had a student one time have a grand mal seizure in my class. And the quick example here is I quickly ran down to a nursing station. It was just around the corner. I ran over there, got somebody, brought them back, and the nurse came back, and we came into the classroom. And I, right now, would tell you… that was my first year of teaching that happened… I would never leave a classroom when an emergency is going on. I should have said to somebody, “Hey, go to the nursing station.” So what I want to do is talk a little bit about what I’ve done, some of the ways I’ve done it, how I would have done it differently, and then how that ties into learning and different aspects. So I really want to make more of a personal story. I don’t know if anybody will be interested in it, but, you know, we’ll give it a try.

Rebecca: Sounds like an interesting book. I’d read it.

Todd: Good. I just sold one. Oooh.

Rebecca: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

John: Maybe two. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Yeah, maybe two.

Todd: No worries, but thank you, appreciate that.

Rebecca: People have anxiety about, like, what if X, Y and Z happens in my class, and hearing personal stories about how those sorts of things have been addressed and strategies for addressing them, I think eases some worry for folks, so it could fill a gap.

Todd: Yeah, I appreciate you saying that, and I think one of the big ones is that it’s been about 40 years of teaching, and the 40 years of teaching, I think the framework I’m gonna go with, I’ve made almost every mistake you can make, and I still am seen as kind of a person who’s written these books. I do know a lot about teaching, and I’ve learned a lot about it, but you don’t become a better teacher without making mistakes along the way. I don’t think anybody can. And so I’ve done that. And I probably should point out, too, as Lew said, I run around some campuses. I love meeting people and going to campuses. I’ll still keep doing that.

Lew: So Todd, three years ago, I did a column for the MAA, it’s the Mathematical Association America. It’s called Still Learning From My Misstakes. And mistakes was spelled with two S’s, anyway, but yeah, exactly that, that idea of, I think, showing your vulnerability, especially at the part in the career that he’s at, like, oh, Todd Zakrajsek does everything perfect. I think peeling back the curtain and showing the mistakes that we made for the folks who are coming up, that is so refreshing to see that and what we did well and what we didn’t do well, and then kind of examples of moving that forward. So yeah, maybe three books, you might sell three. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Definitely worth the investment now. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Lew, that will cover my next tea. [LAUGHTER] But thank you, appreciate that.

Rebecca: Well, thank you both for joining us and for sharing your work.

Lew: Thank you so much. Appreciate it. It was fun.

Todd: Appreciate the opportunity.

John: Well, thank you.

[MUSIC]

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.

[MUSIC]

415. One Classroom at a Time

Posted in accessibility, assessment, authentic learning, diversity, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, growth mindset, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, retrieval practice, teaching
October 15, 2025

Students have varied levels of preparation for traditional types of classes and assessments used in colleges. In this episode, David Gooblar joins us to discuss a variety of instructional strategies that we can adopt to help all students succeed.

David is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the creator of Pedagogy Unbound, and the author of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. His most recent book, One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable, was released in August 2025 by Harvard University Press.

Show Notes

  • Gooblar, D. (2025). One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable. Harvard University Press.
  • Gooblar, D. (2019). The missing course: Everything they never taught you about college teaching. Harvard University Press.
  • Cohen, G. L., Steele, C. M., & Ross, L. D. (1999). The mentor’s dilemma: Providing critical feedback across the racial divide. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 25(10), 1302-1318.
  • Yeager, D. S., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., … & Cohen, G. L. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 804.
  • Canning, E. A., White, M., & Davis, W. B. (2024). Growth mindset messages from instructors improve academic performance among first-generation college students. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 23(2), ar14.
  • Elizabeth Canning (2021). Faculty Mindset. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 212. November 3.

Transcript

John: Students have varied levels of preparation for traditional types of classes and assessments used in colleges. In this episode, we explore a variety of instructional strategies that we can adopt to help all students succeed.

[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 David Gooblar. He is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the creator of Pedagogy Unbound, and the author of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching. His most recent book, One Classroom at a Time: How Better Teaching Can Make College More Equitable, was released in August 2025 by Harvard University Press. Welcome back, David.

David: Thank you so much. I’m very excited to talk with you today.

John: We’re very happy to be able to talk with you again. Our teas today are:… David, are you drinking any tea?

David: I am. I’m drinking an I love lemon.

Rebecca: I have a Jasmine green today,

John: And I have a tea in my pocket, but because my meeting ran late, I am drinking diet Pepsi.

Rebecca: Oh, John. [LAUGHTER]

John: I think it’s only the second time in the podcast I haven’t been drinking tea, so

David: I won’t take it personally. [LAUGHTER]

John: I have it here. In fact, it was a tea that was given to us by one of our listeners in France, but I’ll save that for next time. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So we invited you here today to discuss one classroom at a time. Can you tell us the origin story of the book?

David: Sure, back in probably 2019 I was working for the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Temple University. And as part of that job, I was doing a lot of reading of pedagogy research, and I was, of course, coming across a lot of research on ways to close achievement gaps within the college classroom. There was a lot of work being done on how to help marginalized students succeed. And it struck me as I was reading all this that I wasn’t seeing this sort of knowledge base being applied in the work of DEI offices across the country. It was a kind of high time for DEI offices. There was a lot of action, particularly starting in 2020. Universities, responding to Black Lives Matter and responding to a lot of activism, looking to reform universities, and so DEI offices were doing a lot to try to change the cultures within their institutions. What I wasn’t seeing was DEI offices doing really anything to change how professors teach. And that sort of contrast, looking at this sort of growing base of knowledge that the way that we teach can actually change student outcomes versus the part of our universities sort of devoted to remedying the inequities in student outcomes, sort of ignoring that. That was the kind of conundrum that started my research and really got me thinking about how can I close this gap, how can I communicate with the people who need to hear what they can do to help their marginalized students succeed?

John: Colleges have done a lot to recruit a more diverse student base, and we know that education can be a really effective way of escaping from poverty, but has that been as successful for the marginalized students that you’ve mentioned as it had been for earlier cohorts of students?

David: Absolutely not, no. So we still have really striking gaps, certainly the sort of more famous gaps that we know are between white students and black and brown students, where the gaps in graduation rate are essentially stagnant for the past 30 years, but similarly stubborn gaps exist between well off students and economically insecure students. If you look at students from the top family income quartile, 69% of them graduate within six years. That number for the lowest quartile is 26%. First-gen students are twice as likely to drop out within the first three years as their continuing generation peers. These are things that we know about, but there’s also a lot of research that suggests, not only are we not closing these gaps, we may be making them worse, which is kind of shocking to think about, but there are studies that look at the performance of marginalized students and control for pre-college characteristics like high school quality or pre-college academic performance, and find that they say low-income students still perform worse than you would expect and perform worse than their more well off peers. So I still think there’s lots that we can do, and it’s not for lack of trying, but it is, I think, lack of trying to influence what happens in classrooms.

Rebecca: So you talk a little bit about marginalized students entering into college, and we also know that a lot of these students have a lot of social inequities that impact them before they arrive at our institutions. The focus of your book, though, is, of course, on what happens in the classroom. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to focus on in the classroom instead of what happens before?

David: Yeah, so part of that is that point that I just made, that I do think that there are things that a lot of colleges are doing that are actually making inequities worse, but the main reason is that in my work, I write to faculty members, I write to professors, and so my focus is really trying to be practical. What can we do? It would not make sense for me to advise professors to put their focus on housing policy or put their focus on ending racism. We know that most of the inequality that we confront in our classrooms comes from far afield of our classrooms, that our students are coming to us from really disparate backgrounds. They have all sorts of things going on in their lives, and most of the causes of the inequality that we see we can’t do anything about. And so that’s really dispiriting. So I wanted to sort of look at, well, what can we do? What are the things that we can change in how we teach that might actually change the trajectory of our students? I do think that most professors are hoping to transform their students’ lives, even if that’s a sort of modest transformation, of transforming the way they see their subject, or something more capacious, of transforming the course of their lives. I do think that we’re hoping to change our students for the better, and so thinking of, well, we can’t get to the root of these problems, but there are things that we can do. I think that really helped me sort of focus on what to write about and what to promote in the book.

Rebecca: I know it can be really frustrating to faculty to always talk at a higher level of like, what are all the underlying causes, but having something actionable [LAUGHTER] is really helpful.

David: Exactly.

John: And when we have students in our classroom, we have to deal with the students we have. We can’t go back and undo their past experiences with education and inequality and so forth. So we don’t want to ignore the students that we’re currently dealing with. And in the first chapter of your book, you call it imaginary students and imaginary classrooms. What are some of the ways in which faculty preconceptions differ from the reality they experience in classrooms, and what causes this disconnect between faculty expectations and the actual reality they’re working with

David: The broad strokes of the imaginary students problem, as I think of it, is that most of us imagine our students to be more privileged than they are. That’s the sort of broad thing. There’s lots of specifics into that, but generally, our students are worse off economically, aren’t as white as we think they are, or will be before we meet them, have all sorts of aspects of their identity that make their path through life trickier than what we imagine they’ll be. There’s lots of reasons for this. One of the sort of more, I think, persuasive things that I came across in trying to figure out why we have this kind of disconnect is the idea that within the sort of hierarchy of universities and what we think of as university quality, but maybe we should better think of it as university prestige. Almost every professor in this country teaches at an institution lower on the totem pole than where they were trained. It’s the nature of our industry that you get a PhD, and then you end up getting a job, usually somewhere with less prestige than your graduate institution. Only a small proportion of American colleges and universities offer doctorates. This is one part of it. What this means is that to the extent that professors are trained how to teach, they’re trained on a more privileged sub-population of college students than the ones they actually teach. So that’s one big issue. Another big issue is that for the most part, we don’t train professors to teach. This was, of course, the subject of my last book, The Missing Course. And so what this means, practically, is that I teach very much like my professors taught, because I learned by watching them, and they, of course, teach by the way their professors taught, but my professors taught a student body that was far more privileged than our student body. Now I think it’s easy to forget the sort of diversification of the American higher education system is actually a really recent phenomenon, as late as 1990, which…I don’t know about you, but I remember 1990… 8 out of 10 American college students were white. Right now, that’s 55% and dropping. And so the sort of our sense of what a college student is and what a college student can do is sort of based on an earlier version of who college students were. And so this comes out in all sorts of ways. One of the sort of more visible ways that we see this disconnect is in the amount of time we expect students to be able to put to our classes. And I can sort of feel every faculty member that’s listening to this nod about this. Because everyone is concerned about students not reading as much, not devoting as much time to their studies as possible. My students work 20, 30, sometimes 40 hours a week on top of being full-time students. An astonishing number of my students take seven courses a semester. Many of them have family members they take care of, many of them actually volunteer. They’re very, very busy. And when we have surveys of how students spend their time, typically, although we expect them to spend two hours outside of class for every one credit hour in class, the surveys suggest that it’s about half that that students spend, on average, about one hour outside of class doing schoolwork for every credit hour they take. Now I’m not suggesting that we lower our standards or even that we assign less work, but we’re not going to help our students succeed if we don’t acknowledge the reality that they don’t look like what we expect them to. So that’s one of the more visible ways that our students are kind of having more difficult lives, to put it bluntly, than what we may expect them to have.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about or maybe provide an example of a way that a faculty member can support students that have all these tugs on their time and attention?

David: Yeah, well, a couple of things. The first thing that I always try to do is acknowledge it. I do think that we can actually achieve a lot by letting students know that we understand that we are one important thing among many in their lives, and if we don’t treat them like our thing is the most important thing, and they have nothing else weighing on their time, we can sort of get to a better level of communication with them, where I can make the case to them that doing work for my class is going to be valuable to them. So that’s the sort of the case, or the psychological approach you can take. The other thing that I think is, like the easiest thing to do, it’s not that easy, is really focus on taking advantage of class time. Like, I don’t know what many of my students do outside of the classroom. That is their lives. That is their time. And they may have quite different and unequal circumstances affecting the amount of time and attention they can give to the work that I want them to do. I do know that they have to come to class, and so this isn’t me saying get rid of homework, but I’m much more aware of using class time to have students do the work that I want them to do. I no longer think it’s a responsible thing to just lecture at students and give them information. I want to take advantage of them being together, of being in a social environment where they can do work with my guidance and with the feedback of myself and their peers. So that’s one thing that I really think about when thinking about the inequalities of time and attention that we see.

John: Marginalized students often experience some degree of imposter syndrome or stereotype threat. What are some strategies we can do to break that down to create a better sense of belonging for all of our students?

David: Sure, this is one of the most well established psychological barriers that anyone that faces in academic domains, stereotype threat, the sort of concern that you may be the target of a negative stereotype, consumes part of the brain and takes away cognitive resources from the important intellectual work we hope students will do. So, one of the sort of most effective broad strategies we can put into place to combat stereotype threat is inviting students to share a broader part of their lives in our classes. One of the things that we know is that students who suffer from or who are targets of stereotypes around academic performances, those stereotypes can be mitigated if students feel that they’re not just their academic selves in the class. If students are reminded that they are not just students, but sisters and brothers and children of parents, that they are friends, that they are soccer players, that they are interested in crocheting, whatever it is, they’ll have a broader base of self integrity, of self confidence to fend off stereotypes. It’s not that they’re going to stop understanding that they might be stereotyped. It’s going to have less power because they’re not just going to see themselves as students within their classes. And a lot of how students see themselves within our classes is based on how they think we see them. So if they believe that we as professors see them as more than just their academic performance, they’ll be more likely to have that broad base to work from. So part of that is conveying an understanding that students have a lot going on in their lives, but also there’s lots of little things you can do to invite students to share parts of their lives in class. I do this thing that I know a lot of professors do, that I call question roll, where to start the class. I always ask students a question, and everyone has to answer it. And for me, this question almost always has nothing to do with what we’re going to talk about in class, and it is a no stakes, no wrong answers. Type of question I’ll ask, what’s the first thing you wanted to be when you grew up as a kid? What’s the best thing to eat for lunch in Iowa City? What’s the best fruit? There’s a lot of food related ones, but it’s a way to ease students into class, get them talking before there’s any stakes, but also, in a kind of subtle way, it allows them to share who they are, without them even sort of realizing that that’s what they’re doing. And what I’ll find is that I start every class with this, and that if I ever forget to do it, my students are completely up in arms and like they cannot imagine starting class without doing question roll if I didn’t ask my question. So they really get into it, even though at the beginning of the semester, they’ll think it’s silly and they’ll resist answering questions. It kind of lays down that precedent that in this class, yes, we’re going to do hard work. Yes, we’re going to try to understand difficult concepts, but we’re all people coming from various places and that we’re going to have a more successful time if we don’t deny those parts of ourselves. So I really sort of believe in this sort of broad strategy of trying to invite students in, invite more parts of students. That, to me, is the kind of subtle thing, or a broad thing that can show itself in lots of different ways throughout a semester, but I do think that if we can think about part of our job as inviting students to share parts of their selves that may not be obvious to them as relevant to their academic selves, that we can really help to mitigate stereotype threat for them.

Rebecca: One of the things that we’ve talked about on many episodes of Tea for Teaching is growth mindset, and that’s something that I know you cover in your book as well. Can you discuss some strategies that help nurture a growth mindset in our students?

David: Sure, one of the more interesting things I learned in doing the work for this book, I of course, had read a lot about growth mindset, and I’m a parent, so I understand all the research into the encouragement of a growth mindset in individuals, but one of the things that I saw is that a lot of the big studies that look at the effects of promoting a growth mindset in the students, the results aren’t as good when the environment students are in work against the growth mindset. So when their peers have a fixed mindset, and/or when there’s a school culture that has a fixed mindset, any promotion of a growth mindset within an individual is kind of blunted, which makes a lot of sense to me. And so what I hope to do in the chapter I have on growth mindset is move away from the idea of growth mindset as sort of teaching students that their brain is a muscle. I think there’s a kind of limitation to sort of telling students to have a growth mindset, and we should focus more on the signals we send to students about the environment of our classrooms. That much more important is looking closely at the way that we do things in our courses and asking ourselves, “Is this focused on student growth, or is this focused on sorting out the better students from the worst students?” So I think about how we talk to students in our syllabi, how we literally talk to students in classes. Are we focused on persuading them that we’re working for them, that the course is designed to help them grow, rather than persuading them the course is going to root out the people who don’t have it, or look to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t be here, or even sort of the purposes of assessment. If we can explain to students that assessment is really important for teachers to understand how students are doing so that we can help them better. Students generally assume, and a lot of professors talk about it like this, that assessment is to sort out whether they know it or not, to give them a grade. And of course, that’s part of what we do, but to me, that takes a back seat to the formative aspect of assessment. The main purpose of assessment, for me, is to see how students are doing, because I want to help them get better. So those kind of more sort of environmental aspects of a class, I think, make a bigger difference in promoting growth mindset than talking about it directly and promoting it to students a sort of individual version of that, one of the sort of strategies that I think goes along with this idea of a growth mindset culture, is something called wise feedback. Came from research by Jeffrey Cohen and his colleagues that looks at particularly how we give feedback to students on their work. They looked at student writing, but I think it can be for any kind of student work. And essentially, wise feedback has three aspects, where you start by invoking high standards. You sort of say, I’m giving you this feedback because I have very high standards for you, either because of this class is really difficult and hard and I’m trying to bring you to a high level, or because I believe that you’re capable of meeting these things, following that invocation of high standards always has to be encouragement. So I’m giving this feedback because I have very high standards, and I know that you can get there, that you can work on it, and then you sort of fill out that encouragement, or you prove that encouragement by giving specific guidance as to what students can do. So most of us, I worry, have been sort of taught by experience and trained to give feedback to justify our grade. I think of particularly the early career instructors I work with, who are very concerned with, for good reason, being challenged about grades, and so their feedback they give to students on paper, essentially, is, here’s why I’m giving you the B minus. Instead, if we think about this kind of growth mindset approach to feedback, here’s where I think you can get, here’s why I believe you can do it, here’s how you can get there. I think that’s a much more effective way to get feedback, where you’re actually teaching through your feedback.

John: You just noted that one of the issues is that it’s not just something you can do in your class with students or encourage them to have a growth mindset if that’s not what they’re observing, and one of the studies you cite is a study done by Elizabeth Canning and colleagues, who looked at the impact of faculty mindset on student learning outcomes. Could you talk a little bit about that study?

David: An amazing study they looked at science professors at a big midwest University, and I think they surveyed all these faculty members about their mindsets, not their students mindsets, but the faculty members mindsets. And they found that the faculty members with a fixed mindset had much larger achievement gaps in their classes than the faculty mindsets with a growth mindset. This was independent of faculty identity, by the way. So this was even the case for faculty with marginalized identities themselves. So it seems that, at least as I interpret it, that our students are taking cues from us a lot of the time about what’s expected of them and what the course is about. And so if we have a growth mindset, if we come at the world with a sort of theory of mind that people can improve, that people can get better with practice. Our students will notice that, and they’ll take what we tell them in a constructive way, in a way that they’ll actually work at something. If they suspect from the way we talk, from the way we carry ourselves, from the way we structure our courses, that we actually have a fixed mindset, that we believe that generally talent is doled out somewhere, and either you have it or you don’t, they’ll get the message that when they struggle early on in a semester, that there’s essentially not much they can do. And so I do think it really matters how we talk about our subjects, classes, how we talk about our disciplines, how we talk about what student work is for. There’s been really interesting research done on the concept of brilliance, and certain disciplines value brilliance in their fields. Philosophy is one that comes to mind a lot, that if you survey faculty members about what it takes to succeed in this field, philosophy and some other fields, for sure, rank being brilliant really high. You need to really be smart to do well in this class. Well, research has shown that those disciplines that value brilliance most highly have the biggest gaps between privileged students and marginalized students in their fields; they have the fewest black PhDs, for example, the fewest women PhDs. And so how we think about what it takes to succeed in our field really matters to students, and whether we tell them it explicitly or not, it comes across to them.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked about a few different challenges related to inequity that our students face, and your book explores many others. Can you talk about a few more examples of strategies that can be used to promote more equity and student success?

David: One of the sort of best supported strategies for what certainly used to be called inclusive teaching, I don’t know if people still use that phrase, is structure. There were a couple of really huge, really sort of ironclad surveys about the inclusion of structure into large lecture classes, and how that helped to narrow gaps that were really, really stubborn, and nobody seems to know what structure is, so I’ll explain it a little bit. Structure in the context of educational research is really just having students do stuff. It’s the opposite of a lecture, where all students have to do is sit and listen to a lecture. Structure is where you make students answer questions before the lecture, where you put them in groups and talk about the concept, where you do a survey in class and have students respond to it, where you have students do writing in class. It’s structuring class time so that students have things to do for their learning. And so we know that that is really effective, particularly for marginalized students. One of the reasons why this helps is because privileged students need less from us than marginalized students. One thing that privileged students have that marginalized students don’t have is a positive experience with school. They like school much more than marginalized students do. They’ve had a good experience. They know how to be good students… I’m speaking very broadly, of course… but on the whole, and they have more resources to help them with that. And so a class period where all students have to do is sit and take notes and do the work themselves, is going to favor those students who are good at being students, and it’s going to disadvantage those students who have had a less positive experience with school, who have fewer resources to help them out, with less time to do the work. So the more that we can structure class time is what I was talking about, taking advantage of class time, the more that we can help those students. I’ve also sort of been convinced that the best kind of structure is transparent and predictable. Transparency really helps students for lots of reasons. I think part of it is that growth mindset piece, that if we explain to students why we’re doing what we’re doing, we will most likely persuade them that what we’re doing is to help them learn, which we can’t take for granted that they believe. And the predictability piece, I think, is really interesting. There’s been really, I think, provocative and powerful research done on the value of taking high-stakes exams, and instead of giving, say, two or three exams over the course of semester, dividing up the points you’d give to that and giving students weekly exams, weekly quizzes, and where you ask about the same material, you just do it more often. This strategy seems to really help economically insecure students, and there’s some sort of disagreement as to why this helps, but one of the reasons why I think it helps is that economically insecure students are used to and good at focusing on pressing concerns. We know a lot about how economically insecure students struggle with long-term planning. What they’re good at is short-term planning. Living in near poverty means that you have to focus on pressing needs, because it’s a life of instability and scarcity. And so if the task is study for this quiz on Thursday rather than study for an exam next month, we’re going to help those students who have fewer resources to do that kind of long-term planning, the long term thinking that is involved in preparing for a midterm or an exam in a month or two. So thinking of our structure as, yes, having students do stuff, but wherever possible, make it transparent, so that students always know why we’re asking them to do the work we’re asking them to do, and if possible, predictable, so students can sort of count on our classes as being a reliable source of support and help in a world that is less than reliable for them.

John: So one of the things your book addresses that’s often ignored in many books about effective teaching is a focus on student disability. Can you talk a little bit about this chapter and some recommendations on what institutions and what faculty can do to help create a more supportive environment for students with disabilities?

David: It’s one of my favorite parts of the book, partly because I learned a lot, and so we know that disabled students struggle in our institutions, that they graduate at a much lower rate than their able bodied peers, and that the numbers we do have about their success are probably under selling the problem, because something close to a half to 1/3 of students with disabilities actually report their disability to their institution. So we know that plenty of students, even plenty of students who get institutional support in high school, aren’t telling their institutions in college, and so aren’t getting the support they need, and aren’t getting recorded in these studies. What I did in the course of my research was I kind of looked at the history of disabled students in the academy, and I found, probably unsurprisingly, that the Academy had to be sort of dragged kicking and screaming to care of and educate disabled students. It was only by force of law in the 1970s that American institutions of higher education began admitting disabled students in large numbers and admitting them into mainstream classrooms. But going over that history, which was of course, also the history of the creation of Student Disability Services offices and the accommodation system really made me think of how we take for granted this system that we really shouldn’t accept as being the way things should be. Essentially American colleges and universities were told that there was this new population of students with different needs coming into the academy, and that they had a mandate to give them as good an education as everybody else, and that was an opportunity to tell professors in particular, look, you’re going to get a lot of new students with different needs. Maybe you should change the way you teach. Maybe you should change the way that you approach your students, because your students are going to have some different needs. We didn’t do that. We didn’t do that at all. We didn’t touch the center of our institutions at all, in terms of what I think of as the center of our institutions, our classrooms. Instead, we created an office on the margins of our institutions, and a system that too often allows professors to change very little about how they teach. In fact, seems designed to allow you and I to change very little about how we teach, and even if we look at the language that universities use around accommodations, it very much is about students have a right to an accommodation, but only if it doesn’t interrupt the educational standards, are very often the way they’re phrased, and I just don’t understand what educational standards could be if they’re not helping all of our students learn. And so this idea that we can help certain students, but only if it doesn’t interfere with some vague sense of standard that is unconnected with helping our students that I just don’t understand. And so I really want faculty members to sort of rethink how they approach a class before they meet their students. We very often think of our disabled students as an exception, as something that comes after the fact. We meet our students, we tell them the syllabus, we tell them the way it’s going to be, and then you start to meet some disabled students who say, by the way, I have an accommodation request, and you make an exception for them. So I’m very much drawn to, of course, Universal Design for Learning, which is, of course, a long time, broad approach to teaching, it comes from many disability activists, that seeks to, before we meet our students, design our classes so they’ll work for everybody. This is an ideal. It’s not easy to do, but it’s the right approach, rather than pretending that all of our students are able bodied and then being surprised every time that we get X number of disabled students asking for a change. So I go into a lot more detail in the book, but that’s one of the reasons why I love writing despite how much I hate writing, is that sometimes you can learn something. Is that actually doing this research really opened my eyes to kind of what we take for granted about the place of disabled students on campus and how the system seems set up to cast them as exceptions. In my opinion, that underlies a lot of their struggles to succeed.

Rebecca: It’ll be interesting to see how the updated regulations to Title II of the ADA, which addresses public institutions, helps move this work along, because it does require this proactive approach around access, especially around digital technology.

David: Yeah, I don’t have high hopes, but I do have hopes.

Rebecca: So we focus a lot on in-person classes. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship of the contents of your book to online classes.

David: The reason why I mostly address in-person classes is because that’s most of my experience. I am skeptical of a lot of online education. I know that there’s a lot of people who’ve done really great work, and there’s a sense in which sometimes that online educators have had to focus on some of these issues before people in person have had to, particularly around generating good community, where you sort of have to work harder. I do hope that all the principles that I advance will work in sort of any classroom. I just think that we do faculty and students a disservice if we pretend that online education isn’t harder. I think it’s harder. I do think that we are doing people work, care work, and that good teaching has to do with forming relationships with our students and helping them as human beings. I used to have this joke when I worked for a teaching center when people would come in for advice about their teaching. I’d say half jokingly, all right, I want you to imagine that this is your student, and you’re their teacher, and you’re trying to help them. I do think that sometimes we sort of get away from the idea that these are people that we have relationships with, they’re professional relationships, they’re educational relationships, they’re relationships. I think that that relationship is harder to see in an online environment, at least it is for me, and so it takes more work to nurture and make work. It certainly can work, but it’s harder.

Rebecca: Challenging, both for the students and for the faculty. [LAUGHTER] It goes both ways.

John: We always end with the question: what’s next?

David: Well, what’s next for me is, I’ve just been recently made Director of Programming at Iowa called Gen Ed. Lit is what we call ti, general education literature. It’s a class offered by the English department that every undergrad at Iowa, except for English majors, has to take. So about 3000 students every year take it, 150 sections, something like 60 or 70 instructors. Most of them are graduate instructors, and my role is I oversee this course, and I’m a supervisor of all of these instructors. So I took the position because I’m really passionate about training new instructors and helping people learn how to teach better. And so for me, it’s an opportunity to put a lot of the ideas that I’ve been thinking about and writing about for years into practice with people who are actually on the front lines, which is a terrible metaphor, but I’ll use it anyway. But teaching our undergrads, and in particular in this course, teaching students who, for the most part, haven’t chosen to be in the class, which is, as you know, one of the more challenging teaching challenges that we face. And so I’m really excited about helping new instructors find their feet and helping figure out, particularly at this time, where everyone is worried about AI, helping to figure out how to teach literary reading skills to a generation that I think could really benefit from developing them.

John: And a generation that spends much less time reading than prior generations. So it’s a nice challenge to be addressing and working on it, and I hope it’s successful, and maybe, if so, you can share that more broadly so we can all improve this.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely sounds like a challenge that might keep you busy for a little bit anyway. [LAUGHTER] Well, thanks again for joining us and sharing your work.

David: Well, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much for the work that you do and for talking with me today.

John: Thank you. We’re looking forward to future conversations with you.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes 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 Madison Lee.

[MUSIC]

414. Federal Policy Impacts Education

Posted in diversity, equity, higher education, learning, teaching
October 8, 2025

The U.S. higher education system has been a primary source of research that fuels innovation in science and industry, provides students from low-income communities opportunity to escape from poverty, and enriches the lives of graduates. In this episode, Rebecca Winthrop joins us to discuss how changes in federal policy are affecting the U.S. educational system and, ultimately, our society.

Rebecca is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, where her research focuses on education globally. Rebecca leads the Brookings Global Task Force on AI in Education and co-leads the Family Engagement in Education Network. In addition to her work with many other global education initiatives, Rebecca has served as the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group and served as co-lead for the Learning Metrics Task Force with the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. Rebecca is also a lecturer at Georgetown University and, with Jenny Anderson, the co-author of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The U.S. higher education system has been a primary source of research that fuels innovation in science and industry, provides students from low-income communities opportunity to escape from poverty, and enriches the lives of graduates. In this episode, we explore how changes in federal policy are affecting the U.S. educational system and, ultimately, our society.

[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]

John: Our guest today is Rebecca Winthrop. She is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, where her research focuses on education globally. Rebecca leads the Brookings Global Task Force on AI in Education and co-leads the Family Engagement in Education Network. In addition to her work with many other global education initiatives, Rebecca has served as the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group and served as co-lead for the Learning Metrics Task Force with the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. Rebecca is also a lecturer at Georgetown University and, with Jenny Anderson, the co-author of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, which we talked about on an earlier episode of the podcast. Welcome back, Rebecca.

Rebecca W.: Lovely to be here. Thanks.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: Rebecca, are you drinking any tea today?

Rebecca W.: I’m not drinking any tea because I’m at the office, beavering away, and I have a cup of water next to me. But this morning, I had a turmeric chai tea, which was delicious.

Rebecca: That sounds delightful.

Rebecca W.: … and ostensibly good for me and my immune system. [LAUGHTER] We’ll see.

John: I have a Tea Forte black currant tea today.

Rebecca W.: Oh, yum, black currant.

Rebecca: I have a English afternoon, because I need some energy. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca W.: Oh, that sounds right. It is the afternoon when we’re recording, post lunch.

Rebecca: Need a little boost. [LAUGHTER]

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the rather dramatic changes that have occurred in the federal government’s relationship to U.S. education institutions at all levels. In a February 26, 2025 Brookings Commentary that you co-authored with Emily Markovich Morris and Sweta Shaw, you argue that this administration’s policies at the very beginning of the administration were already beginning to weaken the United States global competitive edge through its dramatic cuts to the US Department of Education, USAID and federal grants that support education. Let’s begin with the cuts to the Department of Education. What have been some of the consequences of the funding and staffing cuts at the U.S. Department of Education?

Rebecca W.: Well, the big picture that I’m most worried about is the U.S. federal government, with all of our tax dollars, who are US taxpayers, not necessarily even citizens, non-citizens pay taxes, plenty of them… have traditionally invested a lot in research and development, which is educational, enterprise and learning, and we have been for many years, and I have to say I have been very proud myself, as an American born here and raised here, of being a beacon of inquiry, investigation, creativity, innovation that is powered by our education system. Yes, our K-12 is a feeder, but especially our higher education system, it’s long been seen as one of the best in the world, and that is really undercut by, I would say, a very, very chaotic and not well organized sort of plan of sort of undermining the programs in closing or shuttering many of the offices in the Department of Education, and it’s been fascinating to see. It has just been very chaotic. So for example, early on, the Department of Ed’s Office of Technology was closed, and then shortly thereafter, an executive order came out saying that we should push technology into schools. And oops, the Department of Education, who actually that team was probably the team who knew how to do it well, weren’t involved because they were disbanded. It went to other sources. So I’m not sure there is some master grand plan. Of course, there is the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint, which is fairly high level, but there’s a lot of big things in there, but I think that the general approach is to burn the house down. And I think the goal of burning the house down is to try to then come and rebuild something else in a likeness in which the new Trump administration wants, or perhaps it’s the Heritage Foundation, because much of what they’re doing is out of that, you know, has some other vision of what they want to see. And it worries me that education, sort of an engine of R and D and creativity across many institutions, if you think about Silicon Valley like that came out of government money and Defense Department money and really laying the architecture and building the platform for a lot of those innovations that we all use today, and I just think that it’s undercutting our competitiveness, our innovative edge. Certainly people are going to be going elsewhere. You’ve got other countries that are just pleased to bits to attract talent, students, professors. You’ve got Macron of France saying, “Choose France.” And frankly, we’ll get into this, I’m sure, but globally, it’s China who really stands to benefit as the US backs away from its investing in its own R&D and human capital development internally, as well as globally.

Rebecca: As you’re talking about all these various pieces of institutions getting shut down, how does this impact students? What students are most affected by funding cuts and departmental cuts.

Rebecca W.: You’re talking about U.S. Department of Education, I think, but we can also talk globally. A lot of the U.S. Department of Education funding, which is again federal tax dollars that largely went to equity. So it’s really a transfer from rich [LAUGHTER] Americans to poorer Americans. In many ways, it was a transfer from blue states to red states, and that is probably going to be maintained in some way, shape, or form. And then there’s, broadly speaking, the support to higher education, again, equity… It’s helping kids without a lot of financial resources get to college, Pell grants and all that. And then there’s the data piece. Information is power, and one of the first things they’ve done is sort of actually take away a lot of data and some of the ability to sort of track outcomes. So the argument is, “No, don’t worry. These things will stay alive in other places and forms in other parts of the federal government bureaucracy.” Now, a number of programs have been shut down, that would normally have been continued, things like community schools, et cetera, and all of those are really heavily focused on equity, and the kids that are the farthest left behind.

John: Along those lines, we’ve already been seeing a decline in student performance on standardized test scores that had been going on for quite a while, but became much worse during the pandemic, and most of the solutions for this that are proposed involve spending more resources on education, rather than less. With some of the cutbacks here, is it going to be possible to work very effectively to reverse some of that downward trend that we’ve been seeing in K through 12 education?

Rebecca W.: Well, I think many, many school districts across the country are really worried about a fiscal cliff. But it’s not by any means, just the U.S. Department of Education. Actually, the U.S. Federal Department of Education did not provide very much money. It was important, it was strategic, it had R and D elements, etc. But it wasn’t like all school districts across the country are bankrolled by the federal government’s Department of Ed, [LAUGHTER] so it’s a small portion financially. So that is a piece, and certainly the process of sort of uncertainty of, “Will we have a budget? Won’t we have a budget?” There’s been a lot of, “Oh, you have your budget,” or “We’ve awarded your contract. Oh, never mind. We’re not going to spend the money.” I mean, it’s incredibly poorly managed and chaotic and uncertain and amateur, really. That piece has caused a lot of uncertainty with the small federal money that does get distributed around for school districts. School districts are nervous about spending money because they don’t know what they’re going to have in the next year or two. So that’s one reason, but there are other forces and reasons. One of them are big demographic shifts. There’s just less kids, and we fund often per pupil. And so we’re going to have to think about how to get economies of scale if you have more and more buildings that are less and less full [LAUGHTER] as time goes on. And then another sort of worry and cause of this fiscal cliff is the support that had come because of Covid. The extra support to schools and kids in the education sector at local level is drying up, that had come sort of under the Biden administration. So there’s a mix of reasons that is by no means only the federal government sort of chaos at the federal level, but the chaos does lead to uncertainty. If you’re a school leader or a district leader, you don’t exactly know what’s in your budget next year. You’re not going to spend the money. It makes it a very hard operating environment.

Rebecca: The lack of knowledge of funds, as well as lack of other data available, makes it really hard to make all kinds of decisions or to look into different pieces of information and understand what’s happening in some cases. Can you talk a little bit about whether or not the cuts in the Department of Education will result in less data being collected, and how that’s going to harm our system,

Rebecca W.: We’ll see where things ultimately pan out. But IES, which is an important function in the U.S. Department of Education, has traditionally held a wide variety of data that we all need as researchers, those of us in higher education and research use these databases, but it’s not just for researchers to write papers and get journal articles. The real reason the data is important is so the leaders and the people doing the work, and those of us who are helping and advising the leaders have an informed vision of what’s happening, and can make good decisions about where to spend money, what types of things should be done, what works, how kids are doing, who needs help, who doesn’t, etc. So that’s a worry.

John: And one of the main uses of that data was to see how educational outcomes differed by income, by race…

Rebecca W.: …and by geography, by rural versus urban. I’ve interrupted you, John, but there’s plenty of rural district leaders and principals and caring people who are really concerned that they’re going to be left out in the cold.

John: One of my concerns is that they’re going to stop collecting data on those important issues because of their attempts to downplay diversity, equity, and inclusion, and one of the good ways to move that issue aside is just not make data available on all those issues.

Rebecca W.: Yes, it is a strategy that I’ve seen employed in other moments of time with other leaders and countries we might not want to live in. If you remove the data, it doesn’t actually remove the problem. [LAUGHTER] It just makes it a lot harder to track and have accountability.

John: And just a few weeks ago, we saw a satellite being crashed because it was being used to collect weather data that they no longer wanted to collect. And we had that whole issue with the BLS Commissioner being removed because the administration did not like the data on employment trends.

Rebecca W.: Yes, it’s very, very worse, and from anyone in higher education, anyone working in education, the core of education is knowledge and insight and illumination. The opposite of learning and education is delusion and confusion, [LAUGHTER] and that’s not what we want in education, and removing data doesn’t change the actual facts on the ground. It just makes it harder to really understand what is happening and to be able to have healthy debates about best ways to proceed forward.

Rebecca: USAID, an agency that long had bipartisan support, was effectively shut down at the start of the administration, and you noted in your blog post that roughly 85 countries received support for educational programs through USAID. What types of programs were supported, and how expensive were they? What are these impacts?

Rebecca W.: First of all, the USAID budget, in terms of size of the federal government budget, is tiny, teeny, tiny. I think probably just a couple Defense Department contracts make up the entire USAID budget. And what you get from investing in international development assistance is hugely beneficial to the United States foreign power, and frankly, our self interest. Now USAID, The mission is very much to serve others in other parts of the country, but the USAID has always doled out its funding in a way that was incredibly self serving. So we spent a ton of money through USAID in Pakistan when we were fighting the war in Afghanistan, for example. There’s always been foreign policy interests and priorities closely aligned with our development assistance. Now it is largely in countries around the world that are low income, or perhaps middle income. The way USAID doled out its money, if you had put like the poorest kids to the richest kids, it wouldn’t have all made linear sense. It’s not like the poorest countries [LAUGHTER] got the most, etc. So there’s always been a really strong soft power argument through diplomacy and development, which is usually considered in most countries around the world as the two legs of the stool that sit around with defense. as sort of defense, diplomacy and development as sort of the three legs of the stool for how you interact in the globe and advocate for your national interest. Programs that USAID supported in education… again, it’s a tiny amount of money compared to the US budget, barely anything… but significant in terms of small countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have lots of minerals that the U.S. wants, remember, to help with our manufacturing, especially chips and technology. It’s not an insignificant amount for countries that are small and have themselves small budgets and have many kids who are out of school and not learning well. A lot of the support and money from USAID went to helping kids get to school, build schools, give them textbooks, and learn to read. That was a very large [LAUGHTER] part of the financial support, and of course, they did a wide range of other things too that were all worthy causes and really helped children around the world. And virtually, Republicans and Democrats alike, for years, have seen that when we helped other countries grow their human capital, if you want to use an economic term, they will be more productive themselves. They will purchase more U.S. goods. So it’s great for us to create more trading partners. And in fact, USAID had always heavily supported U.S. product exports [LAUGHTER] through its development assistance, food, school meals, and also just hunger programs… helping feed the world. USAID and other parts of the US government heavily bought U.S. agriculture, and it was a really important part for a lot of local farmers. So we get a lot out of foreign assistance through USAID. And in addition to all that, which sounds very, perhaps not aspirational or moral, but in addition to all that sort of benefits the U.S. gets, we get something that is incredibly hard to replicate, which is soft power. And I would say the Trump administration knows very well how to use hard power… are very effective at it, but they are missing entirely the soft power strategy and soft power is when you have development assistance programs, let’s say in sub-Saharan Africa, which is, by the way, going to house shortly here in the not too distant future, the majority of the world’s working age population and talent, [LAUGHTER] as the rest of the world gets older, U.S. companies are going to be interested in hiring [LAUGHTER] in sub-Saharan Africa, and they might want to be setting up shop, but that would have gone great with a foreign leader who might want to create a partnership with perhaps an overseas office or a company, until the Trump administration really abruptly, sort of pulled the funding. And I would say that some of the countries would be okay having less funding. It was just the way it was done, really rude, abrupt, not respectful. And those countries are thinking, “Hmm, China seems pretty nice,” because China just walked right into the vacuum we created. “Oh, rather than letting a U.S. company come and set up an office and recruit from our talent pool, etc., I think we’re going to have a partnership with China. And it could be higher ed partnership. It could be an Employment Partnership. It could be an infrastructure project partnership,” which is largely what they’ve been doing, and might have more favorable trading, including for minerals, with them. So it’s a big misstep in terms of thinking about US dominance, which is what the administration has said they care about.

John: And these cuts were made on the grounds of improving government efficiency, but it’s perhaps the most wasteful set of actions that I’ve ever seen or read about in the U.S. , because, as you mentioned, these things were cut off very abruptly. There was a lot of food that was just left to rot in warehouses and storage. And also you mentioned that historically, policies have often been tied to political interests, but for the first time, they had a chief economist there whose goal was to look at the most efficient way of improving economic development, Dean Karlan, who we’ve had as a guest on the podcast in the past. His research basically has been focused on coming up with the most efficient ways of achieving development goals, and he was implementing a lot more randomized controlled experiments evaluating the effectiveness of these programs, and all that just completely stopped. That’s really troubling.

Rebecca W.: I would agree with you, though, John, because I think the guise was government efficiency, but that wasn’t really the purpose. Because if it had been government efficiency, there is lots and lots of ways to make government more efficient, and in fact, we at Brookings have spent a lot of time suggesting ways to make our government institutions, which are very important, work better, more effective, faster, more efficient. Spend money on things that actually are shown to work versus not. And there are lots of ways to make government more efficient, and you would have had to go in and really look at what those are. And frankly, it could be across the board. It’s not that USAID was the only department that could do things better. Lots of government departments can do things better, but I don’t think that was the real goal. Because, frankly, the idea was, we’re going to be efficient, we’re going to spend more money. That’s was sort of the narrative. And the truth is, it was just cutting things that didn’t align ideologically, and then funding things… lots of money has been spent. If you look at the big, beautiful bill, I mean, the debt is higher than ever before. This is not fiscally conservative government by any means, and a lot of it is boosting majorly in anti-immigration policies, staffing up ICE and Department of Defense, absolutely, getting lots and lots of things, including contracts for Elon Musk’s company. So the narrative might have been this is about government efficiency, but if you really wanted to do that, you would have had to kind of study and go slower. What I saw was just putting money where you want stuff to go, and slashing and burning things you don’t like… it was basically the action.

Rebecca: One of the things you mentioned earlier is the global aging population, and where certain parts of the world have younger populations, and they have historically wanted to come to the United States to study and U.S. institutions have been trying to entice them to come, but we’re seeing a lot of actions from the government to slow that process down, revoking visas, making visa appointments nearly impossible to have, searching social media accounts and things like that. Can you talk a little bit about the current administration’s policies on international student enrollment and how that’s affected the enrollment and the future investment that sometimes those enrollees have in our country?

Rebecca W.: Well, higher education is a really big industry. There’s 1000s and 1000s of higher education institutions across the United States. It’s one of the wonderful things actually about the U.S.. We’re a big country, but there’s many pathways to higher education. We have a really robust community college system. So if you maybe don’t love high school and don’t do great, it’s not it, it’s not over for you. You have a second chance. I’ve always been extraordinarily proud of that, because many other countries that I visit don’t have that. You have to either get your act together and be brilliant in high school and then you’ll go into college, and if you don’t, that’s it for you. There’s no second chances. Higher education is itself a big part of the economy. And then, of course, higher education institutions bring a lot of livelihoods to the communities they’re in. Their students, they spend money, they go to restaurants, they need laundry machines, they have activities, not just the professors and teachers and educators who are there to teach students, but there’s a whole economy around them, and the U.S. has long been a sort of star attraction for foreign students, for countries around the world, in part because we have had such a deep, robust, innovative, sort of R and D engine, heavily powered through universities and a variety of higher education institutions, that there’s a lot of excitement and opportunities and very interesting new insights and discoveries being done in the United States in the higher education sector. And that for sure… I mean, I’ve had conversations with people around the globe… that sort of sparkle has faded rather quickly, [LAUGHTER] because again, as you say, there’s been a real clamp down on international students, revoking J visas, which are very hard to get. And I think again, what it does is just the students aren’t not going to college. All these students who would have come to the U.S. are not going to stay home and say, “Well, that’s it for me. I’m not going to pursue my studies and try to contribute and try to help solve society’s problems and invent something cool. I’m going to stay home.” They’re not doing that. They’re saying, “Oh, the US doesn’t want me. I think I’ll go elsewhere.” They’re going to Canada, they’re going to China, they’re going to Europe, even possibly India, Latin America. These are losses for the U.S.. They’re losses for higher education as a sector. And I think it’s very, very short sighted if the goal is American dominance and keeping U.S., and I keep saying, if this is the goal, I’m not sure that’s my personal goal. I’d rather us have a sort of co-equal, collaborative stance to try to have a better society, but there is a stated goal by this administration, to have America be number one. This is the wrong strategy to do that. It is absolutely reducing America’s glory, sparkle, brilliance, attraction, and going to be handing pretty much for free the competitive edge to some of the world’s brightest and best talent who are going to go elsewhere and boost the economies and insights and knowledge networks of other places in the world.

John: And in addition to the contribution these foreign students make while they’re in college, many of them stick around, and that’s particularly true in the STEM fields. And in terms of innovation. Immigrants account for a relatively large share of patent applications. What are some of the implications of limiting the number of top students coming to the US who have in the past played such a large role in innovation and economic growth in our economy?

Rebecca W.: This gets back to the previous point, and it’s specialized. We’re talking about tech companies. We’re talking about innovators. We’re talking about R and D, advanced robotics. This is the type of thing that you are talking about, John. Now, those companies are desperate always to hire talent. They’re always in a talent war. They’re going to have less talent, and they’re going to need to find talent elsewhere, in other parts of the world, where, as I said before, other parts of the world might not be so interested in U.S. companies or doing sort of collaborative work with U.S. entities, because soft power is real. When you’re mean to your neighbor and then you go ask to borrow a cup of sugar, they’re less likely to give it to you. I mean, it’s just as simple as that, it’s human nature.

Rebecca: So one of the other things that we’ve seen happening is the federal government targeting specific institutions like Harvard and Columbia, where they’re cutting federal funding, visa approvals and threatening termination of accreditation. What are the consequences of threats like these?

Rebecca W.: Well, it’s a very frankly standard practice. I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve worked in many countries around the world, the standard practice for leaders who really want to dominate and control with a very tight fist. The models I have of people who’ve gone after universities in the same way are authoritarian figures. So you can make your own judgment there, but when you go after universities and higher ed institutions, it’s usually for a couple of reasons. It’s like going after the press. It’s to dampen critical thought, and frankly, a lot of movements start with university students: the civil rights movement, the movement for the entire nation of Pakistan, [LAUGHTER] there’s a lot of sort of social movements that start with the university students. So it’s not just also the freedom of thought of the professors. It’s also sort of going after an entire institution that usually is known for new ideas and critique, and frankly, critique of any status quo, whichever political party exists, that’s almost the role of research and universities, is to look at what we have and say, “How can this be better? What isn’t working?” And I can’t think of a single time in history that there wasn’t something to critique at some point. So yeah, I think it’s a very straightforward, obvious strategy. You want less critique and you want less dissent, go after universities. And I would say to universities, don’t expect it to stop after one or two high profile cases. Most of the time, universities need to really band together and figure out what their approach is going to be collectively.

John: And we see some broader attacks on education and expertise and evidence in general, and that’s particularly troubling. One of the things economists have studied for quite a while is the impact of human capital investment, as you mentioned before, on economic development and research, going back to T.W. Schultz, to Gary Becker, and many other people have indicated that investment in education is one of the most important ways of encouraging economic development, and within a country, it’s one of the most effective ways of moving people out of poverty. And yet we’re seeing a general shift in public perceptions of higher ed, or education in general, where the public perception of the gains from higher ed had been falling pretty steadily for the last few years. And that’s kind of troubling. Why has this messaging which is so inconsistent with all the evidence, been so effective in changing public attitudes towards education.

Rebecca W.: So I’d be interested in your take too, because I see a couple of things mixing together. One is the runaway costs of higher education. So when parents, who are voters, [LAUGHTER] are doing the cost-benefit analysis of helping support their kid go get a college degree. So let’s talk about undergrad here. For a long time in this podcast, prior, we’ve been talking about really R and D and sort of graduate level, and really the sort of top-level research and innovation that comes from higher education institutions, but at a pure sort of undergraduate level, this cost of college is so burdensome. The fact that kids are coming out with undergraduate degrees and huge loans to try to repay in a job market where they can’t really sustain themselves and repay loans, I think, gives people a lot of pause. So I would put that very much on the shoulders of higher education themselves. That is something that a higher education sector needs to grapple with… should have addressed long ago… and it’s one of the reasons people are making the determination that it’s not worth it, because for many kids, it might not be. They might pay an arm and a leg and not actually get a super top quality experience and come out the other side, not markedly, massively better. Now, I would say, if they’re reasonable students, and they go to a reasonably good institution, they’re going to get a lot of benefits. We know that. But the other piece I think, and I think this is where we also can put this at the feet of the university and higher ed institutions to grapple with, is basically a runaway woke-ism that was frankly silly, [LAUGHTER] and there’s constant ridiculous stories of students in a classroom on Muslim art. I’m thinking of a particular case, I think it was in the Midwest, saying they were triggered by a picture of the Prophet Muhammad, and then the professor getting fired. And this is a class on Muslim art, and you don’t take the class. [LAUGHTER] So that’s really silly and ridiculous, and I think that is, at least in my experience teaching at Georgetown University, I never really saw that much of that. I think that these were sort of often the exceptions, but they are stupid, and it does also undermine freedom of thought and discussion, and people got pissed, rightly so, and they were used to create a narrative that our entire higher education institutions, or frankly, schools, were sort of overtaken by radical, woke ideologies. And I have to say, having visited many, many schools [LAUGHTER] for the work that Jenny and I did, maybe in some elite, private, sort of top of the line, suburb or urban schools, that might have been a problem. I did see that, but very, very rarely did I run into any, any of these issues that people were theoretically so worried about in just your run of the mill school in a rural community or an urban community in a sort of middle class or lower income neighborhood, very rarely. And also, I would say the same for my experiences, at least personal experiences, talking to students and visiting colleges at the higher ed level.

John: I think those cases were probably quite a bit the exception, that when you look at most courses, courses in computer science, classes in math, classes in science, classes in art and in general, just simply don’t address many of those sorts of cases that made it to Fox News and that got so widely disseminated. But going back to the other issue, the evidence that I’ve seen at least up until the last few years has been that the rate of return to a college education is still pretty much at historically high levels. Now that’s partly because college graduates do earn quite a bit more, but the other part of it is high school graduates and high school dropouts earn so much less today than they did 20 or 30 years ago, relatively. So for an average student, the gains to an education more than pay off. The place where the problems occur are for those students, and that’s a very large share of students who enter college but don’t graduate, but still leave with student debt. That’s a nationwide tragedy.

Rebecca W.: That is a very, very good point, and I’m glad you corrected me, because you’re totally right, and that’s what we have to guard against.

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

Rebecca W.: Well, I’m really hoping that we start connecting with each other, and I mean that universities start banding together, schools start communicating [LAUGHTER] with each other and saying, “No, education is important.” Education, obviously, I work in it, and I’m deeply passionate. I think education makes a huge difference in your life trajectory. I also think it makes a huge difference in our societies. Education is not just about math and reading, it’s about how you learn to live with other people, and how can we, especially now in a polarized community, make sure that education is about forging bridges, connecting with others and solving real problems.

John: Well, thank you. It’s always great talking to you, and we hope we can have future conversations on these and other topics.

Rebecca W.: Lovely to talk to you both too. Take care.

[MUSIC]

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.

[MUSIC]

406. AI: A Student Perspective

Posted in artificial intelligence, edtech, educational technology, equity, feedback, higher education, learning, teaching, Uncategorized
August 13, 2025

In past podcasts, we’ve often explored faculty concerns about student use of generative AI. In this episode, Kaija Hoyt joins us to discuss the evolution of her AI use. Kaija graduated from SUNY Oswego in May 2025 with a major in Human Resource Management and a minor in Mathematics. After graduation, Kaija provided a presentation on this topic to Oswego faculty and staff during an AI symposium.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: In past podcasts, we’ve often explored faculty concerns about student use of generative AI. In this episode, a student describes the evolution of her AI use.

[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 Kaija Hoyt. Kaija graduated from SUNY Oswego in May 2025 with a major in Human Resource Management and a minor in Mathematics. After graduation, Kaija provided a presentation during an AI symposium on our campus in which she discussed the evolution of her use of AI tools. Welcome back, Kaija.

Kaija: Thank you for having me again.

John: Today’s teas are:… Kaija, are you drinking any tea?

Kaija: I am not today because the room that I’m in right now is too small for me to store my tea. So it’s really sad because for this entire month I’ve been tealess. Yeah, it’s very unfortunate.

Rebecca: That is very, very horrible.

Kaija: Yeah.

Rebecca: I have English tea time today, John

John: And I’ve been without tea, but I picked up some tea at a Whole Foods across the street from Duke where I’m recording from, and I’ve got some ginger peach black tea, again, restoring one of my favorites.

Rebecca: Oh, look how it doesn’t matter where you are, [LAUGHTER] you can still drink the same tea. [LAUGHTER]

John: It’s so convenient. So we enjoyed that conversation we had with you in last week’s podcast on microaggressions, and we thought we’d bring you back for another discussion. And once again, this is based on a presentation you gave during a workshop for faculty on our campus, except this time you were talking about how your use of AI tools evolved. ChatGPT arrived on the scene in late November of your sophomore year and was rapidly adopted by many students. What was your initial reaction to ChatGPT and AI tools in general?

Kaija: I hated it. I was so mad that they had kind of become a thing. Because for me, who’s always been like a strong writer and a strong student, it kind of devalued that in a way, because a lot of students were using that, and their writing was about at the same level as mine, or stronger. And some professors were starting to maybe not realize that it was AI doing that, and expect me to write more of that standard. And I also didn’t like the idea of using it. I’ve always really wanted my work to be fully my own, and so when it was first coming about and other people were using that, I was just very strongly against it, and still to this day, to some extent, like, I’m not a huge fan of AI and the use of AI in a lot of environments, but for me, I wish it hadn’t come about when it first did.

Rebecca: I hear, though, that your position or reaction or response to generative AI has shifted a bit over time. Can you talk a little bit about what changed your opinion?

Kaija: Yeah, so I was very firm in the AI use all the way until, I would say, honestly, like the end of junior year, so pretty much like a solid year and a half of being anti AI. I had a professor, Dr. Friedman, who loves AI. He’s kind of obsessed with it in a good way. So in our classes with him, he really encourages the use of AI and gives us some ideas on how to use it. He was really passionate about “You could use it to help you with this part of an assignment.” Or, like, for example, with writing assignments, he would say, “you could use it to draft an outline for you and then build off the outline.” Or when we were doing our compensation project, he said, “help it come up with competencies for you, help it come up with the weights, it can help you with all of that.” So he pushed it pretty strongly. And that compensation class I took with him junior year in the beginning. And even though he was saying that and pushing that, and my group members were like, “Yeah, let’s use it. Let’s use it.” I was like, “Listen, if you want to use it, you can, but I’m not going to” like,” if that’s what you choose to do, fine, whatever. I don’t care, but I’m going to still steer away from it.” And then he also became my honor thesis advisor at about that same time, and that was when he started pushing AI at me even harder. And I kind of was like, “okay, whatever like, just to get you off my back, I’ll try it this one time.” And then I was like, “oh, you know what? That actually did help a lot.” So I started realizing, like, “okay, it’s really useful with things that are, like, the small work that you have to put into a project that doesn’t really have to come from you, like things that AI can do for you that will make it easier to do the project and will also leave more time for you to, like, brainstorm and be creative.” So it takes that monotonous part out of it, which ended up being really helpful, and it also is really good with writer’s block, I feel like, so that was kind of the thing that switched me, for the most part, to being okay with using AI.

John: Could you tell us a little bit about how you used it in your writing?

Kaija: Yeah, so in my honors thesis, I used it when I was having a hard time, like merging two ideas together with like getting it to flow, just having it give me ideas. I very rarely used what it gave me, because basically what I did was like, I would have it help me, and then that would spark an idea for me. Maybe it would give me a transition word, and then I’d be like, I should use furthermore here, that would work really well, or something like that. So it was more of like a jumping off point for brainstorming, but it also helped me a bit if I was struggling to paraphrase something, like getting it to what is another word that fits here? Because sometimes I know there’s a word, and I think I know what the word is, but I just can’t remember it in that moment. So it did help me a lot with that. I also used it with restructuring my thesis. Because when I got to a certain point, I don’t even remember what point this was, but there was a point when I was like, wait a minute, my outline doesn’t make any sense for what this has turned into. So I needed to, like, move things around. And that was really stressful, because at that point I was definitely over halfway done. So there was, like, a lot of paragraphs, there was a lot of information, and I kind of knew how I wanted to move it around, but I also wanted that feedback of, does this make sense? Are these transitions better? worse? the same? And I was trying not to put too much work on my advisors, because I knew they were both very busy at the time and I also really prefer to get their feedback after I know what I want, so that I don’t feel like I’m just doing what they tell me to do. I like to know this is how I want it to be, and then hear their feedback, and then go from there. So I used it to help me switch up that outline a little bit, and I didn’t take exactly what it told me, like this paragraph should go here. For some of it, I was like, “Yeah, that makes sense.” And for others, I was like, “Actually, I feel like this is a better transition,” but it helps me kind of be okay with making that change. So basically, it’s helped me in a lot of ways with writing, but it’s mostly just that starting point and getting me comfortable with what I’m doing, and then later on, it basically looks like AI didn’t help me at all because of how many changes I ended up making.

Rebecca: It sounds to me like some of the ways that you’ve been using AI are to find out what you don’t want, like to bring clarity. [LAUGHTER]

Kaija: Yep, a lot of the time, a lot of it is because there are things that AI wants or thinks that I hate, or just, I’m like, “That is not my writing style. I’m not going to do that.” So I do definitely use it in that way. Or like, sometimes if I give it a paragraph to proofread, and then I see how it wants to make that paragraph, and I’m like, that’s not what I’m trying to say. And it helps me be like, this is what I need to change to make it work. So I definitely used it in that way.

Rebecca: One other thing you mentioned was the writer’s block. And I don’t know any faculty or students that get writer’s block ever. So I’m asking for a friend. How were you using it to overcome writer’s block? You hinted at a little bit, but could you give some more specifics?

Kaija: Yeah. So one of the big things is if, for example, I at one point was going to talk a bit about some psychological theories that relate to microaggressions, and Dr. Friedman had suggested that I cover that at some point in the thesis. He’d given me some brief explanations of different theories he thought would apply, like he gave me a lot to build off of, but I didn’t feel great about writing it, because I’m not really a psychology person, and so I asked AI for some help. One, it helped me find sources, but it also helped me with figuring out how to work that into my thesis and starting the writing. So I told it what Dr. Friedman wanted, and then it kind of gave me, like, “you could do this.” And so then I was able to figure out, okay, from that, what do I want to do? It’s also really good with brainstorming outlines and ideas for projects, because sometimes you just get stuck and you can’t think outside the box at all. Usually, in my experience, like I’ll ask it to brainstorm something, and I won’t really love the answers it gives me or the ideas, but it’ll spark something else. It’s like, if you talk to someone else about it and they gave you a bunch of ideas, except you don’t have to find someone who wants to talk to you about it. You can just ask it, and it’ll word vomit some things at you, and then you can be like, “Okay, I know what I want to do now.”

Rebecca: An introvert’s dream.

John: And also, if you’re doing some work at two or three in the morning, it might be easier to have that conversation with ChatGPT than to wake someone up and ask them to give you feedback. One of the other things you mentioned was that the type of feedback you were getting on your writing was different than the type of feedback that people get from Grammarly and other tools, because with Grammarly, which students have been using for quite a while now, it’ll tell you what to change, but it won’t explain why it should be changed. I think you were getting a little bit more information from ChatGPT in terms of the types of recommendations it would use, and that also ended up affecting the writing that you did later during your thesis. Could you talk a little bit about this?

Kaija: Yeah, so one of the main differences for me personally was occasionally I was looking for grammar checks, but that wasn’t my main focus, because grammar and spelling, like, I’m good on that, and mine is more like, “How can I just make it even better?” So I feel like Grammarly can do that, but yeah, like you said, It never tells you why it’s doing it. I also find Grammarly a little bit annoying, because it just yells at you about everything, and that’s not what I want. Like there’s specific things that I’m looking to fix, and you can’t tell it that, whereas with ChatGPT, you can be like, “Hey, check this paragraph to see if I used also 50 times instead of mixing it with different words.” Or one of the things that I did with it was in my thesis on microaggressions and talking about the trainings that I was proposing, I wanted it to be trainings (plural) consistently, because that’s what made sense for what I was writing. But a lot of the time Google and Grammarly, whatever, really wants it to be singular, which makes sense, but in the context that I was using it, it needed to be plural, even though it thought it was wrong. So I’ve used it in one way with that to be like, “Hey, if you see it, say training singular anywhere like highlight that or call that out so I can fix it.” Another thing, this isn’t a real example for me, but I know some people will start a sentence “although this” and then they never finish, like the last part, so you can tell it look for those situations, and it can highlight them for you. Another thing that I did was there’s like, active/passive voice, I tend to forget to check that, and also really struggle with like when I reread something to check for that, sometimes I just get distracted by something else and I forget what I’m looking for. So I tell it, like, call out those moments, and then I could see it. And then over time, like, the more it was like, “You need to fix this, you need to fix this, the less I made that mistake. So it was really more of a learning thing for me with figuring out, like, “Okay, what are the problems in my writing and what is the way to do it better?” And then, like, I would say by the end of the thesis, like, I wasn’t really using it that much, because most of the problems that I was having I figured out what I was doing wrong and how I should do it better.

Rebecca: Based on some of your examples, I’m thinking other examples that fall into the same category, or maybe, like, checks for first and third person, other things like that that we all make mistakes on when you’re initially writing a draft.

Kaija: Yeah, for sure. I think if it’s one of those things where you maybe are someone who writes… this is really good for students, because I know there’s a lot of students who like to write in the first person… I think it would be awesome if professors who notice, like, “Hey, you’re someone who has a really hard time getting rid of those ‘I’s’ like you love to write. ‘I think that,’ or ‘I believe,’ showing them how to use ChatGPT to help you reword it could be really helpful,” because it’s not that they want to submit it with the ‘I’ in there. It’s just that they don’t realize there’s a better way to do it.” And the more that you have something telling you this is the better way, like, the more likely you are to catch on and to learn it. And a lot of times, professors don’t really take the time to do that with students. They just say, like, “don’t use I,” but students don’t understand how to not do it. So they really need that assistance with the teaching on that part.

Rebecca: One thing, Kaija, that you mentioned earlier was telling ChatGPT, like, “No, I don’t agree with you. [LAUGHTER] I want you to focus on this in a way that you felt like tools like Grammarly couldn’t do that.” And I know that that’s something I enjoy doing too, like telling the machine, “No, do it this way instead. Try this instead.” Can you talk a little bit more about some of the iterations you were able to accomplish using ChatGPT?

Kaija: Yeah. So with different iterations, I would definitely say there were, especially with the structure piece. So trying to restructure it, I think I changed the structure a couple times. And one of the things that I started with, figured out the main ideas of my paragraphs, gave it that, and said, “What order makes the most sense?” And then it did whatever it did. And I was like, “Actually, you don’t realize what the paragraph really includes. So you don’t understand. I don’t agree.” So then I gave it more information. So instead of just like this paragraph defines microaggressions, I really summarized it a little bit deeper. So that was one of the things where I kind of went through a couple different attempts with it and got it to understand what I wanted. Another thing that happened, this is, like, less related to it proofing my writing, and more related to, like, the output it gave me. So one time, I gave it a paper because I had proofread it twice, and I was tired of staring at it, and I knew that there were mistakes, and I just couldn’t find them, so I gave it the paper, and I said, “Don’t edit it,” because I gave it the paper the first time and said, proofread this, whatever prompt I used for it, something along the lines of like, proofread this. And then it gave me the essay rewritten how it would write it. And I was like, “No, don’t do that. Don’t rewrite it. Just tell me what is wrong with it. Tell me what needs to be fixed.” And then I don’t even remember what that output was, but I was like, that’s not really what I want. So then I said, “Okay, without changing anything, just tell me what the strengths of this are, what the weaknesses are, and what things are just clunky.” And then it gave me a very broken down, “These are the parts that are strong. And then a couple of quotes of examples. And then these are the areas that could be improved.” And then if, with the improvements, I needed help with, like, how do I do that? Then I can ask it that, like, “Well, how do I make this more concise?” And it would give me examples.

John: When you gave that presentation to faculty, one of the other things you talked about was using this to help prepare you in your math classes. Can you talk a little bit about how you use ChatGPT to support your learning in math.

Kaija: Yeah. So it was in my introduction to algebra class, which started off a little rough for me. I was having a really hard time paying attention in class for the first, I want to say, like a month, and that first test came around, and it’s not go well at all, which is very strange for me, because I usually do really well in math. So that was, like, a big blow for my ego. And I was like, “Yikes. Okay, this is a problem.” So I started paying more attention in class, and that helped. And I was doing the homeworks and starting to understand them, but the first stuff that we had learned, like, kind of I knew, like, “I just really don’t get this, and I don’t know if I’m going to if I just keep going in the class.” So we had a textbook, but it was one of those textbooks where it’s like, the professor uses the textbook, but not really, so it doesn’t directly match up. It’s not like Calc I and II, where you are literally doing your homework out of the textbook, and the textbook follows the same path that the class does, like this class in the textbook were different enough that it made it kind of challenging to find practice problems in the textbook. And the other thing is that practice problems in the textbook are not always what you’re looking for, and there’s no way to like, filter them out, like, you just have to stare at it and find the one you want. You can’t be like, “Well, I’m looking for how to do mod eight.” You have to find that in the massive answers that there are. And the professor did give homework, but I think we had like one a week, and there was only like six to eight questions each. And I’m very used to math classes where you have like 20 questions for a night at minimum, although those are usually optional, but I do them because I love math. So it was kind of odd for me. And I was like, “Why are we not doing more?” And I also, in addition to the fact that I was struggling, like I also wanted to do more with it, I really enjoyed it. So I went to ChatGPT, and I was like, “I feel like this could help me.” So I kind of told it what the class was, told it what I was learning, and then said, “Do you understand what this topic is?” And it was like, “Yes, I can give you practice questions.” So then I would tell it, “Okay, can you give me a question on Z/8?” and then it would give me something, and then I could do it. This is the one that I had a problem with. It was that I told it like, “I just want you to say whether it’s right or wrong. That’s it. Give me the question, I’ll tell you the answer, and you say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and then if you say ‘no,’ then I’ll be like, ‘Okay, walk me through it.’” But it just kept giving me the whole thing anyway, even though I told it, like five times, so I just gave up. So that was kind of how I used it for mostly getting practice problems. And there were also sometimes, if there was a concept that I was struggling with, I would have it kind of walk me through it. And honestly, it’s pretty impressive how well it did with this class, because this is like a higher level math class. I did not expect it to understand it, but it really was good at walking me through like how to solve it. And then from that, I was able to create my own understanding of what to do with some of these problems.

Rebecca: Kaija, what class was this in?

Kaija: Introduction to algebra, which sounds easy, but it’s Math 330 and it’s not like solving simple algebra equations. It’s like abstract algebra concepts.

Rebecca: I kept thinking that doesn’t sound like intro to algebra. [LAUGHTER]

John: When you were getting these problems, one of the things you noted when you gave a presentation describing this was that you learned how to modify your prompts a bit to get more useful feedback. Could you talk a little bit about what sort of modifications you made to get more useful results from ChatGPT?

Kaija: I, for one, kind of learned how to get better at telling it what kind of problems I wanted, because I started off with being like, “Can you give me an example of something like asking whether or not it’s a homomorphism?” I gave it no context, so it didn’t know what types of groups we learned about and what types we didn’t. So one time it gave me this group that I honestly was like, “I don’t even know what that is. Never heard of it.” So then I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna start telling it like, these are the groups we know. Give me an example from there.” So that was for the practice poems it gave me, and then when it gave me the feedback on whether it was right or wrong. If it was a time when I was like, “Okay, I actually need this feedback because I didn’t do it right or I could just then I would read through what it gave me,” and then I would give it follow up questions of, like, “Okay, here’s where I’m stuck with your explanation, L I don’t know what this means.” Or “Can you clarify this more,” which sometimes it would just regurgitate the same thing. So then I had to figure out a different way that I can phrase this to get the part that I’m confused about out of it.” So asking, like, “Okay, I don’t understand where this Z came from. Why is there a z here?” instead of just, like, “What does this mean?” because if you just say, “What does this mean?” it’s just going to throw the same thing at you, and it’s not going to help.

Rebecca: So I’m kind of wondering, given the experiences that you’ve had in using ChatGPT in some really different contexts, how would you like to see faculty talk about AI in their classes, or what parameters or ideas do you think would be helpful for other students to understand how it might actually be a productive way of learning in a class?

Kaija: I have very strong feelings about that, so I’m glad you asked. For me, I think that it was really helpful having a professor who said, “This is how you should use it. This is the ways that it can help you in this class specifically, and I’m not going to penalize you for using it in those ways.” That really is what helped me, like, be open to using AI. And I know, not for me because I was anti-AI, but for other students who can’t seem to get away from using it, when a professor is just like, blanket no AI policy. You’re not allowed to use it like they just decide to entirely ignore the AI policy because they don’t care. They don’t know how to learn without it. And they’re so dependent on it that if you don’t provide them a way to use it productively and without plagiarizing, then they just can’t move away from it, and obviously some students are always going to use it to write their papers for them. I’m not saying that this is going to solve that problem totally, but I think that there are a lot of students out there who, if you say to them, “Hey, I’m okay with you using it to make the outline,” or “I’m okay with you using it to help you proofread,” or something like that, and showing them like these are the ways that you can use it without it becoming an academic integrity problem, then they are going to be more likely to actually put that work in alone, because a lot of it is like, they just don’t know where to start. They don’t know what to do. They’ve got writer’s block, and there’s a deadline, and so they’re just like, I’m just going to have it write it for me. But I don’t know for sure, because I wasn’t super close with the people that were in my senior seminar HR class, but Dr. Friedman said in that class for our paper that we had like “You can ask ChatGPT for an outline, and you can build off of that. You can ask it for assistance in writing this paper. You can ask it for sources.” And I’m pretty sure that a lot of students in the class really took that and did that and used AI responsibly and still submitted mostly their own work, whereas with other professors, I noticed them just kind of having it write it for them, or things like that. And I know that, like a lot of the time in the tutoring center, if I have a student come in for writing who is clearly someone who’s really dependent on AI, I try to give them that overview of like, if you use it in this way, A) you’re safe and B) this will help you in the future as well. And it seems to work. So that’s a small example. So I don’t really know, but it does seem to be really helpful to be clear about like, these are good ways to use it, these are bad ways to use it. Instead of just saying all of it’s bad, you can’t use it at all.

John: So during your time at Oswego, I think you had five semesters during which AI has been available to all students. How often, though, did professors talk to the students about whether AI could be used, when it should be used, and why it might be inappropriate to use it in other areas? Was that a conversation that happened very often?

Kaija: So I would say I had the one professor who talked about it lot. I had probably one or two professors who really consistently called out, like, please do not use AI in my class. If I catch you using it, I will fail you. And then I would say it’s hard with math, because math professors don’t really talk about AI very much, which is mostly because it can’t really do that much with math, because it’s really easy to catch it, because it hallucinates a lot when it’s math, and honestly, it will take more of your time to use it in a math class to, like, do your homework for you if you’re trying to get a good grade. So they don’t talk about it a ton, but they do say they have their policy of don’t cheat, and that includes AI use, things like that. And then in my other classes, I think most of them had it in the syllabus, like you are not allowed to use AI in this class, that that would lead to a failing grade and being reported to the dean. But if they even said anything about it, they only addressed it, like on the day that they went over the syllabus, and then they would just not talk about it again. So I think a lot of them, like, just put the policy on there because they feel more comfortable with that and they don’t really want to have to address it. That’s kind of the vibe that I’ve gotten. So I would say it’s like, mostly just this thing that, like, you know you’re not supposed to do, but you also don’t really know what’s going on with it, at least in the School of Business.

Rebecca: You’ve talked a bit about math and you were just pointing out the hallucination issue with math problems, and because you were doing practice problems and things with it, how often did you find the hallucinations bubbling up in your use?

Kaija: So surprisingly, it didn’t happen as much because it was more conceptual things than computational, but there were a couple things that were computational that I used it for, and that’s when I found it hallucinating. One of them was I was practicing the product of cycles, and I’m pretty confident in this, but I just wanted to practice it because the final was coming up, and you never know. So I was going through, I think it was the second or third example with it, and I did the multiplication the way that I knew was correct, and I got the answer that I knew was correct, and I told it, this is what I got. And it said, that’s wrong. So then I looked through the output that it gave me of it’s step-by-step, and it’s step-by-step didn’t make any sense. I don’t know what it was doing. I don’t know what happened, because it was working fine before that. I do suspect that it’s possible that it had been right when I’d run out of the like higher-level questions, and it switched me to the lower level, and that’s why it happened, but I don’t know that for sure. And so I got to the end of it, and I was like, “No, I’m definitely right. I don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s wrong.” So I basically told it that. I said, “Your answer is wrong, my answer is right. I don’t know what you did, but that’s what it is.” And so then it responded to that, and was like, “Yeah, you’re right. You got the right answer.” But then, like, it’s calculation, it had the answer, it had before, and then it had my answer, and then it said, “Yeah, so you’re right.” It was like, 123, so 345, and I was like, [LAUGHTER] that doesn’t make any sense. So I did stop checking my answers with it at that point with those because I was like, you don’t know what you’re doing, but that is the only time that happened with the higher-level algebra. I have seen it do funny things with lower-level math classes, like regular algebra or calculus, because I’ve used it for fun with that, just to, like experiment and see if I can get it to hallucinate, because I think it’s funny. [LAUGHTER] And it definitely has happened a couple times with that, which is a little bit interesting, that it can just kind of end up in places. And I’ve also found that if you tell it like it’s wrong, it doesn’t even care if it’s actually wrong, it just decides that it is. And so that is probably part of the problem, is people being convinced that they’re right, and so they’re training it that this other thing is true and it’s not. So it’s pretty confused on things like that. And I think that’s the other thing that I think is why it worked better for introduction to algebra, because I don’t think there’s a lot of people going to ChatGPT for that. So I think it really just had that database of whatever it found when it was first started, and less of that user input that can make it more incorrect.

John: One of the things you described just a few minutes ago was using ChatGPT to get more practice problems, especially in classes where there’s not enough practice problems to make you feel comfortable. Is this something that perhaps students should do more regularly or more often? Use it to help develop skills when they’re not getting practice problems that are relevant to their own areas. When instructors give assignments with a group of problems they’re generic problems that are designed to address the needs of all students, but every student comes in with very different backgrounds in terms of what they understand and what they don’t. Were you able to use this to help develop those areas where you weren’t as comfortable with and not having to spend that much time on those areas that you were more comfortable with?

Kaija: Yeah, so it’s totally adaptable to what I needed, and with what I said about I fell behind because I wasn’t with it at the beginning. So it was something where it’s like, we’re not going to have more practice problems. We left this way back there. It can still show up on the final but we’re not talking about it anymore, whereas he’s still giving us practice problems for whatever we’re working on now, and so I would do that homework, but that was something that I was like getting. So instead of spending extra time on that, I would just go do the areas that I needed, and I didn’t, in this context, but you can have it figure out on its own what areas it is that you’re struggling with, and then it can just throw those questions at you, because you don’t have to tell it: “Give me a question on homomorphism.” So you can say, “Give me a question that would appear on an introduction to algebra test.” And for the most part, it’s good, especially the more information you feed it. And then if you work through, and you work through, it starts to catch on, like, this is where you’re struggling, and this is where you’re set. So it can really modify to you in the same way that your professor would at office hours, without you needing to go to office hours and figure out that schedule with them, because our times usually don’t match.

John: When you presented this, a math instructor asked, “Why didn’t you just go and talk to the instructor with questions?” And you gave a really good response that I think would resonate with a lot of people. How did you respond to that question?

Kaija: So I basically said that for me as a student, I’m a very independent learner, and I also don’t like to ask for help, and so going to office hours is really difficult for me from that side of it, and I personally am someone who would rather spend two hours on a math problem than have anyone or anything help me with it, like I really want to figure it out on my own. That’s something that’s really important to me, and so the more help that I get with it, the less satisfied I am when I solve it. And one of the things that I really like about AI versus a human in that is like with your professor, they don’t really know what pace you learn at, and they don’t really know what specific spot you’re stuck on. And so with a professor like they might just either show me the whole problem or do it in that way where they’re trying to get me to figure it out, which are both great methods, but it’s not necessarily what I’m looking for in that situation all of the time. And so with AI, what I can do is I can do my steps and say, “Okay, this is where I’m stuck,” and then just see what’s the next thing. Or, like, “give me a hint on something small,” which professors sometimes are really good about that. The professor for this class was actually great with that. There was a couple questions that I went to him with, because I’m not going to use AI to solve the math problems. Also, it doesn’t know what it’s doing. So I would go to him and be like, “I’m really stuck, can you give me a hint?” And he would do that, which is great. But when it comes to a practice problem, I don’t want to go in and be like, “Can you give me a bunch of practice problems and sit there and solve them?” So there was that. I also feel like, for me, with the way that my schedule has been because I’m an overworker, so I tend to be like, overloading on credits, working two jobs and running a bunch of student organizations. I don’t have time to go into a professor’s office hours. I could send them an email, but a lot of the time, I find that communication to just be a little bit ineffective. We’re on different time schedules, so when you reply to me, I might not be able to reply for a bit. So there’s that side of it too, where, like, I’m not available during your office hours. I’m honestly not available when you’re awake, most likely. So I can’t really make that work. And so a lot of the time, it’s easier to have something that’s available whenever I have that five minutes to work on a problem, instead of like, “Oh, I have five minutes, let me email them and see if, in this five minutes, they can give me practice problems.” So there was that as well. And then, especially for students like me who struggle with anxiety, going to talk to your professor is like, one of the hardest things that you will ever have to do in college. Like, it’s just really intimidating. And if you don’t feel close to them already, it’s really hard, at least for me, to go into their office and have that one-on-one interaction. With professors that I bonded with throughout the class, throughout the year, like at the end of the year, sure, I’ll go to your office hours, but at the beginning of the year, when I don’t really know you yet and I’m not comfortable around you, that’s just too difficult for me, and so having AI there as a backup and as an extra resource is really helpful.

Rebecca: Thanks for sharing those. I think those are hard things sometimes for students to articulate and say, but I think it’s a common experience for a lot of students. I think one thing that you’ve pointed out, and I’m really curious how you got there, was being able to fully articulate what exactly you needed. So because you were able to say, “this is what I need” to the tool you could get what you needed. But sometimes people aren’t quite at that point, and you hinted at maybe there was times when you weren’t quite sure what you needed. Can you talk a little bit about how you develop some of those skills to be able to articulate what you need?

Kaija: Yeah, so I like to say that I’m a pretty self-aware person, so that certainly helps, like, I am a little bit better at being like, “Okay, this is an area that I’m struggling” or I know what I need right now, but there are obviously times when I’m like, “I have no idea.” So sometimes I had AI help me with it, like I would tell it, maybe just throw things at it, just like word vomit into it, and then have it be like, “Okay, this is what it looks like your problem is,” because it somehow can pick that out. But also sometimes it was like, just using my resources, so looking back through tests or the homework and figuring out where did I get stuck there, and really diving into it and thinking deeply about like, “Okay, I know I can’t solve this problem, but why can’t I solve it? What is it that I’m confused? Do I just not know the definition? Or is it I’m halfway through the problem and I just can’t get to the next step?” So it’s really a lot of kind of talking to yourself. For me, I do that out loud, and it really helps. But just like, having that conversation with yourself about, like, “Okay, let’s really think about this problem, and let’s really think about what part of it is confusing,” or “Let’s think about this class as a whole, and why are my grades not as high as they should be? Where is that problem?” So, like, part of it for me, like I said before, was really just that I wasn’t paying attention in class, and that is something AI can’t help me with. AI cannot help me study for a class if I don’t even know what’s going on in the class. So that was something that I had to be like, “Okay, this is a me problem, and I need to figure out a way to fix it so that then I can use AI as a supplemental resource.”

John: One of the things that’s been in the news a lot are student and sometimes parent reactions to faculty using AI to generate questions, problem sets, and other things. How do students react, in general, to faculty use from what you’ve heard from other students and your own reactions?

Kaija: Honestly, I haven’t heard a crazy amount about it. I think that for the most part we get it. We’re like, “hey, whatever.” I mean, as long as you’re still teaching us, as long as we’re still learning like, “it’s okay that you’re using it,” but where we get stuck is, “how come you can use it to teach us, but we can’t use it to teach ourselves?” That is the part that bothers me. I’m totally okay with you using AI to help you generate the syllabus, generate the questions that you’re going to ask, the learning objectives, like, that’s fine. I don’t really care. But if you can do it, then why can’t I? And to me, it makes that gap between us more. I understand that the professor is above me and standing like, that’s fine. I’m okay with that, but I want, at the same time to feel as respected by them as I’m supposed to respect them. And so when you say, like, “Well, I can use it because I know how to use it responsibly, but I don’t trust you to use it responsibly.” That’s where I kind of have a problem, where it’s like you need to respect students in the same way that you would expect them to respect you. So if you want your students to be okay with you using AI to assist you with the learning objectives, the curriculum, whatever it is, then you also need to be okay with students using it to assist them.

Rebecca: Well Kaija, this has been really great, but we always wrap up by asking, “what’s next?”

Kaija: Yeah, so who knows? So, as I said on the last one, I’m moving to North Dakota. I do have an apartment set up. So moving in on the 15th of August, which is exciting, still looking for a job, which is terrifying. Currently, hopefully I’m going to have one. I’m going in for like, the third round of interviews. So that’s hopefully a good sign with one company, and otherwise, I’m just really, really hoping to do something in human resources out in North Dakota for a couple years and then hopefully come back here.

John: Well, it’s been great talking to you, and we really appreciate your willingness to join us for these two conversations. And we hope everything goes well.

Kaija: Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah. Best wishes on your job search.

Kaija: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes 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.

[MUSIC]

405. Microaggressions

Posted in classroom community, diversity, engagement, equity, gender bias, higher education, inclusion, learning, stereotype threat
August 6, 2025

Microaggressions interfere with the learning process and damage class community. In this episode, Kaija Hoyt joins us to provide a student’s perspective on microaggressions and strategies to address them. Kaija graduated from SUNY Oswego in May 2025 with a major in Human Resource Management and a minor in Mathematics. She completed an honors thesis on “Mitigating Microaggressions in the Workplace.” and recently provided a workshop presentation on microaggressions to SUNY-Oswego faculty and staff.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Microaggressions interfere with the learning process and damage class community. In this episode, we explore a student’s perspective on microaggressions and strategies to address them.

[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]

John: Our guest today is Kaija Hoyt. Kaija graduated from SUNY Oswego in May 2025 with a major in Human Resource Management and a minor in Mathematics. She completed an honors thesis on “Mitigating Microaggressions in the Workplace.” and recently provided a workshop presentation on microaggressions to SUNY-Oswego faculty and staff. Welcome Kaija.

Kaija: Thank you for having me.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: Kaija, are you drinking tea with us today?

Kaija: Yes, I have a chai tea today.

Rebecca: Oh, nice. Are you drinking some tea today, John?

John: I have a ginger peach green tea today.

Rebecca: Nice. I am drinking Harsha black tea today.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss microaggressions in the context of higher ed Could you start by defining what a microaggression is?

Kaija: Sure, so microaggressions are commonplace slights or insults. They’re usually subtle, ambiguous and unintentional, and they’re based on marginalized social identities. So if you don’t know what a marginalized social identity is, it’s usually something related to historically marginalized groups or minority groups. So African Americans, Jewish, if you’re female, if you identify as non binary, or transgender, if you’re gay, anything like that is a marginalized social identity, and that’s what micro aggressions are usually based on. They can also be statements, behaviors, actions, anything of that sort. So it’s not necessarily words that are said. It can also just be behaviors that happen.

Rebecca: Can you share some examples of microaggressions that students might experience in a classroom environment, from either faculty or from other students?

Kaija: Sure. So there’s a lot of them, and there’s a lot of research and sources out there, if people want to look up more, you can easily find them. But some main ones would be professors maybe only calling on the male students in the class, or when choosing groups, maybe the white identifying students all join one group and leave people of other races to join their own group. You could also have like in a group project, sometimes the male students won’t listen to the female students’ opinions, or during a presentation they’ll speak over the female students things like that. So basically, any situation where a professor or student is just treating someone else like they don’t belong in the classroom, or that their opinion is not valid, and they can happen in any situation in the classroom.

John: Have you experienced any microaggressions during your time here at SUNY Oswego, and if so, could you tell us about it?

Kaija: Oh, yes, so many. It’s very unfortunate how often they happen. But they are unintentional, so it’s not surprising that they happen a lot. One of the biggest ones that I experienced in my time at SUNY Oswego actually happened to me, I think, freshman year, so it was very early on… kind of set the tone for my experience… was with a professor repeatedly asking me about my name. Could never say it right, like the entire semester, he never got it right. He didn’t get it right a single time, even though I told him multiple times, they gave him plenty of tricks to remember it, and he didn’t, he didn’t get it. But then he kept asking me where I was from, and I’m from New York, [LAUGHTER] a born and raised New Yorker. And so I kept telling him that, but he didn’t seem to believe it. And he kept asking me over and over again. And then he would ask, like, where are your parents from? Things like that, which kind of suggested to me that he didn’t think that I belong in America, that my name meant that I couldn’t be American, and that just really negatively impacted my experience in that classroom. I did not participate much in that class, and I didn’t really want to talk to him.

Rebecca: Can you talk about some of the harms that result from microaggressions?

Kaija: Yeah, so there’s multiple sides to the problems that come from microaggressions, there’s physical, mental, if it’s in a workplace, there’s the work effects, and then there’s also the academic impacts. So from a mental standpoint, it increases depression, anxiety, stress, sleep deprivation, suicidal ideation, substance abuse, all of those really negative things that people experience that really impact their mental health, which then impacts every aspect of their life, and especially when you’re someone from a marginalized group or multiple marginalized groups, and they happen so often to you, so many times, it really builds up and creates these negative ideas. You feel like you don’t belong. Your self esteem is less, and things like that. Then, from a physical standpoint, this is the part that’s really shocking to me, is that it actually impacts your physical health as well. So it can lead to higher blood pressure and increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Those are things that are obviously not good for your physical health, and they don’t lead to long-term life and things like that, so it’s really detrimental in those ways. And then there’s also the academic impacts. So for students, when they’re experiencing them from other students and from professors, they’ll participate less in class. They might not go to class because they don’t feel safe in the classroom. They won’t complete assignments. They may be afraid to share their opinions and discussion board posts or anything like that, and their performance overall will just decrease, which hurts their grades and hurts just their learning as well.

John: So earlier you mentioned the groups of students who are most likely to be affected, these also seem to be the groups that are most likely to be subject to stereotype threat and other barriers that can interfere with their progress in school. What impact does this have on the prospect of people graduating or being successful in their programs?

Kaija: So microaggressions are probably one of the many reasons that people from marginalized identities struggle more in college. So they already have a bunch of setbacks that come from discrimination and systemic things like that, but microaggressions make it even harder for them, because they’re already pushing through so much and now they feel like they don’t belong. Definitely, I’m sure, it decreases the graduation rates and things like that. And even if they do graduate, they probably didn’t get as high of grades as other students. So a lot of the times you’ll see, like at any school, that it’s primarily white men who are graduating from the school at microaggressions are probably a big impact on that.

Rebecca: How should faculty respond when they may have committed a microaggression, obviously, not intentionally? What’s the best way for them to respond? Or really, anyone who might be in a position of power?

Kaija: Yeah. So if someone comes to you and says that you committed a microaggression, the first thing you want to do is make sure that you’re not getting defensive about it, because it’s not an attack on your character. Everyone commits microaggressions, and they have negative impacts, but it doesn’t make you a horrible person because you committed them. It was probably unintentional and you didn’t know. So the main thing is keeping calm, stopping yourself from being defensive, and making sure that you’re open to the feedback that they’re providing you. So once you come and get yourself in that head space of like, okay, this is not an attack. I can listen to what they’re saying. You want to make sure that you’re actually listening to what they tell you about how it affected them, things like that. Be empathetic. Think about times when maybe microaggressions were committed against you, or when you’ve been excluded in any context, and then the main thing is committing to change. So you want to make sure that you’re showing that student or colleague, or whoever it is, that you hear them, you understand the problem and you’re going to do better moving forward. So if it’s that example with the professor that I had who kept asking me where I’m from, like, if I’d brought that to his attention and said, “Hey, this is a problem, because it makes me feel excluded, it suggests that I can’t belong here,” then he would need to commit to saying, like, “Okay, in the future, if I have a question about “where someone’s from, I’ll only ask it once, or I just want to ask it at all,” something like that, and then making sure that you follow up later and you check in with that person, you say, “Hey, how are you doing? Are you doing okay? Is there anything else I can do to help you deal with the situation?” Apologize, be honest. If you said it and you regret it, you tell them that, be like, “Hey, I’m really sorry I didn’t know. But moving forward, I’ll be more conscious of things like that, and I won’t say those things or do those things.” So that’s the main part, I would say, is just being honest, open, and committing to that change.

John: When students are faced with microaggression, though, do they always let the person committing them know? What might be a good response from the person who’s a target of a microaggression?

Kaija: We usually don’t say anything, especially in the classroom, because there is that power dynamic. So I know for me, when it happened with that professor, I never said anything to him because I didn’t feel safe talking to him about it, nor did I think that he cared, because he didn’t seem like he would have made any adjustments. So there are situations where you shouldn’t say anything. It’s not safe, or it’s not going to help. But when it does feel safer, when you think, “Okay, this is something important.” Maybe it’s a professor you’re going to have three or four times. So you might want to say something in that situation. You’ve got to decide whether to say something first, because, like I said, it’s not always safe, but once you do make that decision, you can either say something in the moment, if it’s safe situation, if it’s a one-on-one, something like that, or you can say something later. A lot of the times, I think for students, it’s probably safer to say something later, because you don’t want to have to stand up in front of the whole class and address it, right? So being aware that you don’t have to address it in the moment. You can address it later on, is really helpful. And just explaining to them the problem and how they can move forward in a better way, act better in the future, maybe not say those things, things like that, is really important for students.

John: Sometimes microaggressions, though, come from other students during a discussion where someone will say something that is offensive to some of the other people in the class. How should faculty members respond if there is that sort of student-to-student microsggression that occurs in class in real time.

Kaija: Yeah, so that’s tricky, because every situation is different, but I would say if it’s a whole class discussion and one student says something that is harmful to another student or is a microaggression, professors should speak up in that moment, but in a way that doesn’t attack the student who said it, but maybe just to remind everyone that, “hey, this is a safe space, and we need to respect each other and respect each other’s differences,” something like that would be very good. And then I would say, maybe after class or at a later date, talk to that student one on one, and explain to them why what they said was a problem, because, again, it’s usually unintentional. They don’t know that what they said is an issue. If it’s more of a small group discussion that you like overhear it happen, then I would say right there, you can really sit down with them and have a conversation and let them know like what they said was wrong and why, because it’s not like you’re calling them out in front of the whole class, because that’s really important, to not call someone out in front of a large group of people, because they will get defensive, and it’s not productive. And then the really important part is after you want to check in with the target of the microaggression, so the student who experienced it, or the student that it was aimed at, make sure that they’re doing okay, and that they know that you’re there to support them, and that you will do your best to keep the classroom a safe space for them, and then also ask them, like, is there anything that you can do better to stop that from happening in the class? Because they probably know better than you will what needs to be changed.

John: You mentioned creating a safe space and reminding people that this is a safe space. Is that something perhaps that all instructors should do at the start of classes to help set the environment for good discussions and let people know that there may be issues coming up that you might be offended by or you might be troubled by, and it’s always important to voice that concern. Would that be helpful to help set the stage and reminding them that any critiques should be of what’s said and not of the person per se.

Kaija: Yes, absolutely, so I would say in the syllabus or in the day when you’re going over the syllabus, to make it very clear to students that your classroom is a safe space, that everyone is welcome and that it is not acceptable to be excluding anyone for any reason, being upfront with that is really important, setting that tone. But I also think it does depend on the class. So for example, if it’s a gender and women’s studies class, that class is probably going to have a lot more of these difficult issues being brought up. So that class may be diving deeper into it. These are the topics we’re going to be discussing, it is going to be hard conversations, things like that versus in more of a math class, not as applicable, but still good to say. Like everyone’s opinion is valid. Anyone can participate in this class. You don’t have to be good at math to participate in this class, things like that, so that everyone knows that they’re all safe in the classroom and setting that tone for other students like you need to be respectful to your classmates.

Rebecca: It strikes me, as you’re talking that there’s often fear or an unwillingness to confront the person who might have committed a microaggression. I wonder what the role of a bystander could be or should be, because they may also not feel empowered to speak up. But what are some ways that a bystander might actually be able to support folks in a situation like this.

Kaija: Yeah, so becoming an ally is really important. When you witness a microaggression, when you see something like that happen, you want to be there for the target. Maybe you’re another professor, so you maybe don’t have that power dynamic, and you feel comfortable going to the person that committed it and saying something. Definitely do that. But if you’re another student and you don’t feel safe addressing it with the professor, just go to the target and talk to them about it, let them know like I saw what happened, if you want to discuss it, I’m here like I understand that that may have been hurtful or upset you in any way. If you need that support. I’m here for you, but it is really awesome if you feel safe doing it to say something to the professor, because that really helps the target to feel safer, to feel included, and it reverses the negative impacts from microaggressions. So instead of them walking away feeling excluded in the classroom, they’ll feel more included. It will prevent those negative mental and physical health problems and probably improve their academic performance, because they feel safe. So in any way that you can support someone who’s struggling with microaggressions, experiencing them a lot, it’s really just be there for them, and that’ll help them a lot.

John: So we’ve been mostly talking about things that are said in the classroom, but more and more classes are being taken online in asynchronous modes. Might the same sort of things occur in online discussion forums, for example? And if so, how should they be addressed then?

Kaija: Yeah, they definitely can, especially in a class like a gender and women’s studies class or I took a management diversity class of some sort, that we did have a lot of those tough conversations. We even talked about microaggressions in those classes, and there are students who don’t understand them and say things in the discussion posts that aren’t very inclusive. So as another student, what I sometimes will do is I will sometimes respond to those posts, and kind of in a very polite and respectful way, explain to them that what they’re saying is a problem, and in a way that tries to not make them feel attacked, but more just an educational, but professors definitely need to be monitoring those discussion posts, because things can happen, and then people can say things that are microaggressions. It’s very easy to do in words, because you’re not even looking at the person, so you don’t feel as connected to them, and you don’t necessarily think about it as much as you might when you’re face to face with someone. So if a professor sees it, saying something to that student, may be taking that post down if they can, or even just replying to the post and saying, “Hey, this isn’t welcome in this space. This is a safe space, and saying things like that are not okay.” If it’s something really severe, if it’s something smaller, I think it’s better to maybe shoot them an email and be like, hey, what you said was wrong for this reason and moving forward, let’s leave that out of the classroom environment.

John: How did you select this as a focus of study?.

Kaija: So I actually started in my junior year. Picked my topic the end of sophomore year, and I came to this topic because in writing my honors thesis, I knew I wanted it to be something relating to human resource management, because I wanted it to be applicable to the field that I’m trying to go into and also something that interests me, because I have to spend two years on this thesis, and you don’t want to get bored. So I kind of went over a lot of the topics that I’ve heard discussed in my classes. And Kristin Sotak taught one of the HR classes. She’s an amazing professor, and she touched on microaggressions, which was surprising, because I didn’t expect us to talk about it in that class, and it was kind of my first real exposure to the topic. Even though I’d experienced them my whole life, I didn’t really know that there was a name for that. And so when she was explaining it, I got really interested in it. And so it was one of the first things that popped into my head when I was thinking about a topic for my honors thesis. So I did discuss that with her and my other thesis advisor, Dr. Friedman, and we talked about doing that as my topic, because it was something that interests me, something that’s really important for the world that we live in. Because a lot of overt discrimination, things like just choosing not to hire someone because of their race, things like that are kind of fading out, but microaggressions are still very prominent and are still kind of perpetuating that discrimination in a more subtle way and in a way that’s a lot harder to fight. So I knew it was something that was important. I knew it was something that interests me, and that’s kind of how I got into it. And then just the more research I did, the more I really enjoyed learning about it and trying to figure out how to stop this problem. And originally my thesis was going to just be a literature review of the current resources out there, but when I was talking to Kristin about it, she kind of said, well, maybe you want to create a training program, something that will actually have a real world impact. And I was like, “Yes, that sounds awesome.” And so I actually ended up doing that. I didn’t get to implement it as great as I wanted to. There weren’t a lot of people that I implemented it with, but it was really an amazing opportunity to really dive into what microaggressions are and come up with a tangible solution for how to fight them, mostly in the workplace, but also just in general. So that’s kind of how I came to it, and then how it became this whole thing where I do things like this, where I talk about microaggressions.

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

Kaija: Yep. So it’s really important to always be educating yourself. Do more research on microaggressions, especially if it interests you, or if you realize, “Hey, I’ve been committing those.” Look up more examples, so that you can be aware when you’re going to commit them, and just really commit to creating a safe space for students and for other faculty, and really for anyone in this world, because everyone should feel included, and no matter where they are, no matter what they’re doing. So committing to that and always committing to growing as a person, to being better. And when people come to you and say, “Hey, this is an area for improvement,” accepting that openly, and then moving forward and being better.

John: And more specifically, what are you going to be doing now that you’ve graduated?

Kaija: I currently don’t know. I am moving to Grand Forks, North Dakota in August, but I don’t have a job lined up yet. I’m looking for something human resource management, and hopefully can do more of this work. But it’s all very unplanned right now. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Spoken like a true recent graduate. [LAUGHTER]

John: Well, thank you for joining us, and we appreciate the workshops you’ve done, and good luck with your job search.

Kaija: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Rebecca: Thank you so much.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes 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.

[MUSIC]

403. Of Many Minds

Posted in ableism, access, accessibility, accommodation, disability, diversity, equity, higher education, inclusion, mental health
July 23, 2025

Since the pandemic, universities have focused attention on student mental health. In this episode, Rebecca Pope-Ruark and Lee Skallerup Bassette join us to discuss faculty and staff mental health and wellbeing.

Rebecca is the Director of Faculty Professional Development at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  She has 17 years of experience teaching undergraduates and is a Certified Scrum Master and design thinking workshop facilitator, an ICF-certified coach, and the host of The Agile Academic podcast. Rebecca is the author of Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal and the coeditor of Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First-Century Undergraduate Education. Lee is the Assistant Director of Digital Learning at Georgetown University and is a regular contributor to Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and ProfHacker. She is also the editor of Affective Labor and Alt-AC Careers and co-hosts the All Things ADHD podcast. Rebecca and Lee are editors of: Of Many Minds: Neurodiversity and Mental Health Among University Faculty and Staff, which is scheduled for release later this summer.

Show Notes

  • Pope-Ruark, R., Bessette, L. S. (2025). Of Many Minds: Neurodiversity and Mental Health Among University Faculty and Staff. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • The Agile Academic podcast
  • Pope-Ruark, R. (2022). Unraveling faculty burnout: Pathways to reckoning and renewal. JHU Press.
  • Moner William; Motley, Phillip; Pope-Ruark, Rebecca; and Roth, M. S. eds. (2020). Redesigning liberal education: Innovative design for a twenty-first-century undergraduate education. JHU Press.
  • Bessette, L. S. (Ed.). (2022). Affective Labor and Alt-Ac Careers. University Press of Kansas.
  • All the Things ADHD podcast
  • ProPublica series on mental health: America’s Mental Barrier

Transcript

John: Since the pandemic, universities have focused attention on student mental health. In this episode, we shift the focus to faculty and staff mental health and wellbeing.

[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 guests today are Rebecca Pope-Ruark and Lee Skallerup Bassette. Rebecca is the Director of Faculty Professional Development at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has 17 years of experience teaching undergraduates and is a Certified Scrum Master and design thinking workshop facilitator, an ICF-certified coach, and the host of The Agile Academic podcast. Rebecca is the author of Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal and the coeditor of Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First-Century Undergraduate Education. Lee is the Assistant Director of Digital Learning at Georgetown University and is a regular contributor to Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and ProfHacker. She is also the editor of Affective Labor and Alt-AC Careers and co-hosts the All Things ADHD podcast. Rebecca and Lee are editors of: Of Many Minds: Neurodiversity and Mental Health Among University Faculty and Staff, which is scheduled for release later this summer. Welcome Lee and welcome back, Rebecca.

Rebecca P Thank you for having us.

Lee Yeah, thanks so much.

John: Our teas today are: Rebecca, are you drinking tea today?

Rebecca P I am drinking a Starbucks iced black tea lemonade, and enjoying it quite a lot.

Rebecca A good way to start the summer.

John: And Lee?

Lee This is a Mango Maui iced tea. Well, I made it into an iced tea, but this is a Mango Maui herbal tea.

Rebecca Sounds interesting.

John: And Rebecca?

Rebecca I’m drinking English tea time this afternoon, John.

John: Very good. And I am drinking an oolong tea today.

Rebecca So we invited you here today to discuss Of Many Minds. Could you tell us a little bit about the origin story of the book?

Rebecca P Sure. I’ll take that one. In 2020 through about 2022 I was working on a book on faculty burnout, and that book came out in November of 2022 and as I was researching that book, I was talking to a lot of people who had a lot of stories about their own wellbeing and their own mental health and how that connected to the burnout stories that they were telling me. And it was a big part of my journey as I was experiencing burnout as well. And we were going through a period of time in the midst of COVID where, of course we were spending a lot of energy and a lot of time thinking about student wellbeing, obviously. And we were starting to question, what about faculty and staff wellbeing at the same time? So that led into some conversations with some folks, and eventually hooking up with Lee and proposing this collection. It was originally going to be stories and critiques, and by the time we started getting the stories and the stories were just so powerful that we decided to just go with the first-person essays.

John: How did you select the essays for this book?

Lee We put out a call in our various social media networks, spread the word. Again, it really helped Rebecca having a book out on burnout, and myself having a podcast about having ADHD, so we were able to really spread the word about it, and then really we just wanted to honor the authors of the stories. The selection process was very much a labor of respect in terms of ensuring that the stories were told in such a way that was authentic to the person telling it, and in a respectful way, and that were relevant for our readers. To give an example, there’s an essay that we kind of call a bonus essay at the end, which is one of the few that gave advice. It was a little bit more student facing, but certainly was advice that you could give to anyone, and we really thought it was important. And so even though it didn’t fit into buckets that we had set up to section off the book, we were like, this is still an important piece, and this is an important perspective, and so we’re going to find a way to include it. And so it was really with the attitude of inclusivity as well that we wanted to be as inclusive and expansive as possible when it came to the variety of voices that we published.

Rebecca To help frame our conversation, can you define neurodiversity for us?

Lee No. [LAUGHTER] So, neurodiversity is… there’s some debate on it, and in the introduction to our book, we tried to keep it as expansive as possible. And so we, for our purposes, included mental illness. We included cognitive disabilities. We considered mental health and any kind of diagnosis, either self diagnosed or officially diagnosed. So we have stories from bipolar, autism and ADHD, depression, PTSD, anxiety. I know I’m missing some, it’s not an exhaustive list. We really wanted to be as expansive as possible and inclusive as possible in our definition of neurodiversity. Some people will say that mental health issues might not be considered a part of that, and it is limited to things like ADHD, dyslexia, and even then, sometimes dyslexia isn’t neurodiverse, it’s a learning disability. So again, there’s a lot of debate, and we just wanted to say that if your brain works a little different, be it on a social level, on an emotional level, on a cognitive level, on all three levels, we want to hear your stories.

Rebecca P And that’s where the title came from, too, the Of Many Minds piece. We feel like we focus so much on the logical aspects of our minds, but there are so many other elements that we bring into our workplaces and into our lives that we wanted to make sure those were represented well.

John: What are some of the most common types of mental health issues or mental illness that faculty have been experiencing, whether at increased rates or being more willing to vocalize the existence of mental health issues, which used to be much more hidden.

Lee One of the things is that, particularly this book, brings up and Rebecca had previously published a book on burnout and burnout stories, and what this particular book brought to light is in a lot of cases, the depression, the burnout, the anxiety that the people who were telling their stories eventually came to realize is that the reason they were depressed, the reason that they were burned out, the reason that they were anxious was either because of a diagnosed or, very often, undiagnosed condition, such as ADHD, such as bipolar, such as PTSD, such as ADHD. And so in their efforts to try to mask, in their efforts to try and fit in, in their efforts to try and appear normal, quote, unquote, normal, they were putting such stress on themselves that that led to other conditions coming up, and it was very often the depression, the burnout, high levels of anxiety, that led them to seek help, and that help led to the diagnoses very often. Not that it wasn’t a universal experience when the people tell these stories, some of them, they knew the diagnosis and tried to push through anyways, because ableism is a hell of a drug. But for the most part, for these stories, for those people who are neurodiverse in higher education, a lot of the mental health issues stemmed from their attempts to mask whatever other neurodiverse condition or conditions they happen to have.

Rebecca P And a lot of people were finding out or starting to think about themselves and the way they process things in different ways when they had their children being diagnosed. They would talk about that being kind of the start of their story or their journey, or students coming to them and then realizing that they have some of the similar characteristics with the student accommodations, or could benefit from some of those accommodations as well. So it really crosses the board, which is, again, why we wanted to have such a wide spectrum of folks. We’ve got a variety of folks with different autism diagnoses as well as ADHD, CPTSD, those kinds of things, OCD, a lot of acronyms…

Lee Yeah.

Rebecca P …but they were coming from this perspective of feeling like what’s going on, what’s happening, and how do I process this? And it’s those stigmas and that masking can be so exhausting that it can lead to things like burnout. So having the diagnosis, or even a self diagnosis, becomes a real turning point for many of our contributors who speak about their diagnosis or the path to diagnosis, and what that allowed and unlocked for them after being diagnosed.

Rebecca You started hinting at some of these things, but can you describe some of the challenges facing neurodiverse faculty and faculty that are experiencing mental illness?

Rebecca P So I think the biggest issue a lot of folks with neurodivergence or mental illness in higher ed face is really related to stigma. So it’s not an internal issue, it’s an external issue in a lot of ways. So they’re facing these preconceived notions about what an academic should be, or what someone who works in higher education should quote, unquote, be, and they’re coming in as their authentic selves and feeling like they really can’t be those authentic selves. So they end up spending all that energy masking. They spend all that energy trying to hide who they are and not participating in the ways that they want to, and often when they try to… we have several stories in there that really talk about folks who really tried to do some advocacy work around these issues, and were kind of shut down in different ways. So folks in higher ed weren’t really listening or weren’t open to these conversations. I think a lot of faculty have preconceived notions about what students bring accommodations in for and may have some negative perceptions that way, and those translate into their perceptions, potentially, of colleagues who exhibit some similar behaviors or mindsets.

Lee I think part of it is, and I write about this in the conclusion, is how we understand professionalism, and there’s stigma, but then there’s also stereotype, and there’s this idea of professionalism. And it is incredible the number of contributors who, due to stigma, described the ideal professor: white, older, male, upper class, married, hetero, all of that kind of stuff. And so it’s not just the people who are neurodivergent who have this kind of idea and thus a stigma attached to them, it’s also our colleagues in higher education who have this idea of what an academic should look like, or how they should behave, or how productive they should be, and what that productivity should look like. And one of the ones that has stayed with me is one of the essays was about someone who was denied promotion because they didn’t socialize enough with the department, and so they were like, “We’re not sure if you’re really invested and a part of this community,” and this was somebody whose neurodivergent condition absolutely exhausted them at the end of the day of socializing with students, socializing with colleagues in the hallways, doing everything they needed to do, which they understood. It wasn’t really masking, but it was just like this takes up so much of my energy that there is literally nothing left for me to be able to go out afterwards. And they describe the process of going home, turning off all the lights, and just being and being able to recharge, but that… it’s not even an accommodation. It’s just like we expect you, like a good colleague, a professional colleague looks like somebody who comes out for dinner and drinks with people at least once a week and comes to all of the after hours activities that we do. So we’ve all internalized this idea of what a productive professional looks like in higher education, and any sort of deviation from that is… the case that I’ve given is probably one of the more severe, was punished. And that adds to the stress, and that adds to the feelings of alienation, and that adds to depression and anxiety and burnout.

John: And we’re living in somewhat interesting times, going back to the pandemic, the rise of faculty burnout, as we’ve talked about earlier, and we’re in an environment where there’s not a lot of support at the federal level, for a higher education in general, in fact, it’s being outright attacked in many ways. Might all of that help create an environment where perhaps anxiety, stress, and depression might be normalized, as well as with the rise of contingent faculty, where many, many faculty members are trying to do many more things than ever before, than in earlier periods when we had a larger proportion of tenured faculty with perhaps fewer demands placed on their time.

Rebecca P Yeah, I think there are a couple of things going on there. I think that we’ve got pandemic, we’ve got racial injustice, we’ve got AI, then we’ve got the White House right now, it’s what else could blow up? Don’t put that out there in the universe, but it has been kind of a collective trauma for years for everyone. And if you’re spending a lot of energy fighting stigma, fighting stereotype, masking, you don’t have a lot of energy left for fighting the good fight in a lot of ways, so you have to take care of yourself as well. So I think we are in a high anxiety…. obviously, we haven’t seen the statistics yet, but we can estimate that things like burnout and anxiety and depression are probably going to go through the roof right now for a lot of people, and there’s a lot of anxiety attached to that. And then you factor in other differences, and it becomes even more stressful. So how do they do that? And we can factor in the workload level of folks who are tenured, non-tenure track, adjunct. There’s a lot of neoliberal sentiment in the way we look at higher education these days, and how we perform in education these days, what is measured, and I think that becomes really challenging for folks who have different cognitive processing or another issue that might help in other ways to alleviate some of that anxiety. It’s difficult to figure out how to get your way in and out of that anxiety.

Lee Yeah, and this was probably one of the hardest parts, is how to conclude this book. What kind of advice should we give? And it varies as like: dismantle ableism? remove stigma? It’s all very high level structural issues, as you said, have better federal support for mental health treatment. There was just a… I think it was ProPublica did it, but I just saw that insurance companies are willfully making it more difficult to access mental health services, to keep the costs down. So it really is these individual stories within a much larger societal system that is working very hard against, not just neurodiverse folks, like at this point, it’s everyone. A friend of mine used to put it that the neurodiverse and the disabled folk are the canary in the coal mine, that if it’s hitting us, it’s going to hit the rest of y’all soon. In terms of being able to say, “uhhh, it’s hopeless,” because it’s not, and if it was hopeless, then we wouldn’t take the time and the effort and the energy to edit a book like this, that there’s power in sharing people’s stories. There’s power in gathering folks together around these kinds of stories, to start conversations within your academic unit, within your center, within your team, around these kinds of issues to be able to then start addressing them, where we might not be able to dismantle systemic ableism, but we certainly can make it better for the handful of individuals that we have direct impact on, and you hope that that grows from there.

Rebecca P Yeah, and those first-person perspectives are so important in this case. The stories are just so powerful that you really just have to sit with them and really think about, how have you participated in this process or in this social structure, and what do we do in higher education to be the open system and the place where everyone is welcome? There’s a lot of characteristics of higher education that fit very well for neurodivergent folks, but there are also just large scale ableism and sexism and things like that can cause these huge gaps in participation. So there’s some big challenges there, but we’re hoping that this is one step in getting people to kind of really understand from a first-person perspective what other people’s lives are like in our disciplines that are in our industry, and move from there into conversation.

Rebecca I think a lot about higher education’s initiatives to promote things like inclusive teaching, inclusive pedagogy, and Universal Design for Learning, and other ways to establish inclusive environments for a wide variety of students. But what are some of the ways that we can improve the environment for our diverse faculty, our neurodiverse faculty, our faculty experiencing mental illness, to really think about inclusion in this other space, and not just around students.

Lee I think one of the ways is to be able to talk about removing stigma. We probably all experienced this during the pandemic or even afterwards, and maybe even still now, where it’s like, “make sure you’re taking your breaks, make sure you’re taking your time off,” but then when you do, you’re made to feel bad about it. And so, again, one of the stories talked about they had to take a medical leave due to mental health struggles, and nobody talked to them, nobody offered meal trains for them, and they were contrasting their experience with their colleague who had to take a leave because they had cancer, and that this was kind of acceptable, but it was just really stark. And again, it’s a very stark example of ways that we treat mental health differently than physical health, very often, that if you get really sick in a way that we recognize, there is a community that forms around you, if you get sick in a way that is not recognizable… and Rebecca, you talk about this too, around how so much of our professional identity is around our brains. When something goes wrong with your brain, it almost feels like, well, we don’t want to catch that, right? or we don’t want to deal with that or we don’t want to deal with that reality and confront that reality. So that’s one of the ways, is that it is just treat it like any other illness, as you would treat it for faculty. Now, the flip side of that is that some places don’t treat physical illness [LAUGHTER] very well and make you feel bad if you take any sort of sick leave, parental leave, any of that kind of stuff. But the other way is, for me, is just having open conversations in ways where, when thinking through, how do you work best? And again, at least tenured faculty and tenured faculty tend to have a lot of flexibility in their schedule. I prefer to teach in the afternoons and evenings because it takes me two hours to get started in the morning, or I can’t teach in the evenings because I’m so burned out from the day no matter what, that seven o’clock at night is a problem. We think of universal design. How are we expected to participate in meetings? My podcast co-host, she always says, “I can either look like I’m paying attention in a meeting, or I can actually be paying attention in a meeting, because the process of looking like I’m paying attention in the meeting takes all of my cognitive energy, and therefore I actually have retained absolutely nothing of what was discussed in this meeting.” So again, having those conversations, asking the questions, not jumping to assumptions around. “Oh well, they’re not listening because they’re staring out the window or doodling,” or they can’t come to the social events or any of these kinds of things, so that there aren’t these assumptions that are made, but instead open conversations that are had.

Rebecca P One of our contributors talks about trying to get mental health and neurodiversity included in the inclusion work that was happening on their campus, and really trying to be an advocate for that, getting on all the DEI committees that this person could get onto, trying to form kind of an autism community employee research group at their institution, and really just being kind of fought for that. He was fighting for it, but he was getting a lot of pushback, that it was very difficult for people to think about inclusion in that sense. So we need to broaden what we’re thinking when we think about inclusion, to make sure that we are including difference of all sorts, which includes mental health and neurodiversity as well.

John: And as you noted, a lot of people have been diagnosed later in life with being on the spectrum or with ADHD or other issues. Is that something, perhaps, they should share with a colleague, so that their colleagues can better understand why they don’t fit in, combined with more institutional support, perhaps, for just general training on neurodiversity, because as faculty learn more about the behavior of individuals who are on the spectrum or who have ADHD, it might make it a lot easier for removing some of that stigma, maybe.

Lee Maybe, well, and that’s always the danger. We know, and again, through the stories, there are, as you said, institutions that were very resistant to these kinds of things. There are other institutions and colleagues who were very accepting, but often even talking about it didn’t help, because the people on the other side of the conversation were not interested in having a conversation, were not receptive to these things. So I think that that is “yes, talk about it,” but be careful. Again, there’s this idea of protecting yourself, where you probably know your institution, your department, your units’ politics best and if disclosure is something that might be, at best, ignored and at worst, punished, because that is always the risk. It’s particularly for contingent, particularly for staff, and even we had tenured folks where it got so bad that they gave up their tenured positions. As an individual, yes, it feels so good to get the diagnosis, but then the acceptance more broadly of that diagnosis [LAUGHTER] is not always a wonderful experience, unfortunately, and that’s why I think it’s that being open to have conversations and listening and unpacking those biases that you have, and those stigmas, those are the important things. So if somebody does come and say, “I just got an ADHD diagnosis, I just was diagnosed with PTSD, and this explains X, Y and Z in terms of what’s been happening with me,” to be able to listen and to hear it, and then to move forward in productive ways.

Rebecca It can be really difficult for faculty to find community in these spaces when you have to decide to disclose, who to disclose to, and then does that lead to maybe meeting some other folks who have disclosed or allies to kind of form a coalition so it is easier to speak out and to advocate when there’s numbers, [LAUGHTER] when you’re not just alone, but it’s hard for faculty to find those connections, because there is so much masking that has to happen to feel protected in your position.

Lee Well. It also speaks to the silos that tend to exist in higher education as well. How many faculty, again, depends on the size of your campus, obviously, but we tend to get it’s like, “our department is the university,” and so maybe your college, depending on how big or small your college is, but if you’re like the College of Arts and Sciences, it’s sort of like, “well, I’ve got my department and maybe a couple of colleagues who are studying something related, and I’m a humanities person.” So it’s like over in history, or maybe over in religion or that, but mostly it’s like, you know the people in your department. And so, even for neurotypical, the challenge of belonging is that if you don’t belong in your department, there’s very little effort to help you belong within the larger institution, very often as faculty, which is also why contingent faculty tend to feel so disconnected, is because the primary point of belonging is the department, and depending on the department, most of them make it very clear that contingent faculty are not a part of the community and that they are not welcome. So there’s that added challenge as well, of like, how do you even go about finding community outside of your academic discipline?

Rebecca P Yeah, and I think too, following that even further, that you get to the point where “do I disclose so that I can belong? Is that coming out process part of advocacy now? Do I now have to be the advocate for this?” And maybe you just want to belong in your institution. You just want to belong in your department. You don’t necessarily don’t necessarily want to have that advocacy role. We kind of expect it of people when they disclose and we don’t necessarily want to be forcing that onto someone.

Rebecca I think that’s why it’s really important for those who are comfortable speaking out and advocating, whether you have a diagnosis or you’re neurotypical or whatever, that those that are comfortable or in spaces or in positions of power that can speak out, it’s important to help move a culture in a space. Can you provide some advice for educational developers, instructional designers, etc, folks that are maybe doing some professional development work on campus, on how to support neurodiversity and faculty who might identify as having a mental illness or might be having mental health challenges? What should we be doing?

Rebecca P I think the first step is learning. I think there’s reading to be done. There are resources to be accessing so that you have a sense of what folks are up against. Our book contributes to that by giving you some first-person narratives to have conversations around, so you don’t necessarily feel like you’re calling people out in your space. You can talk about these cases. So I mean, I really hope it gets picked up as a book club piece for a lot of places, so that they can have those conversations around this. But it’s gonna take some additional learning, and maybe that’s training. Maybe that’s just some good reading about these topics. Maybe it’s a Coursera class or something about understanding neurodivergence, but I think there’s learning to be done for all of us in conversation and in the research that’s out there.

Lee Yeah, and I think that the thing that works against all of us in all of this is just time. My advice is time and patience, because even then, you can do all the reading on ADHD, you can do all the reading on autism, you can do all the reading on depression or PTSD, but it’s going to be different in every single person. Again, on our podcast, All the Things ADHD, my co-host and I have a joke, or we’ll say to each other, “it wouldn’t surprise you to know that my experience is completely different,” or “that thing that helps you sounds like my nightmare.” And so it’s really being able to take the time and that openness to be able to say, “Okay, what do you need from me? How can I help?” And some of that is really also gaining a self awareness. Part of it is the diagnosis, and then accepting it and just being like, “Okay, I need to figure out what works for me now,” rather than trying to make everything that everyone says should work for me, work for me. So it’s fairly typical. I give an example, Right now we’re working on getting ready to launch all the summer online courses, and so I’m a learning designer, I’m working with faculty. I have a grad student working with me as well in building these courses. I’m fine for 95% of it, but the last 5%, I struggle to get that last 5% done. “Add the captions to this video,” to me is more daunting than “build this course.” And so, as an awareness, I have to be very clear with the people I’m working with, and I’m sorry if I keep repeating myself, but I have this to do list, and I want to make sure that I really get in and understand it, so that I do it, because these are the things that I struggle with, and it’s really hard for us to talk about the things that we struggle with. We are supposed to be experts, particularly in higher education. We are supposed to be the subject matter experts, the knowledgeable ones. And so to kind of admit fallibility and to say these are the things that I need help with, and then to be able to ask for them. And so I think it’s a two-way street in that like, ask them what they need. And if it’s an unconventional ask, don’t just scoff at it, probe it a little bit. But on the other side, try to ask for what you need. Try to figure out what it is you need, that if you’re bad at that last 5% don’t just tell the Learning Designer, okay, yeah, no, I got this last 5% be like, “No, I’m like, Could you do the captioning?” Again, there might be stuff in contracts and all unions, but if we’re having these conversations, if we gain an awareness ourselves about what we need, and then we are greeted with an openness to hear those needs that makes such a huge difference in terms of productivity, if we want to reduce it to that, but just in terms of the experience being a more pleasant one.

Rebecca I think this conversation really pokes at a lot of things that need to be discussed in our campuses, and we need to lead some of these conversations to get the word out. And your book might be a really great platform to do that through a reading group. Can you tease a little bit more about some of the specific topics that are addressed in some of the essays?

Rebecca P Oh, goodness, it’s such a wide spectrum, like we’ve mentioned, we’ve got folks different places on the autism spectrum, ADHD, anxiety, depression, all kinds of folks who really are coming from all over the corners of higher education. So it’s really well represented. You’ll be able to find someone that you can connect with in the reading of these stories. And we have some sections around masking. We have a section around stigma, specifically, we have a section around higher education structures that can exacerbate for folks these experiences. So there’s just so much to draw from that you’ll find someone that you connect to or that you maybe see yourself reflected in.

Lee There’s also a lot of other kinds of intersectionality, talking about gender, talking about sexuality, talking about race, and so those are also in there, and they are linked in terms of the ways that, how can you tease out: Is this because I am visibly queer, or is this because I am autistic? Is this because I am a woman in higher education, or is this because I have ADHD? Again, all of these things come up as well, and so this is also an opportunity to really start those conversations on a more broader definition of inclusivity, because it isn’t always just only one.

John: We always end with the question, what’s next?

Rebecca P What’s next? Well, the book will come out. [LAUGHTER] Yay! So we hope to be having lots of conversations with different groups of faculty around the country about that book, especially if it gets picked up and read. So we’re looking forward to that. I personally am currently working on a book about women’s leadership and burnout in higher education. So that’s my project for the rest of the year.

Lee Yeah, the book is coming out in August, and so we wanted to take the opportunity over the summer, when things calm down a bit, to talk about, do we want to do a podcast where we have some of the contributors come on who are willing to talk a little bit more about their essays, answer these questions, and so we can put up a website, all kinds of fun stuff that right now I just can’t think about. No more spoons, as they say, there are no more spoons for that. Hopefully it will spark conversations. Hopefully we will be able to go and Zoom in to campuses to talk about these experiences. Hopefully other neurodiverse faculty will feel empowered to come forward with their own stories as well. And you hope that this creates more opportunities for conversation, more opportunities for storytelling, more opportunities for connection in all of those kinds of ways where we’ve opened the door a crack. It is really only just a beginning, but hopefully it just starts something that other people can take up and keep going with in terms of their own. People always ask us, like, “is there a campus that’s done it really well?” And we’re like, “No, not really, no.” And so what you hope is, in 5, 10 years, because academia moves slow, but that’s fine, we will have examples of institutions that are doing it very well, that will have case studies for this and models that other institutions can emulate. And so again, like there’s what we hope comes next is: “Here’s a starting point. Go forward with this and create. Feel empowered, feel creative, feel less alone and go in and in small ways, make things better.”

John: Well, thank you. I’m very much looking forward to reading your book when it comes out in August, and it’s an area that all institutions can do better with, and all faculty perhaps can do better with, in terms of creating a more supportive environment for everyone.

Lee Definitely.

Rebecca This is a great project, and we’re looking forward to your future projects as well.

Rebecca Thank you so much.

Lee Thank you.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes 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.

[MUSIC]

402. Preparing for Title II

Posted in access, accessibility, accommodation, disability, edtech, educational technology, equity, higher education, inclusion, learning, professional development
July 16, 2025

Updates to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act regulations require public colleges to increase their efforts to ensure that digital content meets accessibility standards. In this episode, Sean Moriarty joins us to discuss strategies to foster a culture of access across an institution. Sean is the Chief Technology Officer at SUNY Oswego. Sean and Rebecca have worked collaboratively on digital accessibility initiatives at SUNY Oswego since 2017

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Updates to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act regulations require public colleges to increase their efforts to ensure that digital content meets accessibility standards. In this episode, we discuss strategies to foster a culture of access across an institution.

[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]

John: Our guest today is Sean Moriarty. Sean is the Chief Technology Officer at SUNY Oswego. In this role, Sean provides leadership for the continued development of a client-centered, agile, robust, accessible, and secure digital campus environment that advances the university’s strategic goals. Sean and Rebecca have worked collaboratively on digital accessibility initiatives at SUNY Oswego since 2017. Welcome back, Sean.

Sean: Well, thanks a lot. It’s good to be back with you two.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Sean, are you drinking any tea today?

Sean: I am. I am having an Irish Breakfast tea.

Rebecca: I almost drank that knowing that you were probably drinking that. [LAUGHTER]

Sean: Yes.

John: And I am drinking a pure peppermint tea today.

Rebecca: And no fear, I’ve got English breakfast. [LAUGHTER] Got the British Isles represented.

John: So in January of 2019, we had you on to talk about SUNY Oswego’s work to build a culture of accessibility. And five years later, in January of 2024, members of SUNY Oswego’s workgroup on accessibility practices joined us to talk about one of our initiatives, the 10-day accessibility challenge. And several weeks ago, we had Mark Greenfield on the podcast to talk about the recent updates to Title II of the American with Disabilities Act (or ADA). Today, we’re planning to follow up on those earlier conversations and talk about some of the practical steps that SUNY Oswego is taking to address Title II. Meeting the requirements of Title II can seem pretty daunting if a campus hasn’t been actively engaged in digital accessibility practices. So where does a campus start, what were the first steps that SUNY Oswego took to address digital accessibility?

Sean: So first of all, thanks for inviting me back again. It’s always good to talk to you two. You mentioned that I was on in 2019 which does seem like a lifetime ago when you think of it being six years ago, but also the pandemic happened in between, and this really brought, I think, a whole new vision and awareness around digital accessibility and the role that it had in terms of helping students to navigate the teaching and learning that we went through during that period of time. And I think the work that we’ve done beforehand really paid off during the pandemic, and I think the work that we continue to do really helps with students. But if we go back to your question like, where do you start with something like this? The way that we have approached it here at Oswego is that the responsibility for creating accessible content falls to the people making accessible content. When we first had our OCR complaint, in 2017 that was, we saw just really how deep the hole was in terms of the content that we were creating and the requirements to go in to make it all accessible. So I think the way that we’ve gone and really done it is to focus on educating people on how to create accessible content and making them aware of their responsibility in terms of doing it, and trying to simplify the process as much as we can for everyone as we went forward.

Rebecca: I think one of the key things that we focused on was building a coalition of folks who wanted to build the momentum around digital accessibility. So prior to the OCR complaint, there was through our Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, we had a work group on accessibility practices that had representation of constituents across campus that has greatly grown over time. And so now there’s representation from many units and now faculty, et cetera, that does a lot of the professional development on our campus around digital accessibility. But around the OCR complaint, Sean also formulated the digital accessibility steering committee, and now those two groups are connected.

Sean: When we first had the OCR complaint, we really focused on the website in particular and having it reach standards. And I’ll just say we were one of 31 SUNY schools out of the 32 that had complaints against it. So everyone was going through the same thing at the same time, but once we went and got the website up to standard, we realized that it’s an ongoing task in terms of going and keeping it that way. So really, we got the group together, that started with our web services team and also included Accessibility Services. And Rebecca was a partner, certainly, in all this work, and Rebecca has a unique skill set in the sense that she teaches graphic design and teaches web services, but she also happened to be working with you at the time, John, right in our Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. So it really helped that we could go and integrate these teams together and to bring the work that we were trying to do and expand the scope as we went forward. Another important component, I think, of it, was how we went and integrated faculty inside what we were trying to do. And started with our first accessibility fellows… in 2019 I think that was. And our goal was really just to have someone from each of the different colleges to be a part of the team and kind of look at accessibility, particularly in their discipline, learn about how to use it, and then act as an advocate inside their area of expertise. But actually the first year, we had seven people step forward, and that was a good investment, I think, in terms of going and working with those people. The next year was 2020, and we had four people. And when the pandemic hit, by that point, really, we had 11 people who had gone through accessibility training and were really ready to step in and really acted as advocates and helped all the people inside their departments to go and to navigate what lay ahead as we went through the pandemic and our shift to online learning as it was for months and months to come.

Rebecca: I think if we were to talk about what we’d recommend for other campuses to do to start, it’s really to start with the coalition of the willing, or the folks that are most likely to advocate for digital accessibility, or might be in adjacent spaces focused on equity issues, for example, and to find representation across campus. So we have folks from the library, instructional designers, the teaching center, faculty. We have folks in Disability Services, folks in our student affairs unit as well, that are doing a wide variety of work and can act as a liaison in all those different areas to transform the practices of folks on campus. And I think that strategy has served us well.

Sean: Yes, for sure. And I think also, as we get more people involved, more people look and see other areas that we should involve as we move forward. And I know Rebecca has done a lot of work, and the people in the work group in areas such as orientation and how we bring students in. We also have the person who runs Slate on our campus, which is our enrollment application, that we go and interact with students as they apply to college, and then get information back and forth. But he was a graphic design graduate of our school, and was a student of Rebecca’s at one point, and he’s been able to go in to implement all of the same principles and really go to bring this kind of technology and this way of thinking to the way that we work on campus, and bring students in.

John: Just to clarify one thing… earlier, you mentioned an OCR complaint, and just to make sure everyone is on the same page with us, by OCR, you are referring to…

Sean: Yeah.

John: …the Office of Civil Rights.

Sean: That’s correct, John, yep.

Rebecca: …and then the Department of Education.

Sean: Yes, and actually, and just to go back to that, in 2017, over 2000 universities had OCR complaints against them, particularly around the website, and a number of them were in SUNY as well.

John: So, now, as we’re coming up to the April 2026, or ‘27 for small communities, compliance deadline, what are some of the concrete steps that are being taken to ensure that all digital content, web content, and digital apps, including those created by faculty, staff and students, will meet the WCAG 2.1 AA standards by that time.

Rebecca: So one of our strategies is actually to use the current WCAG standards, which are actually WCAG 2.2 double A in part because they include some important guidelines around mobile technology. So we’re always gonna adopt the most current WCAG standards, so that we’re always ahead of things, rather than adopting an older, outdated set of guidelines. [LAUGHTER] And so we have a Title II plan that we’ve worked on collaboratively that has essentially four components. The first is raising awareness and making sure folks know what we mean by digital accessibility, so defining that, and then also what Title II is, developing a professional development strategy, which we can talk about, and implementing policy and procedures, especially around procurement, and then finally, making sure that we have an assessment strategy and have a way for folks to evaluate their own progress and know where they stand, so using accessibility checkers and things like that.

John: So you mentioned these four steps. Could you elaborate on this a little bit?

Sean: So we’ve really tried to think of it in these four steps. The first one is raising awareness. And we’ve really been focusing, and actually, the way that Rebecca and I have got the plan here, and the steering committee of the plan it’s like a component for each season, although we will continue on with many components as these seasons progress. So awareness, we’ve spent a lot of time this past semester and during spring of 2025 focusing on awareness, making people understand what Title II is. We call it digital accessibility in our campus because we’ve really focused on having the digital campus as a core component of the way that we deliver education here at Oswego. The second component, that we’ll work on over the summer, is preparing policy and procedures, procurement is going to be a large component, I think, as we move forward, and I know we’ll talk more about that later. But we want to go and focus and make sure that we’re ready to move forward once we hit September again. Then we’re also preparing training and being aware of how we’re going to go and develop people as we move forward once we hit the ground in the fall when school returns. And then there’s the assessment feedback, and I know Rebecca just touched on the point, we want to be able to give people feedback so that they understand, if they’re creating accessible content, how to make it better, and whether it’s inside Word, inside the Brightspace environment, or the digital learning environment, or whether it’s on the web, people should be getting feedback and understanding if they’ve created and posted accessible digital content for others.

Rebecca: One of the strategies that we’re using for professional development, which might be of particular use for this audience, is organizing around content types, so everyone on campus is a content creator of some sort, whether you’re creating emails or documents, presentations, et cetera. And so the professional development that we’re doing is largely around these kind of content types that might have slightly different skill sets necessary to make those types of content. So we have email, documents, slide decks, multimedia, charts and tables, forms, social media, kind of page layout and design, folks that are using the learning management system, and how to navigate that and make sure things in that system are accessible. And then folks that are editing content on the front end of the website, as well as those that are doing more of programming or development on web or software applications.

Sean: Well, I think what’s interesting too is that the way that people create content really isn’t necessarily role based in terms of what we’re doing. One item that we really haven’t mentioned up to this point around Title II is how it affects students and how students will be required to create accessible content as well. We’ve really thought of this in a couple of ways. There’s what happens inside the classroom, and faculty can be responsible for that, but there’s also the clubs and how they have students interact with one another, and the social media, different technologies that they integrate too. So as we have this content type of training, if you’re doing social media, you could be in marketing communications, or you could be running the fencing club at school, and you’re going to need to have this kind of training and awareness to go and to be responsible. So the training will be good for both of those groups of people, and it really cuts across where you are in the organization.

John: Remediating materials created by an entire institution would seem to be pretty much an impossible task, requiring a tremendous staff, unless perhaps individuals are charged with that responsibility. So what ongoing professional development and training opportunities are being provided to faculty and staff to create accessible content effectively, beyond that initial awareness and beyond those initial departments that were reached by the accessibility fellows.

Sean: You’re right. I think, in that remediation, the quantity of work makes it impossible, which is why we took the attitude about six years ago, that we’re going to go on a step-forward basis, and this is where we’re at and we’re going to start creating as much accessible content as we can. And we really started by investing in training for our staff and our trainers. If I go back to 2018 and ‘19, and that would have meant sending people out to the WebAIM training out in Utah, which was a great investment, I think, for our staff and for their awareness, and they were able to go and to bring that kind of training back and start our own programs. But then we started a series of other kinds of trainings, which would include our CELT breakouts for our Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, where we would go and focus on different accessibility items. We already talked about the Faculty Fellows in terms of going and helping them with their training. And we have created a lot of on-demand training, whether it be on our accessibility website, and utilization of Deque.

Rebecca: So, Deque is Deque University, which is an online training platform. You can get subscriptions too. So the SUNY system has a subscription to Deque University, and that provides really great opportunities to learn about specific software. So if you wanted to learn digital accessibility skills in the Microsoft suite, the Google Suite, or web platforms, etc, so everyone has access to that on our campus. We’ve also developed a Brightspace course called Access: a Quest Toward Inclusion, that we’re rolling out on our campus. We’ve done a couple pilots, and that’s fully rolled out as we speak right now in the summer. And in that course, not only do we have some technical skills, but also conceptual ideas around how digital accessibility fits into ideas of inclusive pedagogy, diversity, equity, and inclusion, student success, et cetera, so that it helps connect those pieces and how digital accessibility also dovetails with UDL and some of these other strategies. That course is built upon an earlier experiment that we had on our campus called the 10-day accessibility challenge, which we rolled out in January of 2021 to support faculty as they were teaching online during COVID, and that we have a whole podcast on.

John: We’ll include a link to the earlier podcast discussions of that program and of other related topics. How many faculty fellows have been through training?

Sean: At this point, we’ve had 24 faculty who have gone through the fellowship training.

John: And you mentioned workshops, and those are generally taking place at least twice a year. And there’s probably eight to 10 workshops at least twice a year on all these topics.

Sean: Yes, and actually we focus on accessibility for a couple days in the January winter breakouts and training sessions that you have, which would be the time where we bring in the new accessibility fellows, and they go through specialized training. But the training is really available to everyone on campus. And, like I said, we really focus on that for a couple days.

John: So this is a pretty big task that you’re discussing here. And how did you effectively secure commitment from campus leadership to allocate those initial resources: the human, the financial and the time allocation for digital accessibility, especially when many on campus might not fully understand the urgency or the scope of moving to digital accessibility.

Sean: So when I think of the commitment, I think the OCR complaint really opened people’s eyes. And it raised awareness in terms of what was required to go in to do digital accessibility properly, and we’ve really looked at it from two components: one is how it ties to our mission in terms of student success, equity, fairness, and the second component of it is the risk and risk mitigation in terms of how, if you’re not going and doing this stuff, you might get sued. So I think both of those items really talk to two different components of the university. So around financial components, they’re really interested in mitigating the risk, and they can see where doing this work will go and avoid any lawsuits that we might have. But I think from the classroom side and academic side, we really want to go and focus on why this ties into the mission, and how we can go and really serve the students. There’s a second component, I’ll say, in terms of how we go and secure commitment. So the leadership is one component of it, but I would also say there is this component on campus that really believes in it and will go and do the work required around it. So when I think of Rebecca and her team and the instructional designers that she’s worked with, and really other people inside CTS, and then the faculty that we’ve dealt with, they’re committed to going and doing it and providing a structure and a framework for them to, in essence, either have extra service pay or to have time cut out of their schedule to go and to do it, was a wise investment, and showed that the university really was serious in terms of what we’re doing, and that’s what we offer for the faculty fellows, in terms of the structure around going and supporting it.

Rebecca: I think one thing that Sean’s not directly addressing is his pivotal role in all of this, and someone in his position, and getting someone who is a chief technology officer, a chief information officer, really on board is really integral to getting this work done. So we were doing a lot of ad hoc stuff in the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching through our work group, which was kind of a grassroots group that was just doing the work because we were passionate about it and thought it was important for our community to be a part of, but when we brought the need to bring this work into the classrooms, beyond just the website, which is what the OCR complaint was about, initially, Sean was really collaborative and wanted to work with us and provide resources and advocate for resources, and so that digital accessibility steering committee that we mentioned at the top of the show has become really integral as a space to discuss critical issues, to prioritize things that might need to be funded or advocated for, so that the work here can get done. So, for example, we use Google on our campus, and the Google platform doesn’t have built-in accessibility checkers. So one of the things that the work group brought to the steering committee was the need to invest in a checker. So we invested in grackle so that we have an accessibility checker for folks that are using Google Docs and Google Slides, et cetera. So that platform has been really important for fellows and for our work group to raise issues, and then for that steering committee to make some decisions about priorities, and then Sean’s task is that to advocate for that and either fund it through his budget or request funds elsewhere. [LAUGHTER]

Sean: Yeah. Well, I think when we have put forward a budget and we have money set aside, I would think for our accessibility initiatives, it’s less than you would think would be necessary. But I think when we think of what’s required, it is this investment in people and then in the technology to go and to make the work easy, and then it’s also in time. You wouldn’t underestimate the amount of time that’s needed to go and to provide for people to go and to get on training. When I think back to the time when we did the 10-day challenge and thinking these things through, I mean, first of all, they were a lot of fun to go and to do, but we also gained a lot in terms of going and moving our initiative forward as we went and invested. So the time is an important component, but it really comes down to prioritization. When I think back to the last few years, IT departments… when I think of how we can go and be involved in the diversity and the equity and the inclusion and the items that we were working on at the time… this was really a key component, I think, and one of our major contributions to going and helping largely around the equity that we provided to the students and really focused in on student success. So I think the initiatives really went hand in hand with what we were trying to accomplish.

Rebecca: Building in the 10-day accessibility challenge and our Access: a Quest Towards Inclusion Course, are really helpful because they provide scaffolded and structured learning, so that complements the on-demand resources that we also have available. So departments have advocated for their constituents to participate in these challenges or in the course, and that means that they’re prioritizing or allocating time to do that work, which I think is helpful.

John: You mentioned the issue of Google not providing the tools that are needed to help check accessibility, there’s also a lot of other software that’s being used on campus from third parties. Can you talk a little bit about how procurement strategies might have to change here and at other institutions in response to the need to make sure that mobile apps that students are asked to use are accessible?

Sean: Yeah, I think this is a large component, and I would say, for us, kind of the next frontier in terms of going and figuring out how we’re going to do it. So I think what makes it difficult is the testing that you need to do on the software that you’re looking to go and buy. And reading the VPATs and the ACRs, which are the accessibility compliance reports that software developers are supposed to provide you when you purchase software. So it takes a certain skill set to be able to go in to do that, and that skillset’s highly in demand and is difficult to go and to teach, but I think this is an area that we’ll focus on over the next year. So when I talked about policy before, it was around developing this software acquisition policy and procedure that we’ll go and integrate and for us, it’ll include all of the security work that we’re doing, and it’ll also include the accessibility and compliance checking that we’re looking to be able to provide to software end users.

Rebecca: One thing that we don’t always think about when we’re considering third parties is third-party content that we might be getting from publishers or PDFs from library databases and things like that. So those are all materials that we’re using for teaching and learning that are coming from third parties that do need to be evaluated, that maybe traditionally, we’re not attending to in that way, that we really need to build into our practices. So often we think about procurement as something that we’re spending money on, but it also, in the way that we’re thinking about it means that anything that we’re acquiring to share with others. So that may not cost money, but we still need to test it.

Sean: Yeah, it’s a skill set that we’ll really need to go and develop, but it really is necessary to ensure compliance.

John: Might this become a little bit easier, though now as third-party platforms are threatened with the loss of sales, as all public institutions are required to meet these accessibility requirements as we move forward?

Sean: I certainly hope so. There’s also a law in New York State that software developers need to provide software that’s compliant with what we’re looking for around the accessibility. I will say, though, that building software is kind of like steering a large ocean liner, and depending on where people are, it can be difficult for them to go and to change where they’re going. So I think I would certainly see this in the future, but we’re not there now, for sure.

Rebecca: But as universities kind of band together and put the pressure on I think we will see this change over time.

John: And one of the nice things about being part of a system is some of the work can be shared across institutions. And I believe there are some efforts to do that across institutions in the SUNY system.

Sean: Yes, I would say inside SUNY we’ve really worked together, and I give SUNY System Administration a lot of credit for prioritizing this, and they have a core group of people that have really prioritized it, and Rebecca and I have worked with those people, and they’ve really moved us forward a large amount. An example would be the Deque University training systems that are available. But there’s also other examples of where there’s a lot of training that’s provided by our Center for Professional Development, and they’ve really taken on items such as Universal Design for Learning and provided many opportunities for faculty to go and to incorporate those practices inside the classroom for themselves. I’ll also add that they’ve started a new program this year on accessibility advocates and allies that Rebecca is leading this year, and it’s really to go in to take our accessibility fellowship program, and there’s 11 accessibility and advocate ally fellows this year, and they’re working and seeing how they can go and further the work on their campuses to get these core groups working together and move the needle forward around accessibility.

John: Traditionally, when working with students or faculty with disabilities, much of this was handled by campus disability offices, where the focus had been historically on providing accommodations. We’ve been moving towards, and Title II is certainly going to reinforce, a shift from providing reactive accommodations to a proactive inclusive design model. So this is something we’ve been doing for a while, but what strategies have you found to be most effective in fostering a campus-wide culture of accessibility, especially for those who might be somewhat new to digital accessibility.

Rebecca: I think that depends a little bit on the audience. So for administrators and decision makers, helping those individuals see how this work ties to the mission is really core and critical. When we’re talking about faculty, we can integrate that work into other things that we’re talking about in teaching centers, like inclusive pedagogy, evidence-based practices, Universal Design for Learning, all of those things, with accessibility also support student success. And then, if we’re talking about student affairs folks, who really focus on the students, the whole student… when we’re thinking about student success… that’s also a way to tie this accessibility work into the mission and goals of their division as well. So I think tying it to what people are already doing and what they already care about is really critical in shifting the culture of access for sure.

Sean: So you did mention, historically, when this work is done reactively, it all falls to like, Disability Services or Accessibility Services, but I’ll just say that those people are still integrated into the work that we’re doing, and are key parts of our coalition, I would say, and of who we’re working with to go and to focus on the student service, but we have spent a lot of time really going and developing this coalition and looking at the different roles and responsibilities that each people has. And really, Rebecca and I have tried to go and develop a model in terms of how we go and look at this work and what we’re trying to do and how we move it forward. And we use an acronym called RAMPS, which is really a key set of tactics we have developed to cultivate a culture of access.

Rebecca: So RAMPS stands for request, amplify, model, prioritize, and support. And you might wonder why RAMPS? Well, we associate ramps with kind of the sloping planes that you might use to access a building. You’re on wheels, for example. So it’s already tied to the land of accessibility. So we were hoping that would make it a little more memorable. And then, in addition, the word ramp can be used as a verb, meaning to speed up or expand or increase quickly. And so we see this as a set of tactics that really can accelerate this culture of access. And so if we want to dig into each of the tactics in a little bit more detail, requests specifically means requesting colleagues, peers and others to use a specific accessibility practice, so use a microphone or captions or something like that. Amplify or amplify voices and perspectives of people with disabilities, this can look like raising your hand in a meeting and asking what kinds of accessibility features might be built into a particular event or software or other platform. Model is model best practices in your everyday work. So things like, every time you create a document, you’re running your accessibility checker, you’re using alt text and those kinds of things, so that people see that you care about it because you’re doing it. This is particularly important for leadership to do. Prioritize, is prioritize accessibility by allocating resources, and by resources, we mean time, funds, and personnel, and then support… support others in their accessibility journey through coaching, education, processes, and procedures, and so this can look like a wide variety of things, but making sure that as people want to develop in the space of digital accessibility, you’re helping support their technical skills, but also developing their workflows and other things where they might face a few hiccups along the way.

John: So could you provide some other examples of how administrators, faculty, staff and students can employ RAMPS tactics to help advance accessibility.

Sean: Yeah, so when I think of administrators, whether it be the presidents, provosts, vice presidents, deans, directors, and so on down the line, we’ve gone and developed a list of tactics. So, as an example, request units to review their policies and procedures to ensure they’re meeting the legal requirements, but looking around what they’re doing around accessibility and the content, amplify the why of accessibility practices, and I think that’s really an important component in terms of how it ties to the mission, because people often see it as more work than just putting material out, but remediating is way more work than it is to go and do it right the first time. Model, model accessibility practices on correspondence and particularly presentations that go out from your office. When we think of prioritize, I think of team time for professional development and the resources that are required, and support that would be through appropriate budget and resources that can be provided for these types of projects. I see the responsibility of CIOs, and what we do, and really around prioritizing Title II initiatives by ensuring availability of accessibility tools, ensuring that there’s professional training and support available, and ensuring accessible procurement practices are developed and implemented, and then support by really partnering with the other people on campus to ensure that we’re producing the results that we’re looking to produce.

Rebecca: We think about instructors and the role that instructors play, the tactics might look different in those settings. So for example, instructors can request that students follow accessibility guidelines like the WCAG 2.2 double A standard, just like they might APA or MLA style guides, and so that could be something that’s a graded component.

John: We could always hope that they do better with that than they do with the citation styles.

Rebecca: True, [LAUGHTER] but reinforcing it with grades or as a rubric component is helpful. We can also model using accessibility checkers, not only by checking our own work, but showing students how to do that as well. One way that instructors can prioritize this work is by participating in professional development related to Universal Design for Learning or UDL and accessibility.

John: So, what metrics do we use here, and what metrics might other campuses perhaps consider in monitoring the progress of meeting accessibility practices.

Sean: So, when I look at it from the technical point of view, I look at ensuring that we’re gathering these metrics and being able to provide people feedback. So we use tools such as ALLY, and we also use SiteImprove. So ALLY would be inside the learning management system. SiteImprove is an application that will go and browse your website and let you know what the accessibility content is and where there might be areas that need to be improved. And then we’re able to go and provide that feedback back to people so they can understand what they’re doing. We also look at people that are requesting accessibility workshops, people speaking up about microphones and using microphones or other accessibility practices. I’ll also say that we’ve really tried to focus on understanding where we’re at, and we’re going to move forward at the fastest pace we can but this is really when you go and develop culture, it’s really difficult to go and to leapfrog from one stage to another. You really just make progress by making steady progress and by doing the work that’s there. So we just focus on getting better each semester.

Rebecca: Yeah, some of the stuff that we’ve done includes analyzing some of our ALLY data to see whether or not the fellows have made an impact in their departments, to see if that’s improved their ALLY scores, and it has. So that’s exciting. It means that that’s a worthwhile investment. Sometimes it’s these really specific metrics where there’s scores, but when you’re really looking at culture change, some of the things that you actually observe are spaces like our Faculty Assembly, where maybe one person, often me in the past, would be the person saying, like, “Please use a microphone. Please do this. Please do that.” And now I don’t have to say anything. And there’s many other people who will speak up in these settings to request certain accessibility features be used in a wide variety of settings, and I’ve seen students, faculty, and staff, all make these kinds of requests in public settings. So that’s real advocacy work that’s happening, and is a real difference from where we started.

Sean: Well, I also think of people who have come to training, and when you think of culture like we have people in events that have come to our accessibility training and trying to understand better. The people running the orientation are really trying to go and ensure that they’re creating accessible content to provide to the students. So sometimes we’ve recruited those people, other times they’ve been recruited by others who are part of the culture, I guess I would say. So, I think when you see how it’s grown organically, in that sense, it’s really satisfying.

Rebecca: I think along those same lines, we can see a wider variety of individuals offering workshops during our Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching’s breakout sessions in the spring and in the winter, and that just demonstrates how many more people are deeply engaged with the subject matter compared to previously.

John: So one of the things that really struck me was the comment about using microphones. It’s still an issue. We ran an AI symposium yesterday, and we had a number of people attending remotely, and some people in the back of the room said, “Well, my voice is loud enough so anyone can hear” and sometimes faculty in large classes will still do that. And it is important to get that reminder out that while people who are near you certainly will hear you, the people who are further away or who have hearing impairment won’t, and there’s a lot of people with hearing impairment who do not necessarily reveal that.

Sean: Yeah, it’s a real issue. Actually, one of the things I’m proud of, too, is how we’ve really worked to go at big events such as graduation and commencement, which we just hosted and brought in an application that’ll go and provide real-time translation of what the speaker is saying for people in the audience, and we post that on a QR code, both in the program and on the screen beforehand, so that people can hear and understand what the speakers are saying. And when you have an audience of over 4000 people, there’s going to be a lot of people who have hearing impairments who really will benefit from that kind of service that you’re providing.

John: So what do you see as some of the biggest challenges that institutions must face in meeting this Title II deadline? I know we’ve done a lot here, but a lot of campuses are much further behind.

Rebecca: I think even though we’ve made a lot of progress here, we still have challenges that we’re going to face, and one of them, and I think this is true across most of higher ed, is student-generated content has not traditionally been a focus. So this is really when students are sharing work with each other. Previously, we’ve certainly focused on things when they share it more publicly, [LAUGHTER] but they’re sharing it with each other in the class. That’s going to be something that instructors need to think about and may need to become integrated into our learning objectives through general education or some other spaces to reinforce learning some of those skills.

John: And that’s something that can be sold to students as a useful skill in that as more and more companies start moving towards making their digital content more accessible, there’s going to be a lot of employment possibilities there.

Rebecca: I know it’s been a great benefit to a lot of my former students. [LAUGHTER] Some disciplines also have specific challenges that we need to really come up with better strategies for. Some of this work is starting and is there, but it’s not streamlined. Some software packages just don’t have accessibility features built into them. So there’s workflows and habits that need to change, and changing habits and workflows and anything you’re used to is difficult, and people, by their very nature resist change often. So that’s something that all institutions are going to have to work with and address. And I would say, in particular disciplines with notation, so things like math, chemistry, music, all have some unique specific challenges. Or if you think about disciplines like art history that are heavily image based, and thinking about how alt text might need to shift depending on why you’re analyzing a particular image in a course, sometimes it might be more esthetic, sometimes it might be more important to be a more poetic alt text to fit the needs. And so education around some of those really unique features of disciplines is something that we just really need to work together on across institutions.

Sean: I’ll also add, I think procurement is going to be difficult for many colleges in terms of going and having the skill set, which I mentioned before, and also a lot of schools will have problems with resources in terms of training, in terms of having people to go and to train, and depending on where you’re starting from, I can certainly see it being a challenge. It’s an advantage to us to be in a system so that we can go and aggregate some of our resources together. But I can understand how it’s difficult for many of the colleges to go.

Rebecca: I would also add, though, that although these are challenges, these aren’t insurmountable things, these are all solvable problems, but it might need some collaboration and changes of processes to make it happen.

John: Well, we’ve addressed a lot of issues related to movement to meet the Title II requirements. We always end, though, with the question: “What’s next?”

Sean: So I think the first item is, like the game is afoot now, it’s time to execute on the next components of our strategy, which is around training for the content providers at Oswego, and focusing on meeting people where they’re at in terms of going and both offering the training and in terms of going and upskilling them as we move forward. And I think the second component is to invoke the student clubs in the equation and the students as we move forward, and partner with them to help ensure that they make the requirements and take responsibility for their social postings or documents, as well as integrating where it fits into the academic side of the campus. And I think really, one of the third parts is not to look at April 2026 as like this magic day when the project is over. It’s just another day, another milestone, we’ll l not be 100% perfect at that point, and it’s just a continuing project that will go on for years to come, I would think, and to make sure that we have a solid base to constantly be building on, so it becomes less work for people to go in and do, and it makes it easier for them to integrate into their workflows.

Rebecca: I think one ongoing thing to remember moving forward is that accessibility is not an on off switch. So we need to remember that there’s continuous improvement, and we can always work as technology develops to make things more accessible and to keep reevaluating where we’re at so that we can make those improvements.

Sean: I’m going to add one more component that’s what next, and it is our integration of the AI Fellows that we have on campus. So we started an AI Fellow program early this year, but I see the AI Fellows and the Accessibility Fellows integrating their work in the coming year, and to see how that can really go and help us to move this forward. That might be an area that can help us to leapfrog some of our actions forward and our ability to create accessible content.

John: And I did just see an article about several campuses introducing AI tools to read the names of students during graduation, which might actually sometimes give better pronunciations than some of the readers might otherwise, although we’ve had some very good readers here on our campus.

Sean: Yeah, AI is going to have an impact everywhere. So I’d look at where the intersection of these two areas is for sure.

John: And we’ve had a few podcasts where people have discussed how AI tools may help meet accessibility and UDL requirements, and we’ll share links to some of those in the show notes as well.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes 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.

[MUSIC]

396. Title II

Posted in access, accessibility, accommodation, disability, edtech, educational technology, equity, higher education, inclusion, instructional communication, online learning
June 4, 2025

While the Americans with Disabilities Act has long required digital content to be accessible, specific technical requirements were recently defined in updates to Title II of the ADA. In this episode, Mark Greenfield joins us to discuss the new regulations and what that means for public colleges and universities as the April 2026 deadline approaches.

Mark retired as the University at Buffalo’s Web Accessibility Officer after 35 years of service at the institution. He continues to consult on digital accessibility and serves as a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (or ACM) U.S. Technology Committee, which educates and informs Congress, the Administration and courts about digital technology developments and how they may impact public policy in the US.

Transcript

John: While the Americans with Disabilities Act has long required digital content to be accessible, specific technical requirements were recently defined in updates to Title II of the ADA. In this episode, we discuss the new regulations and what that means for public colleges and universities as the April 2026 deadline approaches.

[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 Mark Greenfield. Mark retired as the University at Buffalo’s Web Accessibility Officer after 35 years of service at the institution. He continues to consult on digital accessibility and serves as a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (or ACM) U.S. Technology Committee, which educates and informs Congress, the Administration and courts about digital technology developments and how they may impact public policy in the US. Welcome, Mark.

Mark: Thanks for having me.

John: Thank you for joining us. Today’s teas are:… Mark, are you drinking any tea?

Mark: I am drinking tea. It is a Blackberry sage.

Rebecca: That sounds nice. I have just some decaffeinated breakfast tea, thanks to John making me some hot water. [LAUGHTER]

John: I have a peppermint, spearmint, and tarragon tea today. I’ve already had a lot of caffeine today.

Rebecca: So Mark, we’ve invited you here today to discuss new regulations in the U.S. related to Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act and digital accessibility. In order to ground our conversation today, though, can you share a definition of digital accessibility?

Mark: Sure. So when we’re talking about digital accessibility, the goal is to make sure that everything we’re doing online works for people with disabilities. And it’s interesting, as I kind of explain, over the last few years, what I do for a living, how many people don’t know that that’s a thing, when, in fact, not only is it a thing, it’s a very important thing. And I like to also use the words digital accessibility rather than web accessibility, for a couple of reasons. One is that with web accessibility, you’re talking about a very specific technology where, with how technology has changed over the years, it really is much more than just websites. The other reason I like to use the word digital rather than web is that it lets people know that this just isn’t the purview of web developers. It actually impacts anybody who’s creating content online. So when I have a lot of conversations with faculty, if I talk about web accessibility, they’re assuming this is IT, and IT compliant, without realizing the impact that a faculty member has when it comes to making sure that their materials are accessible.

John: You mentioned that digital accessibility requires that the needs of people with disabilities be met, but are those the only people that benefit from digital accessibility?

Mark: So there is a lot of myths around how many people are impacted when it comes to digital accessibility. Most people, in their mind, automatically default to somebody who is blind or somebody who is deaf, when in fact, there’s a number of different indices on how many people have a disability. The number I use is 20%; about 20% of the population has a disability that impacts their ability to use technology. And when you’re thinking about the different kinds of disabilities, it’s visual disabilities, people who are both blind and have low vision and are colorblind. I think the number is 8% of the male population is color blind, so if you’re using color to provide information and using red and green as your color combination, somebody’s not going to be able to differentiate that. Then beyond visual disabilities, you have auditory disabilities, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, motor disability, somebody who can’t use a keyboard or can’t use a mouse, and also cognitive disabilities. And this is something I think is important for educators when you think about dyslexia and other types of learning disabilities, this falls into the realm of digital accessibility. But the other thing to remember is that, even though we’re talking specifically about people with disabilities, almost everything you do related to digital accessibility, improves the user experience for everyone. What can be frustrating for the general population can be a barrier for somebody with a disability. I’ve always been a huge advocate of user-centered design usability, and there’s a direct correlation to accessibility with that. And my message to web developers always has been, when you’re addressing accessibility issues, you are improving the overall experience for everyone.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit as we’re kind of framing this idea of digital accessibility, what some of the specific skills are related to digital accessibility, especially for content creators?

Mark: Sure. So there are a lot of things that make a website or a document accessible. Some of it does get complicated, but much of it is very simple to do, and something that I think everybody should just build into their workflow, whether you’re creating a web page or creating a document. So some of those include: color contrast, so the difference between the color of the text and the color of the background, there are specific contrast ratios you should be thinking about, but understanding to make that contrast workable for people who have low vision, and think about using your cell phone out in the sun. That would help in that situation as well. Related to colors, making sure that you don’t use color to convey information. I see a lot of schedules where an available time slot is green and an unavailable time slot is red, red/green is the most common color blind combination. So if somebody can’t see that difference because you’re relying solely on color to reflect that information. So another thing that everybody should think about is what I call semantic markup. And what semantics mean is that you’re describing the function of the information rather than what it looks like. So think about a heading. What you don’t want to do, whether you’re in Microsoft Word or using Google Docs or making a web page, is take your heading, make it a larger font and bold it, because that’s just addressing what it looks like, but not what the function of that content actually is. So when it comes to headings, when it comes to lists, when it comes to links, those are all things that can be marked up in a way that assistive technology understands what that is and will work properly with that. Again, very easy to do. Another thing is with images, making sure that you have provided alternate text, which allows a screen reader or other assistive device to be able to know the content of what’s in that image. Again, very easy to do. Another thing related to that is with videos, making sure that they’re captioned. Again, the tools are such now that you can do captioning much quicker than you could even five years ago. So really, no reason not to caption all your videos. And one of the things when I talk with faculty about captioning is that this really can be part of Universal Design for Learning. When I was working at the University of Buffalo, we had a large international student population, and they benefited from having captions on the videos, because they could understand the content much better. Making sure that when you are using a form, whether it’s a PDF form or whether it’s a web-based form, that you have labels for the input, again, important for assistive technology to understand how that form is working. I also want to make sure that when it comes to web pages, that your content will work with just a keyboard, not relying on the mouse. This is a skill that I recommend everybody learn. It takes about five minutes to learn how to navigate a web page using just the keyboard. Push your mouse to the side, and there are just a handful of keys you need to learn to be able to navigate a web page. This is very important for two reasons. One is most automated testing tools cannot determine whether the keyboard is working correctly or not. The second is that when it does not work correctly, that can be a complete barrier for somebody with a disability. One of the examples I use is that there was some administrative software at the University of Buffalo that we used, once you were into the software, it was fairly accessible, the problem was to log into it with your name and password, required the use of a mouse. So anybody who needed to use a mouse, it was a complete barrier; that tool was unusable. So really a good skill for everybody to learn.

Rebecca: You used assistive technology a lot in your last description, can you just describe what that is for folks that might not be familiar?

Mark: Sure, so assistive technology is developed specifically for people with disabilities. The most common assistive technology are screen readers, and there’s a variety of screen readers. Many of them are free. In fact, I recommend that people use free screen readers. On the Windows side. NVDA is a free screen reader, which is really powerful; on the Macintosh side, VoiceOver is included on both the iPhone and on a Mac, so again, very easy to learn how to use those. Those work for people who are blind. And one of the things about screen readers is that there are people who use those who can see but have other disabilities. So it’s not just somebody who has a visual disability. Another type of assistive technology is known as a mouth stick. So this is somebody who does not have use of their hands, but can still use a keyboard by just putting the stick in their mouth and then pressing on the keys instead of using their hands to do that. More sophisticated assistive technology is something like a Braille keyboard. So there are keyboards that allow you to type and get feedback using just Braille. So pretty advanced technology. And one of the things we’re starting to see is, I’m wearing AirPods right now, and those AirPods can be used as a hearing device as assistive listening, and that’s one of the things I’m happy to see is that a lot of mainstream devices now can be used as assistive technology.

John: The history of legislation related to disabilities is fairly recent, beginning with the Americans with Disability Act (or the ADA) that was enacted in 1990. At the international level. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2006. In it is the explicit claim that accessibility is a human right. The first version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines was released in 1999 with a 2.0 version adopted by the International Standards Organization in 2012. More recently, laws have been updated throughout the world to more explicitly address issues of digital accessibility. As one example, can you talk about the recent updates to Title II of the ADA in the US?

Mark: Sure, so Title II of the American with Disabilities Act had rules established last April, and this was, in my opinion, a really important event in the history of how the web and disability come together. The important thing to remember about the American with Disabilities Act is that is a civil rights law. So that should be the message. This is about human rights and about civil rights. As you mentioned, the ADA was adopted in 1990, which predates the web. So the web went public in 1993. I was fortunate enough that I was there like a week after that it went public, and guessed that the web might be a thing. I taught myself how to program and away I went. But it’s always been case law, rather than regulations from the government about what does disability actually mean. And it was a long process. The real start to the current regulations was in 2010. That rule making was then dropped in 2016, picked back up and finally adopted last year. So this has been a long time coming, and one of the things to remember about the ADA Title II is that now we have a specific technical standard that we can reference. And for the ADA Title II, it is WCAG, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1, level AA, and we can talk more about what all that means if we want to talk more about what all that means. But anyways, this was the first time that there was a specific technical standard that people could reference. There was an interesting case with Domino’s Pizza. This was like four or five years ago. Domino’s was sued because somebody who was blind could not order a pizza online, so they took Domino’s to court, and one of Domino’s defenses was, “Tell me what it means to be accessible, and I’ll make it accessible. There’s no standard. How do I know if I’m making it accessible or not?” For me, that was an interesting argument. However, eventually that case did go to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court chose not to hear it, so Domino’s didn’t win on that argument, but it raised a really legitimate point: that having a technical standard would be so helpful, and this is why the ADA Title II regulations are so important. A couple other things about the ADA Title II regulations. This is specifically for state and local government. That is what Title II is. And all public colleges and universities fall under Title II. Private colleges, however, are not part of Title II, and some people who work at private colleges may think, “I’m off the hook. I don’t need to do this,” when, in fact, that is not the case at all. For anything outside of state and local government, it’s business as usual. That means that you still absolutely can be sued in court, if you have accessibility issues, but they’re not going to use the WCAG standard necessarily as the measuring stick. It’s going to be up to the court to decide what are we going to use as a measuring stick. In fact, there was just a case in Louisiana in February where the state of Louisiana said we don’t have to do this until next April. And the courts are saying, “Oh, yes, you do. This is still in effect, even though the deadline for Title II isn’t until next year.”

Rebecca: So, Mark, you’re talking a little bit about the laws in the U.S., but this isn’t just a U.S.-specific thing. Can you talk a little bit about what’s been happening globally, in a general sense?

Mark: Yes. So, globally, there has been a tremendous increase in legislation specific to Web and Digital Accessibility. In the European Union, they’re actually a little bit ahead of the United States, because their accessibility laws deadline is this June, and pretty similar in terms of what the expectations are technically, but they’re again a year ahead of where the United States is. Ontario, same thing. Ontario has had a pretty strong accessibility law in place for quite a while. So, in many ways, the US is catching up to this. One of the things that is nice about the WCAG standards is that they are internationally recognized. So almost every law that you see specifically references the WCAG standard, which I think makes it much easier for consistency, to understand what is expected when it comes to web and digital accessibility.

John: How do the changes in Title II impact our educational system, specifically higher ed, in terms of its effect on institutions, students, and faculty and staff?

Mark: So, Title II regulations are actually a major change with the way that colleges and universities need to think about Web and Digital Accessibility. And that major change is that the ADA Title II regulations move to a model of full accessibility, rather than accommodations. For anybody who is familiar with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, that is an accommodation model. If someone has a disability, it is very specific to their situation. This person is blind, is trying to access this information, and we’re going to create an accommodation that will help that specific person. The expectation with Title II is that everything is fully accessible from the get go. So this, for institutions is a major change philosophically in terms of how you need to think about meeting your accessibility goals… huge, huge change. For faculty and staff at a university, I think the Title II regulations bring the importance of this to the forefront. I am a longtime advocate for accessibility beyond legal requirements. In fact, I would do everything that I normally do when it comes to creating a website if there was no law, because it just is best practice and usability and all of those kinds of things. But with law, that gets people’s attention, and I think with the Title II regulations, this is getting people’s attention because you are breaking federal law if you are not making your sites accessible if you’re a public university. So I think that changes things for faculty and staff, where there’s a level of seriousness now and a level of training that’s needed that perhaps wasn’t there before. When it comes to students, I think this is an opportunity for students to learn about accessibility and why that matters. One of the questions I get is that, technically, students posting information onto a class website or a class activity within their learning management system, that needs to be accessible. And a lot of administrators, faculty and staff, are kind of pushing back against that, saying, “How are we going to make that happen?” Well, the answer is, you train students how to do it. It’s not that hard to do the basics. Every student I’ve ever talked to has been fascinated by the fact that you can make things accessible for people with disabilities. There’s a level of empathy there that perhaps isn’t there with people in my generation. So I think this is a great opportunity to train students on what accessibility means and give them the basic tools to make their content accessible.

Rebecca: I’ve heard some conversations with decision makers across higher ed about whether or not these regulations will be enforced because of current executive orders related to DEI, the dismantling of the Department of Education and the reduction of the federal workforce. What is your sense of the stability of the law and the momentum of the work on digital accessibility in higher education?

Mark: So that is a great question, and my answer may change an hour from now [LAUGHTER] than what it is right now. That’s fair. [LAUGHTER] It is very, very fluid. That being sai, one thing about the Title II regulations is that the current administration cannot legally just throw those out. They were established in April of 2024. I believe it’s 180 days have to go by, and then it’s kind of written in stone at that point. So the current administration can’t say, “Never mind. We’re going to just ignore these.” That’s legally not what they can do. Now, whether they do that anyways, we’ll see what happens. So that’s one thing to think about. The second thing to think about is that much of what happens in the courts around accessibility are private lawsuits. That has nothing to do with the Department of Justice and how they prioritize Title II. Anybody can bring a lawsuit against you at any time, and now you’re in the court system, and it has nothing to do with the administrative branch of the government, so you are always exposed to a lawsuit, and that’s where most of this activity happens. The other thing to keep in mind is that most states also have laws around accessibility. For those who are in New York state, there are pretty strong laws around web and digital accessibility. So even at the federal level, you may not think you need to worry about this, but at the state level, you absolutely do. As far as the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, I’m actually pretty good friends with a lot of people who currently and formerly work there, unfortunately. What has happened with the OCR is that the central team still exists, and again, I’m saying this in April of 2025, but that team still exists, but it’s been drastically cut in size. And the big question is, how quickly can they respond to complaints? Because they have like 10,000 complaints on the docket, not just for accessibility issues, but beyond accessibility issues. So how quickly can they respond to those, that’s open to anybody, who knows what’s going to happen with that. So I don’t know what’s going to happen. I think it would be misinformed to think that you don’t have to worry about this, however, because, who knows? The bottom line is that, as I mentioned before, we should be doing accessibility work, regardless of the law, there is tremendous value there. So one of the things I do as a consultant is when I come on campus and I meet with senior leadership, is I talk to them about how important is web and digital accessibility to everything that happens on your campus. It used to be that we would talk a lot about mission and vision statements, which always included the words diversity and inclusion, which web accessibility fits right in with that. That’s a piece that I’m concerned about right now, is whether we can connect accessibility to DEI initiatives. One of the interesting things for me when I was at the University at Buffalo, as the Web Accessibility Officer, I reported to the Director of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and that was something I told the administration I wanted to do, because it sends a much different message about why we’re doing this when it’s part of diversity, equity, inclusion, rather than being part of the IT office, where now it’s an IT compliance issue. Now would I take that same strategy right now? Probably not, because of some of the challenges around DEI. I am hoping that people push back on this a little bit, because the ADA is federal law. So to me, there’s a complete disconnect between what’s happening around DEI nationally and what the law actually is. Now, how courts interpret that, how the current administration interprets that, is anybody’s guess. I understand why some people are gun shy about talking about DEI and then adding A into that as well, but I think that there are federal laws around this, and I think there is solid ground for continuing to do this work. So who knows what’s going to happen again? It’s a very fluid situation. It’s an unfortunate situation, because last year, after waiting for 15 years, we finally got these Title II regulations, and now a lot of that work is being questioned about how this is going to move forward.

Rebecca: I think, as you mentioned before, about the global context, too, that underscores the idea that it doesn’t really matter what the current political climate is, that globally, there’s an initiative in this direction, and we’re likely to continue seeing it. We’re gonna get behind if we’re not doing it here.

Mark: Absolutely.

John: Now, when faculty and staff and others creating digital content are creating new material, if you start from the ground up and are not retrofitting accessibility onto older work. It’s pretty easy to create accessible content, but there are areas, though, in some disciplines, where it’s a little bit more challenging for faculty. That includes areas where there’s discipline-specific notation, such as chemistry, math, or music, or limitations to machine-generated captions for content that is sung or in multiple languages or spoken by non-native speakers. How should institutions handle content with these more complex challenges?

Mark: This is a very, very important topic. I recently read a statistic that people with disabilities constitute 10% of our national workforce, but only 2% of STEM professionals. So that disconnect tells me that this is really an area that we need to think more about and to address. And as you mentioned, basic accessibility is relatively simple to implement, but there are places where accessibility can be a challenge, whether you’re talking about chemistry notations and math formulas and those kinds of things. What I recommend that campuses do is that they really work hard to create awareness among those faculty members in those disciplines to understand what some of these additional challenges are, and then providing the support and resources to help them meet those challenges. The good news is that these challenges are not new. So there are a variety of tools that are being created to help with math formulas and scientific notation and others. So I think it’s really important that the faculty understand, 1. we’re going to have to take that extra step, and 2. that a campus provides those resources. And related to that, I think it’s important that at least one person on a campus really is paying attention to these additional types of tools. And they’re improving every year, and I think it’s important to stay up with how those improvements are happening, and have somebody play point on campus so they can connect the dots with the vendors who provide these tools and the faculty members who need them. There’s also a lot of good information out there on how to make, for example, STEM materials, accessible. So if you Google that, a lot of places will come up. I have done some work with the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials, the AEM, and they have a lot of great resources. They’re very much involved with Universal Design for Learning… bring the accessibility component into that. So that is a place where you can get a lot of great resources about how to make these more challenging educational materials accessible.

Rebecca: One of the other areas that I know often raise challenges for faculty, but other folks in higher ed, are third party content like learning materials, content platforms and services, PDFs of articles with complex charts and graphs are often a concern. What role does higher ed institutions need to play in moving the accessibility needle in these other spaces, with these third party vendors.

Mark: Third party vendors and procurement is the most challenging aspect when it comes to your digital accessibility program. The phrase that the Office of Civil Rights always uses is we’re going to look at your program, services, and activities. When you think about a campus’s program services and activities, they are almost always happening on third-party products, whether it’s your learning management system, whether it’s your student information system, your alumni system, on and on that list goes. But the reality is that it’s third-party products where the rubber hits the road. So this is really, really important. One of the challenges with the ADA Title II rules is that they don’t apply to vendors. Those are private companies. They don’t need to legally make their products accessible. So what does higher ed need to do to kind of help fix this situation? One is to recognize the buying power, the collective buying power of 4500 colleges and universities across the country, and start to put the appropriate level of pressure onto the vendors. As I say that, the approach I try to take with vendors is rather than it being adversarial, let’s think about this as a win-win opportunity. I happen to know the heads of accessibility at many of the major educational technology companies, and they want us to complain, because in these big organizations, it’s up to the product manager to determine how accessible a given product is, not up to the Accessibility Officer for that company. So we need to put pressure on vendors, and I think there is opportunity for us to do that collectively, rather than individually. This is something I have been talking about with a number of people nationally, about how do we become more efficient in terms of how we approach vendors? And two things to think about: one is testing can be challenging to determine whether a vendor’s product is actually accessible or not. So rather than 4500 colleges doing their own testing, is there a way to combine that and just kind of share best practices, share results? Good idea in principle, but in practice, many times lawyers get involved with this and they’re concerned about legal risk if I, as Mark Greenfield, representing the University of Buffalo, say product X is not accessible, the people at product X don’t agree with that, so we’re going to take you to court and question that. So unfortunately, the lawyers have been involved with that, but there are ways around that, which we continue to work on. And then the second thing, again, is the collective buying power. I have been pleasantly surprised over the last couple of years about how serious publishers and the major educational technology vendors are taking accessibility. They are making progress with being honest and objective about what the shortcomings are, and putting resources to address those shortcomings. So I think it is really important that we continue to do that kind of work. One of the things I was disappointed with with the new ADA regulations is that they only applied to Title II, which is state and local government. I wish they would have also addressed Title III, which is the private entities, the vendors would fall under Title III. For a whole bunch of reasons, it would have been nice for them to address both of those at the same time, but unfortunately, that didn’t happen. So I think we really need to be an advocate about why this matters, and kind of use our collective buying power to encourage vendors to push them kind of in the right direction.

John: The focus on improving the accessibility work on many campuses have focused on faculty and staff but had not addressed students in most campuses, probably. What role do our institutions need to play in moving the accessibility needle in these other spaces for classwork from students or from student clubs and organizations, for example?

Mark: I would love to see college campuses be much more proactive when it comes to training students about the importance of accessibility, why it matters, and just very quick and easy things that anybody can do to make their content more accessible. I remember 20 years ago, I taught a general education course at the University of Buffalo, it was called UB 101, where we basically gave them the components: this is how you kind of survive in college in your first year, and what all the various offices do, and some other advice and guidance. I would love to see any campus that has a course like that, you know what? Spend the day, spend an hour talking about accessibility, what that is and why it matters, and show them the basics on how to do it. Again, my experience has been students are very happy to take those steps to make something accessible, and I think they would just eat that right up. And I think it’s a good service. I am a little disappointed that here we are in 2025, 30 years after the web was invented, and 35 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act, and yet we have made little progress when it comes to the accessibility of higher education websites and documents, and that’s very frustrating to me. I think one of the ways to start to improve this is let’s start to work with students and have them understand, and not just computer science students. There is a group called Teach Access, which is working with computer science faculty to make sure they’re incorporating accessibility in their teaching. But I think it needs to go much farther than just Teach Access and computer science majors to everyone on campus. And again, this is not that hard to do. A real quick story for you. One of the favorite projects I have worked on in my entire career was working with a group of third graders to make a blind athlete’s website accessible. It was a fascinating project. The athlete’s name was Rachael Scdoris. She runs in the Iditarod, and she was legally blind. Through the ADA, she actually sued the Iditarod to have a spotter 1000 feet in front of her, so she had some sense of where she was going in the middle of Alaska. She won that lawsuit. When my daughter was in second grade, as a class project, they followed the Iditarod, and my daughter chose Rachael Scdoris to follow. She was young and blonde, and my daughter identified with her, so when I found out she was blind, I went to her website and found out that it was completely inaccessible. So I didn’t contact Racha el directly. I contacted her agent and told him, you know, this probably isn’t the best look, because Rachael is actually pretty vocal about accessibility and disability. And at first I said, “You know what? Maybe I’ll fix this for you.” But then I had a better idea, let’s train my daughter and some of her classmates how to do this. So I took a group of third graders, taught them how to code websites, this is back in 2006, 2007 and they recreated Rachael’s website and it was perfectly accessible, including captioning the videos that were on her website. So when people tell me that this is too hard, I tell them, “No, it’s not. I had a whole group of third graders who could do it.” The bigger lesson from that was when I asked the third graders, “Why does this matter?” It was all about empathy. “Of course, we’re going to do this to help as many people as we can.” So instilling that mindset in the students, I think, would be a big step forward to help us address why we are still kind of challenged by making everything accessible.

Rebecca: I mean, we are institutions of learning.

Mark: Exactly.

Rebecca: We’re well positioned to educate an entire generation on how to do this work.

Mark: And when you think about how important the web and digital is now compared to a generation ago, I think COVID actually brought this to the forefront when we moved everything online. Now, all of a sudden, everybody’s really paying attention to what happens online and accessibility as well. But as you think about the program services and activities, more and more of those are moving online all the time. So it makes the importance of Web and Digital Accessibility all the greater. And there is an opportunity to train the next generation to really just be aware of and understand what this is all about.

Rebecca: It’s really easy for folks to get hung up on the legal obligations, especially as we’ve kind of framed the conversation around Title II. But can you talk a little bit more about the value of digital accessibility and why we should be doing it anyways?

Mark: So again, one of the misconceptions is that it’s a small part of the population that has a disability, when, in fact, it’s 20% of the population, and that is just people with permanent disabilities. We’re not talking about somebody with a temporary disability. So for example, if you broke your arm and couldn’t use a mouse anymore, or a situational disability, whether you’re in a library watching a video where you can’t have the sound up, or those kinds of things. So there’s a lot of value, just in terms of the percentage of people, but beyond that, one of my goals is to get people to think about accessibility, not as a cost center, but as a strategic investment. Forrester Research a few years ago, did a study on the ROI, the return on investment, of both usability and accessibility together. So this was not just about accessibility, but usability and accessibility are definitely joined at the hip, and really you can think about those very similarly, but the ROI they found was 100 to one. For every dollar invested in usability and accessibility returned $100 of value. So think about it that way, the value beyond. Again, I was talking before about students who maybe English is their second language, and the value of having captions on a video. So there’s just a lot of opportunity there. And the thing is that it’s really not hard to do the basics of accessibility, and if you start with that mindset, it is relatively easy to do. Another message for my web development friends is don’t try to make everything as fancy as possible. Simpler is better. So, as an example, without getting too technical here, there are a variety of ways that you can add alternative text to an image. The simplest way and the best way is to use the alt text within the image tag within HTML, instead of trying to get fancy with ARIA and other fancy programming, which you can kind of accomplish the same thing, but you’re much better off keeping it simpler, because, even as we speak in 2025, the way that web browsers, assistive technology, and the operating system all interact varies tremendously, and ARIA doesn’t always work. So you can get a combination of things where it’s not working on NVDA, where it does work in voiceover because you’re using ARIA. So again, a message I have to developers is, try to keep things as simple as possible. This is a usability thing as well. There’s not a day that goes by that my wife doesn’t hear me say, “What’s wrong? This website’s awful because of usability issues,” and that’s, quite frankly, still the case with higher education. Part of my consulting business is doing audits, not just accessibility audits, but doing just general accessibility and usability audits. And I have yet to find a college or university where I can’t write a 20-page report about the usability issues that a site has, and a lot of that has to do with people just trying to be too complicated.

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Mark: Fascinating question when it comes to technology, and technology changes so fast. So I’m going to tell this story. Again, I’ve been doing IT work for 45 years. Gordon Moore was the CEO of Intel and Moore’s law is that computing technology doubles every 18 months. He said that back in the early 1960s, we’re here in 2025 that is still the case. The challenge is that it’s difficult for us as humans to get our arms around exponential change. I like to share the story of the inventor of the game of chess. So an inventor comes up with this new game called chess. He takes it to the Emperor, shares this game with the Emperor. Emperor loves the game. The inventor says, “Here’s what I want for a reward on the first square of the chess board, I want one grain of rice, on the second I want two grains of rice, on the third square I want four grains of rice, eight grains, 16, exponentially. We’re going to grow that until we’ve done all 64 squares of the chess board. I ask people, “How big of a pile of rice do you have after you’ve filled all 64 squares?” People are amazed that that pile of rice is bigger than Mount Everest. When I started working at the University of Buffalo, 1987, we wanted to buy a Cray II supercomputer, biggest, baddest computer on the planet. Cost, I believe, $17 million in 1987 dollars. We even, as a research university, couldn’t afford it, so we rented time at Calspan down the street at $10,000 an hour. Anybody who has a second generation Apple iPhone or newer has more computing horsepower in their hand than a Cray II supercomputer. That’s what exponential change is. So in your mind, you’re saying, “That’s great. Over the last 30 years or 40 years, we’ve made that much progress. In another 40 years, we’re going to also make that much progress.” That is not exponential thinking. In the next three or four years, we’re going to make that much progress again. So to loop this back to kind of where technology is going and where accessibility is going and what’s next, one of the things I’m paying attention to is voice technology. I gave a talk at an international voice conference a few years ago and talked about how voice could improve accessibility, and it’s really interesting about what the application of voice technology can do, because it can free us from the interface of having to use a computer and a mouse, where now you don’t have to worry about a lot of the disabilities that come into play right now. So the future is multimodal, multi-surface interfaces, which can take into every combination of things and really address accessibility. I was very encouraged that at this voice conference, people are taking accessibility very seriously and trying to build some tools into the voice interface. Related to that is artificial intelligence, and many people are predicting that ultimately the user interface for AI is going to be voice. Now I go back to watching a Space Odyssey and thinking about HAL, and that interface with HAL was a voice interface, so I can see a lot of that coming, and there is real opportunity to address accessibility issues with that. We need to take caution in terms of how quickly we use AI to improve accessibility. One of the big controversies in the accessibility world now is the use of accessibility overlays, which are products and tools where they tell you a single line of code can be installed on your website and immediately address all of your accessibility issues. In the last couple of years, they’ve been talking about AI as the driver of that, the reality is they don’t work. And I am very disappointed in most of the overlay companies who are, quite frankly, telling lies about what these products can do. And for anybody who’s thinking about using an overlay, or currently using an overlay, know that that that can get you sued. There are actually a number of court cases right now specifically addressing the use of overlays on websites, so be very cautious about that. Also, a lot of talk now about how artificial intelligence can be used to remediate documents and remediate websites. I think there is a lot of opportunity there, but it is too early to have that working the way it should be working. For example, in Microsoft Word right now, AI will generate alternative text for you. My experience has been that’s good, maybe one out of 10 times. So you really need to pay attention to that. There’s an old quote. It’s known as Amara’s law, and it says we tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. And I think that is the case with AI, where everybody’s kind of running out to say AI is going to fix everything today. Not the case. But I am very encouraged down the road about what AI can do. And let me just kind of close this with, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a book in this talk. I have a tendency to mention lots of books, and a book I would recommend everybody learns is called Haben: the Deaf Blind Woman who Conquered Harvard Law. It’s written by a woman by the name of Haben Girma. I’ve actually interacted with her a few times online. She is just awesome and such a passionate advocate for people with disabilities. People are amazed that she could graduate from Harvard Law School being deaf blind, but she did, and she is a huge advocate for that. If you get the opportunity to hear her speak, she always is talking about how there is an opportunity for innovation when it comes and she’s encouraging all of the technology people to really think about innovation and how we can use technology to improve people’s lives. And that certainly is something I hope we see again, even as educational institutions going forward, how can we provide that platform for this innovation?

Rebecca: Yeah, that’s a great book. Thanks for recommending it. Thanks so much for joining us today. It was great to talk about accessibility, a topic I never get sick of talking about.

Mark: Thanks for having me.

John: And it’s a topic that all institutions need to be addressing to a much greater extent as we approach that deadline. So thank you again.

Mark: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes 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.

[MUSIC]

395. UDL 3.0

Posted in accessibility, classroom community, design thinking, engagement, equity, evidence-based practices, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, teaching, universal design
May 28, 2025

The Universal Design for Learning (or UDL) framework is based on research on how students learn. In this episode, Tom Tobin, Lillian Nave, and Jennifer Pusateri join us to discuss the most recent evolution of the UDL guidelines.

Tom is a founding member of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of the forthcoming book, UDL at Scale: Adopting Universal Design for Learning across Higher Education, as well as Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education and several other works related to teaching and learning. Lillian is the Faculty and Educational Development Specialist for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success at Appalachian State University’s Hickory Campus, a senior lecturer in first-year seminar, and the host of the ThinkUDL podcast. Jennifer is the Senior Universal Design Consultant at The University of Kentucky and has served as the co-chair of the international UDL in Higher Education Network. She is a member of the CAST National Faculty and is the author of Transform Your Teaching with Universal Design for Learning: Six Steps to Jumpstart Your Practice. Tom, Lillian, and Jennifer often serve as keynote speakers on UDL and other issues.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: The Universal Design for Learning (or UDL) framework is based on research on how students learn. In this episode, we discuss the most recent evolution of the UDL guidelines.

[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]

John: Our guests today are Tom Tobin, Lillian Nave, and Jennifer Pusateri. Tom is a founding member of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the author of the forthcoming book, UDL at Scale: Adopting Universal Design for Learning across Higher Education, as well as Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education and several other works related to teaching and learning. Lillian is the Faculty and Educational Development Specialist for the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success at Appalachian State University’s Hickory Campus, a senior lecturer in first-year seminar, and the host of the ThinkUDL podcast. Jennifer is the Senior Universal Design Consultant at The University of Kentucky and has served as the co-chair of the international UDL in Higher Education Network. She is a member of the CAST National Faculty and is the author of Transform Your Teaching with Universal Design for Learning: Six Steps to Jumpstart Your Practice. Tom, Lillian, and Jennifer often serve as keynote speakers on UDL and other issues. Welcome Jennifer, and welcome back, Tom and Lillian.

Tom: Thanks a bunch, glad to be here.

Lillian: Very glad to be, again, with you all.

Jennifer: Yeah, excited. My pleasure.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Tom, are you drinking tea today?

Tom: I am, I am coming to you with some peak leaf cold brew iced tea when all you want is just the tea. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Love it. Lillian?

Lillian: I would like you to notice I’m drinking in my Tea for Teaching podcast mug that John gifted me at a conference, and I brought my organic hibiscus or hibiscus, depending on if you’re from the south or not, my hibiscus tea bags.

Rebecca: And how about you, Jennifer?

Jennifer: So, I’m not a tea drinker, guys. I drink a coffee in the morning, and then the rest of the day I am team water. So I’ve got my emotional support water cup with me here today.

Rebecca: I do like to always point out that water is the foundation of tea. [LAUGHTER]

Jennifer: That is true.

John: And I am drinking a pure peppermint tea because it’s been a long day filled with caffeine up to this point.

Rebecca: And I have my last cup of London Strand. I’m at the end. It’s very sad.

John: You may have to head back there again.

Rebecca: I may.

John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss the UDL 3.0 guidelines that were released on July 30, 2024. But before we discuss the changes that have occurred, could you describe what the UDL framework is and what remains the same?

Jennifer: I’ll give it a shot. So the framework of UDL is essentially a collection of, gosh, I think there’s over 1200 different studies that have kind of been boiled down into these nine categories, and those categories are organized in a grid format. So you can kind of look at it in lots of different ways, but essentially this framework, the UDL framework, tells you what research says works in teaching, and it tells you about that in nine different areas. So three of those have to do with engagement. Three have to do with representation, or how things are presented, and the other three have to do with action and expression, kind of how people are taking action with and showing what they’ve learned. So that’s how the framework of UDL works, and it’s been updated many times. There was an update that I remember in 2013. There was another one in 2018, but the move from the 2013 to the 2018 version, the words didn’t really change, but the order of some of the guidelines changed around a little bit. So this is the first time in quite a while, and this new version, the 3.0 version that came out here in the summer of ‘24 this is the first time we’ve seen some changes to the actual words inside of the guideline themselves. And there’s actually quite a lot that’s the same. I don’t think anything was removed, per se. Some things were combined. So they took two that might have been similar and combined them into one consideration, which is what we call the bullet points that you see if you’re looking at the framework of UDL. So many were left the same. And then we also had some brand new ones, and those are really scattered across the framework, and a lot of them are bringing into focus some other things we hadn’t really talked much about in UDL. So I’m excited to learn a little bit more about that from my colleagues today, but I always love to talk about the framework of UDL, so I’m here for it. And for a webinar that Lillian and Tom and I did last week, we put together a crosswalk document that will show you what things stayed the same, what things are new, and maybe some things where it’s been changed, but it’s close. So we have a whole document laid out for that, and we will be happy to put that in the show notes.

Rebecca: Always like a good resource around here, that’s for sure. So as Jennifer just noted, both the current and earlier versions of the UDL guidelines include things related to multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression, but there were some revisions to the language about how these are described. The earlier guidelines asked faculty to provide each of these, and the current guidelines remove the word “provide,” and have shifted the focus to learner agency. Can you talk a little bit about what motivated this change and what are some ways of building learner agency into course design?

Tom: Rebecca, this is an excellent question, because one of the reasons why we moved into a new version number with universal design for learning is that, in earlier versions, we assumed a command environment where the instructor had all the skill, the authority, the deference and the learners were just there to sort of bask in the glory of the knowledge of the instructor. And that’s not necessarily the case. I mean, if you’re teaching elementary school students, you act in loco parentis. At the same time, in higher education, we’re working with adult learners, and they are their own folks. They’re there for their own reasons, and we don’t have any legal obligation to treat them in a power dynamic. So when we think about the shift to learner agency, there was, for many years, a call among practitioners to say the designers and instructors are not the only people with power here, and the designers and instructors are not the only people who are engaged in the learning process. So it’s not, “Hey, we design it and then you lucky people get to experience it,” but we should be making space to help learners understand their own learning process and then build up into agency. So the goal is not to create expert learners, but now they’ve actually shifted that language into learner agency, or agentic learners. In colleges and universities, a lot of our learners already have some experience under their belts, so there is much less of a need for an expectation to establish a command environment, like I was saying a minute ago. Now, that actually lets us design better for the goal of agentic learning for Universal Design for Learning, since we are in the business of preparing our learners to join us as professionals in our fields. And if you want to take a look into one of the new guidelines, you’d watch for language in the 3.0 version that talks about co-creating, and we can apply that broadly where it doesn’t yet appear. So Jennifer talked earlier about there are three big principles of universal design for learning. So design multiple ways to get engaged, to represent information, and to take action and express yourself. Each of those three big principles is further divided into nine guidelines. And each of those nine guidelines has several considerations underneath it, specific practices that people can do. The new consideration 8.3, “foster collaboration, interdependence, and collective learning,” it explicitly talks about learners creating their own learning conditions. But one of the older considerations, 2.1, which is “clarify vocabulary, symbols, and language structures,” it doesn’t yet do that. So if you want, listeners, you can search for research on social construction of learning, with colleges and universities in your search terms, and you can kind of address that gap. Similarly in how we design is there’s an assumption in Universal Design for Learning that learners’ brains are still developing. The UDL came out of the K-12 environment, and if you think of maybe a mom and her grade-school-age son, they’re sitting at home, they’re both working on their homework, she’s in college, so she’s on her laptop; he’s in grade school, so he’s got a pencil and a piece of paper. and we need to support developing executive and emotional aspects of learners in K-12 environments. But for college, we kind of have to shift our focus from developing brains toward social-emotional elements, and we see some of this in some of the newer UDL considerations. So the research that’s cited for consideration 3.2, it’s one of the old ones, that’s “highlight and explore patterns, critical features, big ideas, and relationships,” right now, the research that is cited for that doesn’t contain any higher education examples, so we’ve got about 15 years worth of studies like Jen was talking about earlier. And to address this, we can kind of move beyond the simple neurobiology argument of UDL toward a more social constructivist mode of practice. So we’ll design options specifically so that we can help reduce cognitive load, dissonance, and environmentally interfering conditions for our learners. So watch out in the new 3.0 guidelines for language that talks about emotions, self-regulation, and review the research page of those considerations to see what sources were used to develop them, and you can supplement your search with keywords from those considerations, plus college, university or adult learning in your research databases. So there’s a lot to unpack in the new guidelines.

John: The new guidelines also emphasize issues related to individual identity and building on the strength of the diversity in our classes. Some faculty, though, especially in STEM fields, are somewhat resistant to that. They’ll say, “When I’m teaching students how to work with differential equations, identity doesn’t matter.” How can we convince faculty that perhaps they should at least consider the diversity of students in their class and build on that diversity?

Lillian: Well, I’ll take that one, John, and let’s not give, and you’re not doing this, give the STEM professors a bad name or anything. But I do hear this a lot in a lot of my conversations with faculty, and I think it’s just not really broadening enough… broadening our definition of what identity is. It’s really not just the things that we can see, but recognizing that all of the students in our classroom are different, and identity can take many forms, and that’s the reality that we have in our classrooms. More and more students are coming to college than have ever gone before from different backgrounds: We have first-generation students, English language learners, college prep students, and students who’ve had really no college prep, so neurodivergent students, students with disabilities, etc. So it’s really a matter of understanding who’s in your classroom and taking down barriers to learning for all of those students. So all of your students are going to have some strengths. Some are going to be really stem focused. They’re going to have a great math background. They’re going to be ready to go into your physics lab with really no problems. And other students might come in with a lot of other maybe verbal strengths, reading comprehension, a lot of vocabulary, but need a little bit more structure and background with some of the math as they move into your physics lab, okay? So we’ve got lots of challenges and opportunities for all of them. What does that look like? Well, I can use the example of my daughter, who was a typical college student and would have shown up in many of those STEM classes, because she was a STEM major, and she was kind of the typical, you know, most college students now are young women… [LAUGHTER] that’s the majority… are girls. And by the way, she gives me full permission to share this story. And thinking of all of you college lecturers and professors out there, how many of you have had a student named Emma? Probably 100% of them. So she’s in your class, but what you don’t realize is that there are lots of things that are part of one student’s identity that you don’t know are making it harder or are barriers. So being a girl in a STEM class is sometimes just a little bit awkward, when even though they’re the most of the students, they are less represented in STEM classes. So when she was in a physics class, she was in the minority. No big deal. But when you keep adding on a few other things, like the fact that, as a left hander, she really couldn’t write as fast as everybody else, and so she needed a little electronic iPad to work on there. That’s number two. And then the fact that she’s neurodivergent in two ways, with ADHD, anxiety, that made it a little bit more hesitant for her to go up and ask questions when she was feeling far behind. And then add on to that, a chronic condition. So she has to get immunotherapy and go to a clinic. That means she has to leave campus. She has to get those set up even before the semester starts. So, too bad it conflicted with her physics class because she didn’t know which section she was going to be in. So all of those things are things that created barriers for her, and I’m not saying that the faculty member needs to know all those things, you don’t, but those are the kinds of things that are part of your students’ identities. So if you can make sure that you have accessible slides, that if a student has to miss for no fault of their own, they can get that information, then you’re doing a service to your students. In fact, you’re just making it accessible for your students who can’t be there. If you’re making sure that everybody knows, really well organized, what the material is, and that they can go back and look at things that were building up to that particular date, if you have to miss, then those are just other ways that you are supplying the information to all of your students, no matter their identity, if they have a lot of background or a little bit of background, etc. So that’s the kind of thing that we’re talking about. And it’s not just accessibility, but it’s just thinking about you’re going to have students that are coming at your material from a different direction, and they are going to be better served by a variety of ways to get to the end point, not just the one way that you’re the most comfortable with. Because every student is different. Every faculty member is different. My favorite saying that I use all the time is we really don’t want the same students to be uncomfortable all of the time, but we want all of the students to be uncomfortable some of the time, and so if we can spread that out, we get all of the students into that learning zone where they risk just a little, but they’re not always in that risky fight or flight mode, then we’re better serving our students. So that’s what I say about identity for our students, it does matter just because everybody’s different.

Rebecca: Sounds like we also need to think about as faculty also sometimes having that experience of being uncomfortable like that goes… [LAUGHTER]

Lillian: Yes, exactly.

Rebecca: …not all the same faculty need to be uncomfortable all of the time. So building on what you were just talking about, Lillian, and what Tom was mentioning before about the social aspects that are now in UDL. Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways in which our courses can more effectively foster a sense of belonging?

Lillian: Yes, yeah, so I’ll go all in on these two questions right now. So we’re all in this learning together, and all of our students and faculty have a relationship, whether you realize it or not, it might be a terrible relationship where students are afraid to come into class because they’ll get called on and they’re anxious about it, and they’re like dreading two o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That’s a relationship that you may or may not know, but it also could be a very warm and inviting relationship. I know that I’m going to go into class and there’s going to be something interesting and exciting and feel like they’re valued or ready to learn something new. So anyway, everybody’s got some sort of relationship. But how can we leverage, really, the design of the course into learning together and making it really a social learning opportunity? There’s lots of different ways to do that. So you can do that in person, online or hybrid. For example, if you have even a large in-person class, a way that all of the learners can really understand that they’re in the same place, they’re all learning together, is if you were to use, like an in-person or synchronous poll, and it can be completely anonymous, and then the faculty member could really determine, like, where are we as a class? There’s no points associated with it. It’s completely anonymous. So, could throw out a concept and see where people are, maybe on a continuum. Or how confident are you in this theory? Do you think you could solve this problem? And then the students could be like, “Oh, it’s not just me. About the third of the class thinks we need to review this again.” That’s just one way that everybody in the classroom is understanding their learning together. And it doesn’t have to be like, throw everybody in a group. You don’t have to do that, although that’s also helpful, but that’s just like, one of those things. In an online class. I love using a Q & A forum, so this is different, but this is understanding or seeing how somebody else in the class may solve a problem differently than you, but you want all of your students to attack this problem, and you don’t want it to be a discussion board where the first person answers, and then everybody else says, “Yeah. I was thinking that too.” Instead, this is something where everybody has to come up with their own answer, or way they would solve the problem or their thoughts on it, but they don’t get to see anybody else’s until they’ve answered. You have to wait 15 minutes after you answer to see if anybody else has and there’s some great mechanisms to do that. And that could be in smaller groups, it could be in the whole class, but we really do learn a lot and have a much more rich and more nuanced understanding the material when we see that other people are learning that, like I can read a passage and get something out of it, Jen can read the same passage and see something completely differently. Tom will see it a whole ‘nother way and pick up different things, and I’m a much better learner when I see that rich and nuanced perspective of my classmates. So there we all are learning together. So you can design for group learning, whether it’s hybrid, in-person, online, if you give also really good roles for any group work you want them to do. Don’t just throw them in the group and say, “have at it.” Is there going to be someone who’s the convener, who’s going to be sending out the emails? What are the roles? Is there an editor in the group, or what are they supposed to be doing? And also, what sort of document are they creating? Is it accessible, so that all of those students can really find what they need to do. So giving really good instructions on those things can help people learn together. And finally, I think the last thing is, have fun: games, quizzes, review days, trying things out together, making it sort of fun in learning is another way, I think, that we can bring that sense of community into the learning process.

John: One of the things you mentioned was doing some sort of a poll at the beginning of class, or gathering information about the identities of your students. One useful resource for that is the “Who’s in Class” form that was put together by Tracie Addy, Khadijah Mitchell, and Derek Dube, and we’ll share a link to that in the show notes, as well as an article they wrote about that. One of the other things in the new guidelines is that there’s an increased focus on addressing biases in the use of language and symbols, as well as biases related to modes of expression and communication. What are some of the ways in which these biases may appear, and how can we address them in our classes?

Tom: This is actually one of the big shifts in Universal Design for Learning 3.0, is that there’s an increasing awareness of and a need to create space for the intersectional identities or characteristics that learners and instructors bring into learning spaces. So those kinds of biases can be often unintentional ones. So for example, physical assumptions. When I’m giving a webinar and I say, “as you can see on the screen,” well maybe everybody can’t actually see what’s on the screen, so I’ve taken to doing visual description, or just using ableist language. When we think about something that’s really difficult, we say it was crazy or it was insane, and those are small but telling, unknowing ways of saying, “Yeah, if you fall into one of these categories, maybe this is not for you, or you don’t belong here.” Our colleague, Ann Gagne has a wonderful approach to addressing some of these biases, is using very neutral language in very charged or meaningful ways. So if you had a challenging day and someone asks you, “Hey, how did things go?” You can say “it was bananas,” and Ann, in a recent webinar, she used that kind of language, and she talked about one of her colleagues just saying giraffes. It was like a herd of giraffes, and it’s evocative, yes, ableist less so. When Jen and Lillian and I held a webinar for the Professional and Organizational Development Network Accessibility and Disability special interest group, or the POD A and D SIG for short, recently, we each got to talk about one of the new Universal Design for Learning considerations. The one that I was facilitating with some colleagues was 6.5: “challenge, exclusionary practices.” And this gets to your question, John. We can kind of examine power dynamics now within universal design for learning in a way that it wasn’t explicitly included before. So when we’re thinking about power imbalance, the people who teach in higher education, we are not ourselves a homogeneous group. We experience and express privilege and power in varying ways. So the same inclusive practices that white male instructors like me might use in order to lower barriers and smooth the way for learners, those might result in pushback and mistrust when they’re implemented by younger colleagues, women in the classroom, people of color who are at the front of a classroom. So we should acknowledge the privilege and standing that are needed in order to implement many of the UDL considerations. And when we design for variability, we should do so thinking about the variability, not only of our learners, but of the instructors who are going to be in communication and community with them. So when we’re thinking about biases, we can think along lots of different vectors: we can think about socioeconomic, we can think about gendered bias. There’s lots of those that listeners, you are probably familiar with. And when we think about Universal Design for Learning, just as we’re thinking about the variability of the learners, we also should start thinking about, “Okay, who has the privilege to be able to do these things and facilitate them well in the classroom. So that’s one piece where I’m hoping to see more research come out. We’ve actually got a number of different researchers who are working on these kinds of questions as their doctoral work over the last couple of years and into the future in the next two or three years. So I’m excited to see some of this research come out.

John: We should note, Tom, that you wrote an article with Chavella Pittman on this issue a while back in The Chronicle, and we had a podcast discussing that as well, and we’ll share links to both of those in the show notes. So, when talking about agency and power dynamics, the new guidelines seem to provide a bit more focus on the development of student goal setting, executive function, and metacognition, while also recognizing the individual, institutional, and systemic barriers to learning. What are some ways of incorporating this into the design of our courses?

Jennifer: Yeah, well, John, one of the biggest changes that we saw in the framework of UDL from the 2.2 to the 3.0 was moving executive functioning, which was a part of the previous version, but it was only one of the nine guidelines. So in this iteration, they have expanded that to be the entire bottom row, and so that’s including several different pieces of executive functioning. And that whole row now is labeled as executive function. So one piece of that would be emotional capacity. That would be things like emotional regulation or motivation, even inhibition and metacognition are part of that emotional capacity piece. It also includes the building knowledge guideline, and that used to be called comprehension, but is now renamed to building knowledge, and that piece is really going to be talking a lot about the information processing and the working memory piece that is part of this umbrella term, executive function. And then the last is strategy development, and that’s the one where we get into those, what people typically think of as executive functioning, goal setting, planning, organization, time management, that kind of stuff, all falls under that category as well. And I’m really glad that this is the way they have restructured this, because I’ll be honest, I ran into a lot of questions from folks in higher ed and K-12 as well, because previously there were two guidelines. One was executive function, and then the other one was self-regulation. And so I had a lot of people saying, well, aren’t those kind of the same thing? And I don’t want to go down too much of a rabbit… well, that’s not true. I do want to go down a rabbit hole… but I’m going to refrain from going down said rabbit hole. But it’s really interesting to me that now we’ve kind of acknowledged that, “Okay, yeah, the self-regulation part is a piece of executive function.” I think that’s why they went through and renamed some of these on the bottom row. And these are really important. We’re noticing, at least at my university, and I would guess at others as well, that we have quite a few more neurodivergent students than we used to have, and some estimates would say even up to a third of our students could be considered as neurodivergent. And for neurodivergent students, that executive functioning row, that bottom row of the new 3.0 guidelines, is a game changer, because a lot of the pieces that we forget to mention in higher ed kind of that hidden curriculum that we might talk about, or that hidden structure, those things are made explicit through that bottom row of the guidelines. So, for example, if we wanted to think about strategy development, we could be looking at something like walking students through what journal of articles or academic articles look like in your field and how you read those. So, I’ll use myself as an example. I did not know until my PhD program that you don’t just start at the beginning and read all the way through an article to the very end, like front to back. In my mind, that made sense, because that’s how we read everything else. But as it turns out, my professors in my education department were telling me, “Well, there’s kind of a different way you can go about this. You can start with the abstract, read through that, see if it’s still within the realm of what you want to know. Then you can kind of skip to the discussion part at the end. Read through that a little bit, figure out if that’s what you need to know. And then, if you’re still interested and still want to use this article, then you can read some of the other pieces.” Well, I had no idea. Like no one had ever said that. So why would I know that? So when we can pull those kinds of things out and make them clear and explicit to our students, transparent is another word that we might use for that, and that reminds me of the work of Mary-Ann Winklemes in transparency, in learning and teaching, TILT. You may have heard of TILT Higher Ed or transparent assignment design, and those are really all kind of doing the same things. We’re taking the guesswork out of our teaching and learning, and that’s, of course, going to help our neurodivergent students, but that’s going to help a lot of students as well, first-gen students, international students. And if we’re able to do that and make those things really clear, then we’re going to help a lot of students. We could look at another example, if we’re thinking about the, and this is in the building knowledge guideline, so 3.2 is highlight and explore patterns, critical features, big ideas and relationships. There are lots of ways that you can do this, but one way I really appreciate, because I kind of lean toward visuals, is having a concept map, or some visual way of connecting the information to the other information, like connecting it and helping me to orient myself within both the thing that we’re learning about, but like, what am I learning about there, in relation to the whole course? So being able to kind of see those relationships laid out in a visual way is also going to be really useful. And then Lillian actually talked already a little bit about this idea of group work and how we might set that up. And there are several considerations that talk about this kind of idea of, like, working together in some way. And one of the ones I really like a lot in the emotional capacity guideline is talking about cultivating empathy and restorative practices. And one way, of course, we can do that, and Lillian actually kind of mentioned a little bit about this as well, is helping students to reflect on, like, what is actually helpful for me when I’m in a group setting? Like, what kinds of things make me feel comfortable enough to share my thoughts and ideas? What kinds of things get in the way of that? Like, what are some of the barriers that I encounter in a group setting? And having students actually work through that, kind of process that information and process their own metacognitive view of themselves working in a group before we get into a group. And if we can do that first and reflect individually, then we can come together as a group, and now we can start to build this trust framework, this sense of belonging, because I can now share those things. I can say, “Gosh, when I’m in a group, I don’t always talk first like, I’m just not usually that person. But if someone is like, ‘Jennifer, what do you think about that?’ And they ask me, then I’m going to contribute to the conversation.” So things like that really helped me in a group setting. And if I can say that to my group, now they can understand, perhaps, why I’m not jumping into the conversation immediately, and that builds that empathy. And then we can also figure out what are some things that I can make sure I don’t do so that I’m supporting my other group members as well. So I’ve actually got a really good group contract activity kit that I put together for one of our workshops at the University of Kentucky, and I would be happy to put a link to that in the show notes as well. And this actually has kind of that breakdown. First, there’s an individual reflection, then you get together in your groups, and you do a group discussion with your reflection, and also you put together a contract, and it kind of walks professors through how they could go about doing something like that. So I will make sure I get that in the show notes.

Rebecca: That sounds awesome. As we’re thinking about changing times, we also can think a little bit about generative AI and how that might support the UDL framework in its new form.

Tom: It’s a wonderful question, and I had the pleasure at the Online Learning Consortium OLC conference of being on a panel on UDL and AI with the two of you. So I’m going to not actually recycle some of the ideas we talked about there, but I’ve got some new ones. I want to talk about a lopsided house and listeners. I’m going to describe this for you. There will also be a visual that we’ll put into the show notes. I was recently talking with Marcus Popetz. He’s the person who runs Harmonize, the geek company, and we’re going to be putting together a webinar later on, on universal design for learning and artificial intelligence resistant assessments. And if that sounds like I have my wooden shoe ready to throw into the cogs of the machine, quite the opposite. So the lopsided house is an idea that I’m currently playing with. Imagine a rectangular diagram so time moves from left to right. On the bottom, there are learners who are beginners, people who don’t know yet, and they’re just starting to learn a concept or a skill or something we can teach them. In the middle are proficient learners, people who have enough to actually start doing the things in our field. And then over at the other end of time is practitioners. These are learners who are para-professionals. They’ve got the skills, and they probably their next step will be becoming colleagues of ours. Now in that rectangle, draw a diagonal line from the very bottom of beginner all the way over to the very top of practitioner. And what you’ve just done is you’ve created an artificial intelligence tool use diagram that matches up with what we might call designed UDL. So when someone is a beginner, we want to, as designers and instructors, provide them with and there’s that provide word that UDL doesn’t use anymore. We want to provide optimized choices for learners in their learning experiences, and we want to do a lot of that, and we want to be a little heavy-handed with it, right? We’re the experts, and we kind of know how to guide people through those beginnings. Also, at that beginning stage, there’s very little use of tools. We’re helping people to understand the foundational ideas, get them practice, even if it’s the long way around or the manual way to do things. For example, I teach writing courses, and my freshman writers, I want them to create paragraphs that have a thesis statement and details evidence and examples that then help to support that thesis. This is not the time to let them loose on Claude or Copilot or ChatGPT. This is the time to say, “Please don’t use those tools, because I want you to learn the foundations.” Now move forward in time, and it’s about half and half. As people get more proficient as learners, we take away some of that designed UDL, we actually give them more agency. And here’s where you can draw another triangle on top of that, it’s kind of a lopsided house, where as we reduce the amount of designed universal design for learning opportunities, we start increasing where we’re asking the learners themselves to learn more about their learning process and be agentic, to take control of and show where they want to go with their learning. And when you’re more proficient, you can use tools to start working on things like giving study questions to generate off of a reading. A bad use of artificial intelligence… I’m here with Stacy Truex when she says “You can’t ask it to do something you don’t know how to do yet.” So give me a summary of the reading… bad idea. Give me some study questions from the reading and then quiz yourself on the reading that you’ve done…very good idea in terms of asking proficient learners to use artificial intelligence tools. And then when we move all the way over to sort of the end of the timeline, where people who are our learners become more like practitioners. They become paraprofessional. That’s when we really ramp up the tool use. That’s when we let them loose and we say, “Hey, artificial intelligence tools, that can help you skip the foundational steps… Now you know, now you have enough skill and knowledge to skip those steps so that you can focus on higher-order complex thinking.” And this is also the point in people’s learning careers where we want to have the least amount of designed UDL. We’re not guiding them anymore. We want them at that point to have the greatest amount of agentic, universal design for learning knowledge. And when we’re thinking about examples here, I’m thinking about study question generation, but also creating alternative formats of things. “Hey, this document is only a PDF, can you make a read it out loud to me version of that?” Artificial intelligence tools are really good at making alternative versions of existing content and materials. And the same thing when we’re thinking about as instructors or designers, because we have that expertise, artificial intelligence tools can help us to create multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representing information very quickly. You want a question bank that is tied to each of your learning objectives and segments things into question pools of three questions or more. Bang, couple of minutes, and it’s there, and then you can review it from your expert perspective. Creating quizzes, everything kind of speeds up when we’re using artificial intelligence. The key though is, in order to use those tools well, we’ve got to know what we’re talking about first, whether we’re learners, designers, or instructors. So I want to leave that sort of as a provocative thing to hang into the conversation. But AI is going to help us with universal design for learning in lots of different ways.

Rebecca: One of the things that you just underscored in your lopsided house, but also a little bit earlier, is how you might use UDL in the way that you’re designing a class as an instructor a bit differently depending on the expertise of the students in the class. You pointed that out in the difference between maybe K-12 and college, but then again, between this like beginner and expert. Can you talk a little bit more about the different ways that instructors might engage with UDL in really thinking about the expertise of the students in the room when we’re kind of thinking about level?

Tom: Yes, and I’ll be really quick here, and I want to open it up. I know Jen has done work on this as well. When we’re thinking about the students, we’ve been actually engaging in a little bit of a heresy in our conversation today, and that is, strictly speaking, Universal Design for Learning is what we do when we design learning engagements before we ever know who’s going to be in our learning spaces. So whether it’s a classroom or it’s a librarian working with students, or it’s a mental health counselor or academic counselor helping students navigate systems, the design part is what we do before day one of the class, before anybody ever walks through the door and says, “Can you help me?” Then, when we start noticing patterns among our learners over time, we can take that into account. We’re starting to see many more learners who are first-generation college learners, or students who don’t speak English as their first language at home. Or we’re seeing a lot more folks who identify as neurodivergent. Those attributes are things that we can now plug into universal design spaces, but technically speaking, we don’t know who the learners are yet, so we have to assume that there’s going to be wide variability among their characteristics. That’s what UDL is all about. It goes really well with pattern recognition and what we in K-12 call differentiated instruction. I want to make a pause here and see if Jen and Lillian can take this further too, because it’s a cool question.

Jennifer: So, I do a lot of work, both in higher ed and in K-12, and in both of those areas, one of the things I tell people is that UDL is for when a human brain is in a learning situation, and that doesn’t necessarily matter if that’s for preschoolers or if that’s for undergrads, or if that’s for postdocs, if that’s for elderly, it doesn’t matter. If you’re in a learning situation, the framework of UDL should help you to be able to meet the variability, and support the variability, of your learners. So that’s one piece. Having said that, I don’t remember, Tom if you went a lot into this, but I know we talked about this the other day in our webinar. You know, currently the UDL framework is still a little K-12 heavy, and actually we’ve actually got a project going, and I’m gonna throw that in here real quick while I’m thinking about it. So if you’ve ever gone in and looked at the CAST studio guidelines website, and you’ve drilled down to one specific consideration, so let’s say options for choice and autonomy is a good example. And you’ve gone to that little page where it tells you a little bit about this is what this means and here are some sort of generalized ways you could think about doing that in a teaching situation. There’s also a place on that page where you can look at the research that was used to put that consideration in place. Because, as I’m sure everyone knows, in the field of education, we don’t just base our educational and teaching decisions on one study. We’re basing this on a body of research that is built up over time, so that we know, over time, we’ve seen that giving students choice and autonomy is going to help with engagement. Engagement, right? So that’s what this list of all of these different pieces of research and studies are about, and most of those are focused on K-12. So we were really wanting to put together a version of the research per guideline, and even getting down to the consideration level, or the bullet-point level, if you will, that also has some research for higher ed folks in it as well. So we have put together a Google form, and we will get that in the show notes as well. But I can just throw out this quick Bitly, if you’d like. It’s Bitly, that’s, B, I T, dot, l, y, slash, UDL, dash, H, E, which stands for higher ed, H E, dash research. And so basically, we’re wanting you to think about, do you have some like, go to research that you share with people a lot that aligns with UDL? And if so, if that’s higher ed focused, we would like to know what that is, so we can start to build up our own body of research around the guidelines that really is focused in on higher ed a little bit more. So having said that, there’s a lot of ways that you can do this, that you can build UDL in. When I think about our undergrads, Tom talked a little bit about executive functioning earlier, and for the most part, yes, we’re done cognitively developing when we enter college, but we do know that there’s still some parts of your brain that are cooking up to age 25 for most and up to even 30 and 32 for others, and that’s our executive functions. So with our younger students, for sure, but honestly, with almost all of our students, really focusing in on the executive functions piece is a good place to start, because we can just go ahead and assume that our students are going to struggle with executive function. Part of it is because of their age, but also we know that this is one of the most anxious groups of students we’ve ever seen in higher ed, and anxiety, stress, trauma, all of those things compromise our executive functions. So we can assume today that you will have students in your class that are going to struggle with executive functioning. And so I think that’s a really good place to start. And some people like to start with the top row instead, because this top row is really kind of your entry point into thinking about UDL, and it would be changing kind of the concrete things in your class. So thinking about, yes, they have a paper textbook, but can I also provide some kind of a digital format for that as well, or is this something I can maybe give to them in a visual that might make sense in that way? So you’re kind of thinking about those concrete pieces of teaching, learning, and the materials and all the things, and that’s also a really good place to start, is looking at that top row. And I’ve actually seen somebody put together a version of the guidelines where they put a little welcome mat above that and said, This is your welcome mat into the UDL framework is starting at the top and going down from there. And that’s my thoughts on that.

Lillian: In addition to the differences that UDL can be used in K-12, and then also the difference between a freshman seminar, which is what I teach, and what you might use in a senior level or grad course, is thinking about UDL can be used and should be used everywhere, because we’re dealing with people, and people are different, and everyone is unique. And so what it might also look like is thinking about it in workforce development. So not just are you providing multiple ways for your students to learn, but if you have a company, are you providing multiple ways for your learners that are in your company to move forward, to learn new skills, but also to do the things that they’re doing? So do they have options for working off hours or in remote settings? Or do you have a human- centered approach to doing whatever it is that you’re doing, so that there might be quiet spaces, or just the way that everybody can work to their strengths, so that you don’t push aside talent that you can really use, and that the people who are working for you or working in this job or in part of a company are the ones that know themselves best, and so can they offer or select specific requirements or ideas that might help them the most. And the more that we can be flexible, but still have the same end point, like we want to figure out what the goal is, but there can be multiple ways to get to that goal. Does that mean if you’ve got a project, and somebody can do that project, whether they’re in the office or not, and do a really great job, does it matter that they have to be in the office for 40 hours at the time that you’re there, just those sort of lessons we learned during the pandemic. Let’s not forget them, but that it can be something that’s really useful in the world. And think about how we teach our students. So if we’re going to teach a student to create a document, why not tell them also about how to be accessible, so that when they’re in the working world, they know to put alt text in a picture because they’re going to put it on the web, they know how to do headings in a document, so that somebody who needs a screen reader or is blind can figure out what’s going on, because your company wants to reach all those people. So just thinking about the ways that, if we’re learning it in higher ed, then that is actually going to be a really marketable skill to take on into the workforce. So it doesn’t start or stop in the education world, it just is for all humans, because we all learn and we’re all different.

John: It’s a good note to close on, and we always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Tom: Well, my what’s next Universal Design for Learning is now moving from individual micro level applications to at-scale barrier-lowering across entire institutions.

Jennifer: Well, I am in the process of shopping a book around, and my book is going to be focused on neurodivergent learners in higher ed and what we can do to support them. And if we’re going to be honest, it’s mostly about UDL, but I’m also talking about other things as well, but it’s a book that needs to be written, and because it’s a book I wish my professors had when I was an undergrad with undiagnosed ADHD. So this is something that I’m hopefully going to be moving forward on very soon.

Lillian: And what’s next for me? I’m not writing a book, but I’m still podcasting, so I like to listen to everyone’s stories and try to get those out about how UDL really is changing the world for the better, and the more I can hear from folks who are implementing UDL, the better off I think we all will be. So that’s always it seems to be, what my next thing is, is the next podcast and the next guest. And other than that, you know, world domination. No, no, not that. Just UDL.

John: And I haven’t missed any of your podcasts since you started. In fact, I heard about the podcast at the OLC conference a number of years before, when someone was talking about planning this podcast.

Lillian: Excellent.

John: I very much enjoy your podcast.

Lillian: Thank you.

Rebecca: Well,thank you so much for joining us. It’s always a delight to talk to all of you and to always talk about one of my favorite topics.

Tom: Thanks for having us and listeners, we’d like to hear your stories too, so comment and you can find us on the socials, and we would love to hear from you as well.

Jennifer: Yeah, thanks for having us.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes 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.

[MUSIC]

394. Pacific Oaks’ Approach to AI

Posted in diversity, edtech, educational technology, equity, faculty learning community, first-generation, higher education, inclusion, learning, pedagogy, professional development, teaching
May 21, 2025

Generative AI tools are challenging traditional models of college instruction. In this episode, Camille Huggins, Yolanda Carlos, and Orlando Saiz join us to discuss how Pacific Oaks College is working to use these tools to more effectively support student learning. Camille, Yolanda, and Orlando were participants in an AI Institute offered at Pacific Oaks College this year.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Generative AI tools are challenging traditional models of college instruction. In this episode, we examine how one college is responding to more effectively support student learning.

[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]

John: Our guests today are faculty and administrators at Pacific Oaks College. Since we have several guests participating today, we’ll have each of our guests introduce themselves, describe their role at the institution, and state what type of tea they are drinking.

Camille: My name is Camille Huggins. I am a core faculty at the Pacific Oaks College for the last five years, and I’m Caribbean, so I like that strong Lipton yellow label tea. It has a lot of caffeine to it, it’s a good little balance with the lemon. New Yorkers, we love a lemon, no milk, so that’s what I’m doing today.

Yolanda: Sounds good. Camille, my name is Yolanda Carlos. I’m core faculty at Pacific Oaks College. I’m over at the BA and MA Early Childhood Education degree program, and I love Earl Grey with a bit of milk.

Orlando: My name is Orlando Saiz. I’m an administrative faculty and Director of Research at Pacific Oaks College in the EdD Early Childhood Education program. I normally drink coffee, but today I’m having the loose-leaf spearmint tea.

John: Very nice.

Rebecca: Yeah, some yummy tea choices for sure. John, are you drinking any tea today?

John: I am drinking a ginger peach green tea today.

Rebecca: Nice, John. I’ve switched things up, John, I have chai today.

John: That’s been a while.

Rebecca: I know, I know.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the AI initiatives that you’ve been working on at Pacific Oaks, located in Pasadena, California, where it’s much warmer than it is here today. So first though, could you tell us a little bit about Pacific Oaks College and its institutional mission?

Yolanda: Sure, I’d be happy to. So yes, you’re right. The weather here in Pasadena, year round, is beautiful, and the Pasadena Children’s School began in Pasadena, California in 1945. It was started by six local families as a children’s school, which believed that each individual possessed an inner light worth nurturing. It later became a teacher training institution founded on Quaker values of community, equality, and peace, which would offer a progressive education that would help the world heal. Pacific Oaks College was established in 1958. The mission of the college is to train future professionals to be of service and positively impact their communities, to help, and not harm them. Presently, the college is focused on building competent professionals who are culturally aware, respectful of the communities they serve, open and willing advocates focused on justice, fairness, and prepared to advance or lead in their profession.

Rebecca: Our institution has a somewhat similar history in that it started off as a teacher prep institution as well. That’s kind of fun to hear a related story. Can you talk a little bit about the student population at Pacific Oaks?

Camille: So we have a majority is online. 80% of our school is online right now. So we have a combination of asynchronous, synchronous courses. We still have some on the ground students, because we transitioned from on the ground to online during the pandemic. So around 2022, 2023 it became that perhaps this works better, because our students were more interested in doing online courses than on the ground courses. Our typical student body… we are a Hispanic-serving institution…. are Latino middle-aged women in their 30s to 40s. They are working, they have children, they’re married. So sometimes English is not their first language. They have maybe went to school. If they went to our bachelor’s program, they may have had some remedial courses or whatever. But if they are in our master’s degree courses, which is a lot of our courses, they would have gone to college, but they’ve maybe had a gap between bachelor’s and master’s about eight to 10 years. So the academic acumen is the issue when they first get to school. So we have to spend a lot of time really trying to hone in on their learning abilities and basically help them get themselves to match what the rigor of the program is. But yeah, we love these kind of women. They are in the trenches. They are not into lofty ideas. They’re into really learning the skill sets that they are basically trying to gain because of our programming, which is marriage and family therapy and social work and education. It’s a very professions-based kind of school, so they spend a lot of time really getting skill sets, being practical. They’re very practical in understanding what they need to know, and we really help them with their skill sets.

John: In November of 2022, ChatGPT appeared right before finals at the end of the fall semester, and it resulted in some fairly significant effects on higher ed, how did faculty at your institution respond?

Yolanda: Some instructors embraced ChatGPT initially quite readily, and others even used AI apps for assignments to enhance them. Other faculty were hesitant and wanted more information. P.O. is a smaller higher ed institution, and with that being said, we have the ability to be nimble and to add changes to our assignments as needed and to keep up with best practices. P.O. is part of The Community Solution (the TCS) system. It’s a centralized infrastructure and culture that supports six higher ed education institutions. In the spring of 2023, TCS provided a conference space for our system faculty to showcase AI, living out the mission of embracing a culture of learning. So faculty across the institutions presented and all worked collaboratively in experiencing AI in a variety of modalities at our central location in Chicago.

Camille: So I think, how did we embrace it Is that, for the students, we kind of looked at it as a plagiarism kind of situation… so punitive, this is going to stop them from learning blah, blah, blah. And as we got into the AI Institute for the AACU we discovered that this can really help the students. We said our student body is first-generation women, mostly Spanish-speaking, different languages, and so forth. So AI can help them with writing. AI can help them getting their thoughts in order. A lot of times, these students ask, “How do you want this assignment to go? How do you want this assignment to look?” And I thought, AI can help them in that avenue as well. The more you saw a lot of these applications come in ChatGPT starts it off, but then you got Deep Seek, you got Claude. You have a lot of different platforms. You realize that this can really be used to help them educationally. So for us, as faculty, we maybe have been using it secretly. I started using it just to do emails, you know, “write this nicer, put my thoughts and write it nicer,” but we started to not look at it as a negative, but this can be the mechanism of the future. It’s like autocorrect. I can barely spell, but autocorrect makes me look as though I’m passing national spelling bees.

Orlando: I’m relatively new to the institution, so I wasn’t around in 2022, I was working at a different institution, but right away, I was invited to join the AI committee at our school, and I found it very interesting the tools that were available that I was completely unaware of, and just to see how there’s certain programs and GPTs where they can serve as a tutorial and be of service to students, faculty, it’s just amazing. I’m very much looking forward to what the future holds.

Rebecca: So you’ve kind of given us a little bit of a base for how folks were initially responding to AI. Can you talk a little bit about ways that faculty are now using AI to support the educational mission, whether that’s in curriculum or educational activities or other uses?

Yolanda: Recently, I’ve been focused on the basic logistics in application of AI, student use to complete assignments or to create assignments. And so, for example, there is in one class a poem they have to develop. And with that, I used an AI tool for them to download, a free use, to put in their poem, and this AI app creates a video with music, with words and with pictures, and it brings to life their poem. And the students were really excited about that. It really helped to bring that assignment to the next level and then at the institutional level, our Pacific Oaks college AI team has been working on developing the institutional policy for AI usage, for students, faculty, and our community, for example, we believe that it’s important for students to submit their assignments and documents in a format that can be screened for AI usage by the systems that are made available to faculties for screening Word documents. For example, we use Turnitin. We want students to be able to generate and create their own content and use AI as a support for developing ideas, not writing their papers for them. So as an institution, we’ve been engaged in critical discussions and in planning around the use of AI in the classroom, and then also distinguishing the human element, or the connection, versus automated AI machinery, tools, and apps. We encourage the using of AI for brainstorming, creating ideas. This should always be followed by student-created content, rather than the use of AI tools and prompting to create or develop assignments.

Camille: To add to that, I’m the chair of the Faculty Council for our college. On a macro level, we basically engaged in a lot of conversations. We’ve had a lot of staff meetings with the adjunct faculty as well as regular faculty, about AI and how to engage with it for ourselves, as well as for our students. Another thing we did was, as Yolanda said, we are part of a larger system of six universities, we invited the larger system to come in and do a two-day training on UDL (universal design for learning) and then AI. And we’ve been looking at making collaborative initiatives between the UDL and the AI systems to basically incorporate it in our classes as well. Another thing we’re doing is working on a policy, it’s a working policy, as Yolanda situated, but also we have not really introduced it to our students. So that’s our next part of our journey is basically how to appropriately engage students and basically give them a demonstration. I think students really benefit from a demonstration. They definitely, when in online schools, they really benefit from one one-on-one personal interaction via Zoom. They really like it. So that’s what we’ve been working on as well.

Orlando: Just to add to that, in advising doctoral research students, some of my students are using AI platforms to organize their sources. They can engage in mind mapping, and I think it’s a helpful tool for the literature search, even though I don’t think it’s a good idea for them to fully rely on that. I think a good mixture of human capacity versus AI platforms and tools to complement each other are important.

John: Let’s go back to the use of AI to support UDL. Could you talk a little bit more about how AI tools are being used to support a universal design for learning approach in the course?

Camille: So UDL has a lot of different facets to it, audio, visual. What I’ve really been looking at is the growth mindset piece, because what we’ve noticed with some of our students, I’ve been doing some one one-on-one. We’re gearing up to do focus groups with them. We got a small grant to basically implement UDL in the entire college. And so what I noticed with our particular students is that they don’t want to necessarily identify as having a learning disability. That’s just not their thing. But what they talked about, in a very roundabout way, was the lack of confidence, the lack of really being scared to look for assistance. So I was thinking that we need to implement a growth mindset kind of component into our teaching modes, as well as, and AI can help with that, because it can help give you courage to ask questions. You can ask AI to look at how we can integrate: “I’m having difficulty understanding this assignment, I’m having difficulty understanding this article. Can you break it down for me so that you can make more sense?” So integrating an AI component with the UDL will help enhance their learning abilities. So that’s what we’ve been kind of structuring. And I heard from the students that they really were having issues with just self confidence, which makes a lot of sense based on the fact that they haven’t been in school in years, and everything is just moving at lightning space as far as learning acumen. So that is one way.

John: One of the things you mentioned earlier was that students come in with fairly differentiated backgrounds in terms of their prior knowledge, and they have to get up to speed. Have they been using AI to help fill some of the gaps they may have had in their prior learning experiences.

Camille: I’ve noticed it in their assignments, yes, but what I’m learning is also they just put in the assignment, but they don’t put in the reading material. So the assignments come across very superficial and not necessarily depth of critical thinking or any kind of reflection of the reading. So the AI won’t even put in references in it, so the references won’t match what’s in the coursework. So getting them to not use it in the underhanded way… You’re using AI, I have no problem with you using it, but it has to be used to assist you, not do the work for you, and that has been the bridge that we’re trying to cross.

Rebecca: You mentioned the large percentage of your coursework being online, and I know that faculty, in a lot of our conversations around AI, have been really concerned about using AI in online environments, because it’s a little bit harder to distinguish the human from machine-generated. Can you talk a little bit more about ways that you’re helping students move in the direction of the assisting and not doing it for them, so where it’s not an academic integrity issue?

Yolanda: So, what I’ve been using is what’s called the AI sandwich. I’ve been working with students to help them understand how they can use AI like, for example, if they have a topic, but it’s really broad, to helping them brainstorm using AI to narrow down their topic or to develop ideas for topics, and to help them to create and understand how to develop a good, concise thesis statement for their topic. And then, with that being said, the next step is how to gather their data, so using AI to create questions for interviews, for surveys, and then methods for data collection for their action research project. But with that being said, then I go into the humanization of AI, and I shift the focus to our model for P.O. It’s the head, heart, and hands model. I talk to them about, when we’re completing assignments, it’s not just to complete the assignment, but it’s to gain that knowledge, not just to regurgitate it, but to have that passion, because then it’s in the heart. So it’s the knowledge in the head, the passion in the heart, then our practices, our hands, that comes forth in our practices, and that sets us apart from others, and that’s something that AI cannot do for us. That’s something that we as the human, that’s how we humanize the use of AI, but the human-to-human, I talk to them about how AI has helped you generate these questions, these surveys, but you’re going to be conducting these interviews, you’re going to be writing the anecdotal records. You’re going to be taking the raw notes and submitting those, perhaps maybe taking voice recordings or video, but then we can take AI to help organize those for them, so that then they can maybe create their outline, and then they can submit their papers. How I do it is they submit it in chunks, and then I review and we’re in revision state, and I provide feedback. The feedback I provide is using a tool called VoiceThread where I provide specific assignment feedback using what’s called VoiceThreads, where they can see me, they can hear me, and if they need to, they can also see the wording as well. So it touches upon all learning modalities.

John: I have used VoiceThread in the past, and I’ve really enjoyed it. I had to drop it because my classes were large, and just listening to all the audio responses took far too many hours.

Camille: I know Orlando, you did some AI stuff. You’ve been doing it in your doctoral program.

Orlando: Yes, just thinking about most of the students that I teach are at the doctoral level, and most of them are engaging in doctoral research. So if you consider that traditional approaches versus futuristic or current approaches, most of the material that students are engaging in at that level is meant to be challenging. They need to learn research and it’s important to learn statistics and different methodologies. So I’m super open to new tools that they can use, but it’s difficult to substitute AI tools with general educational tasks that are meant to help students advance and to gain a wealth of skills. But some of the newer tools that I’m becoming aware of, and that I’ve noticed could be helpful as a tutorial for statistics and for research methods, even research design. There’s one called Julius AI, where you could drop your data in there and it can spit out a result. If it doesn’t spit out the right prompt for you, you can re-prompt it until it gives you what you want. I’ve tried it with simple data that I’ve had, running a correlation. It gives you everything you need. So I mean, if students are struggling with conceptualization or just to have the right terminology, because it is important to verbalize your research in a way that’s accurate and specific. So I think the AI tools could truly help for that, as well as general organizational tools. NVivo is another research tool that students are using. I’ve used it in the past as well. It is fueled by machine learning now, so creating those hand-coded or manual themes that was done in the past is probably going to fall a little bit by the wayside, but I still think there’s some value for students to learn the traditional way and to mind the author’s recommendations from grounded theory and from phenomenology. I think there’s some real value in that, and they could really showcase the ideas that they have. My exposure to AI is relatively new, and it started when I began teaching here at Pacific Oaks and I joined the AI committee. My doctoral program is very new. This is an inaugural class, and previous development of the doctoral research manual included a passage for plagiarism, to guard against plagiarism. After reading some material, particularly AI for Teachers, by Jose Antonio Bowen. I noticed the finding in there that faculty generally do not do well recognizing AI passages versus AI itself. So I thought this is something that I need to step up, and it has to do with academic integrity. So I wrote a follow-up passage to that where students’ work will be detected for AI passages. It doesn’t say how many passages or the percentage, but I think it’s going to be important for students to understand that they can’t just copy and paste their whole doctoral dissertation and that be acceptable, and there has to be some systems in place to guard against that.

Rebecca: So you’ve mentioned using Turnitin and tools like that to detect AI. Can you talk a little bit about ways that you’re managing false accusations or false positives on AI use?

Camille: So I don’t really trust Turnitin. Let me just put it out there as a misnomer. I feel as though sometimes they see as plagiarism, and when I actually look at the paperwork, it’s like they use the same word the 10 million times and it’s been picked up. So I don’t know if I don’t trust Turnitin or I don’t know how to use it properly. We put it out there like that, and so I don’t really rely on it as much, especially for those who English is not their first language. What I’m looking for is execution of how they write. When I did my PhD, I wished there was a ChatGPT back then, I had to hire an editor who was from another country, and that scared me. I was like, I’m paying you, and I was born in America and speak English, and I’m paying you… she was like from Ukraine or Russia… to edit my paperwork. So because of that, I had to learn how to write. Something about that was not sitting well with me. So I had to learn how to write. And I felt as though ChatGPT and one of these things can help you to learn how to write. In Spanish, the adjective comes after the actual noun, whereas in English, it comes before. And so I thought that this would help them. If, in fact, they can learn how to write, I can overlook plagiarism. What I can’t overlook is them not using the readings and the learning resources that I provide for them. I grade on how they write, and that’s really good, but I also grade on use of learning resources, and I think that that was more important to me than the other thing. Another thing is a lot of them don’t know how to use it properly, so they don’t even see the attachment upload document to put in their articles. So that tells you that maybe sometimes they’re just cutting and pastes. And if you’ve never noticed in ChatGPT, they’ll say the same thing different ways, and it’s up to you to pick up on which way to say it. So me catching them there has been very helpful. Orlando’s correct. Sometimes you can’t tell, but then that’s good, because then you’re learning how it’s supposed to be written in the first place, and then ChatGPT also has a lot of spaces in between, so I’m teaching them not to cut and paste. I want to teach them how to use it in a sense that it can craft a paragraph for you, as opposed to you just cutting and pasting. So catching them in that area has been helpful to me. But again, I will say I don’t know much about Turnitin. I don’t trust your plagiarism readability. So I go in that direction.

Yolanda: I agree Camille. They also have a disclaimer in there, so it kind of is a little bit on the nebulous side. And typically, when I go in and I look, because I think that’s a humanization of anything that we’re going to be using, it still requires us to take that step, to go in, to look at, and to make sense of the meaning of what has been submitted. And then I agree with you. We’re looking for content. Do they really understand this content, and can they apply what they’ve learned? Are they applying this in a real case scenario. But when I’m looking at Turnitin, it flags references, and that tends to be the large chunk of it. When I can see that it’s flagged references. And I’m looking to see, are they in seventh APA edition? Yeah, they are. It’s flagging them because they have submitted this in the revision before this. And so those are things to keep in mind as well. Nothing’s perfect, but it’s learning how to use the tools that we do have available to us that’s important.

John: So you’ve all talked a little bit about how students are using AI, and Camille mentioned how she’s used it to help shape emails. Are many faculty using AI to help develop curriculum, to help develop learning activities, to create various scenarios or other ways in supporting their instruction.

Camille: It has really helped me, and I think other people are doing it too. I’m in the social work department. My other faculty have not caught on as much as I have, but it really helps me with case studies, because my classes are more applied. It helped me develop case studies that make sense. They have better characterizations, like they’ll sit there and say, identify mental health symptoms and then identify environmental stressors. And I was like, “Yeah, I never thought about creating it in that way.” So I think that has been very helpful. It has helped me create quizzes, exams in a lot of ways. So I’m in love. I’ve subscribed to ChatGPT as well as Claude. I’ve been trying out Deep Seek and you know, the platforms can go on and on and on. We were just told that there’s an AI for curriculum development that’s specific for lesson plans and so forth. So I’m going to look into that as well if there’s a free trial. So I’m into it big time, my colleagues, not quite yet, I don’t think. And I’m also a writer, so it helps me with contextualizing ideas and in figuring out what’s out there right now, and so I can look at different articles. I think Deep Seek is pretty good when it comes to accuracy and references, because I check it constantly against what’s in there and what’s outside. But I love it, and I think this AI Institute really opened my eyes to the vast applications that are out there that I think we all should know and not get overwhelmed by. It’s like Bitcoin. You don’t know what’s going on, but I’m really excited about it.

Orlando: Yeah, for myself, I tend to use Copilot. I think it’s helpful, since it’s kind of integrated into the browser that I use, and it’s helpful to summarize long passages, to bullet point them. But also, as a writer, I use it if I’m struggling to find a source. I’ll just drop a prompt in there, and it’ll help me to generate a few more sources that I wasn’t aware of. But at first I was a little resistant. I was just unaware of how it worked and how it operates. But I’m starting to learn more and more, and I do still have a concern about privacy, so I won’t drop students’ whole papers in there, just because it’s not my work. It’s something that I’m not in charge of, and is not my property. So I’d rather just kind of use it in a broader sense, just to kind of quicken my pace in the work that I do.

Camille: I just want to put it that a student told me about ChatGPT. That’s how I first learned about this whole thing in the first place. And I always say I talk to young people because they know and keeping up with them. I’m 53 and I officially have no idea what’s hot anymore, what’s happening. I’ll have to admit it, but this student was like, “Why aren’t you using ChatGPT?” and I’m like, “What are you talking about?” And when it came I was like, “Whoa, this is just next place to go.” So I’m open to it, because the young people know about it, and I’m glad that they have it, because it makes life easier. But you have to know how to prompt. I think that was the biggest thing. Learning how to prompt it and yield it to what you need is what been the biggest challenge.

Yolanda: For me, I have mainly used the app. So initially I discussed how I used one for a poem, and it was Lumen5. It’s an animated avatar video program that they download for free, and they’re able to create this beautiful video with the poem that they developed and they created. What’s really cool about it is that they get excited about an assignment that before was just something that they just went through and they just jumped through the hoops. Well, now with that Lumen5, it’s just kind of has brought things to the next level, and I also use ITSE standards for educators. It’s how to use AI and AI tools for educational purposes. So that’s something that I do and use, and I’m stretching and finding new apps at different times, and then having students go in. I use it as kind of like a pilot program. I’ll pull it in, and I’ll say, “Well, this time, we’re going to use this.” And I’ll say, “it’s not mandatory. Those that you want to use it can use it. Those that don’t want to use it can use the regular standard assignment.” And it’s amazing to see that the majority of them choose to use the AI tool.

Camille: It also creates flyers, if you do that. And it has helped me with ethics applications. So, yeah, it’s a part of my life. It’s on all my laptops [LAUGHTER] and my computers. It’s kind of embarrassing now, but people say, “Oh, you’re leaning on it too much. And if you lean on it too much, it becomes they take over your ability.” But I’m directing this. I’m still involved. I’m the creative director of what I will use and what I won’t use, and I’m still a part of the equation. They haven’t taken me over, have they?. This is the kind of philosophical questions you ask yourself.

Yolanda: Amen, that’s the humanization of AI.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that I’ve heard you all talk about today is that the AI Institute gave you some concentrated time to practice and explore and learn, and kind of set that time aside so that you had the time to do that. I think often it’s one of those add-ons, like in my free time that none of us have, that we might explore these things. So it seems like that dedicated time was a really valuable and important investment for each of you to really integrate it into your work.

Camille: Yeah, we had a staff meeting because, you know, again, our Senior Vice-President of Academic Affairs, he’s really interested in it to kind of go, how can it be used for our professional use? And I remember my colleague and I, we created a case note: “How to Write a Case Note through AI.” And I think that just was, like, blown away. The other faculty were like, “Wow.” If you know anything about social work, you could write it as a SOAP note, which is a subjective objective assessment plan. You can use it as a DAP note, which is a diagnostic assessment plan. So we used it as a demonstration about all the different ways you can write case notes. Now there are AI systems to help with case notes in social work agencies which Is like: you put the paperwork in, put the information in, and they will create yourself an intervention plan. So I think that’s the good thing about Pacific Oaks College, because we’re such a profession-based kind of college, you’re teaching Marriage and Family Therapy. It’s one of the biggest marriage and family therapy schools on the West Coast. And then social work we just got basically a couple of years ago, using AI to help with you as a professional, I think has been great. So doing it with the teachers was the first thing, faculty, and now we’re going to try to see if we can do it with the students.

John: So you all participated in the institute. What proportion of the faculty participated in the institute? And do you still have some faculty who are resistant to trying AI?

Camille: For the Institute, it was seven of us. Three of us showed up today, but the seven of us. One, the Dea,n has moved on to another position, but everyone else has maintained. has stayed. More and more people are interested because of the fact that we’ve been doing staff meetings. And I was very surprised, because when I set up the TCS, which is the system-wide AI and UDL classes, it was like three hours of their time Monday and Tuesday, and everyone showed up. Everyone showed up. Everyone’s interested. And every time we do it, they’re like, “Wow.” Every time you see in the chat, “This is mind blowing.” So I think they’re interested. But we haven’t done anything formal to basically quantify how interested they’ve been and how involved they’ve been, but we’ve shown to them, AI is here to stay, it is valuable, and it can be used by anyone.

Yolanda: I believe we have developed a survey tool that we’re going to be sending out to faculty. So that’s something that we’re going to be looking at, gathering the data of their familiarity with the use of AI. And then I think we’re going to do a pre- and then a post-, and then we’ll probably then follow up on that, because that will denote the need.

Orlando: I think, as well, at other larger institutions, that have decided on a specific platform to use, as far as AI, and how to integrate that into the school’s existing tools. We’re still in the process of deciding about that. I know some of the schools, they use a paid version of ChatGPT or CoPilot. We’re still in the phase of selecting the best platform, but I know there’s some good options out there, and I think it really will add to and cause us to progress in our programming.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking: what’s next?

Yolanda: So preparing for the unknown. What I would say, first is we need to focus on relationships, the ability to connect with others, so that they can collaborate and work in teams together, because this is the 21st century workforce need. Second is helping our students with resiliency, I also like to call it flexibility, because the one thing that is constant in life is change. That’s the one thing that we can depend on, is change. And resiliency is the ability to push through obstacles and to have the confidence to act on the new knowledge that they have to create the change they want to see in the world. And then lastly, this is a P.O. core value is reflection. All of our assignments generally have a reflection piece that’s weaved in there for them to reflect upon. So I always tell them it’s important to stay humble enough to reflect upon changes that need to be made, and then the courage to act on the next steps that need to take place.

Camille: What’s next? Institutionally speaking, what I like is the fact, though we are a part of a system which is TCS and the six universities, the wisdom of the President was that he didn’t want a uniform AI platform for each school. He thought that we have a law school, we have a medical school, they’re going to need different kind of AI platforms than us. So we have been given the authority to autonomously pick our own AI platform that will work best for our particular students. We are keeping our students heavily in mind. We want to make sure that AI is used ethically and with integrity, but while being helpful to them. So we’re rolling out a policy that’s going to help them in that sort of way. We are also redoing our plagiarism handbook and basically incorporating AI and making sure that that kind of meets and it’s more seamless. We are definitely trying to pick a platform that kind of works for education, marriage and family, and social work, three different distinct professions, but yet very similar in a lot of ways. We’re also working on an AI manual, to some degree, to basically figure out how all the different components that come with AI, rethinking it and reshaping it. We have not done a review of our faculty manual in about 10 years, so that’s also being incorporated. We’re in the midst of change at Pacific Oaks, so AI came perfectly so they can be instituted in our paperwork and our regulations.

Orlando: As an institution, I think we’ll continue to serve as possibly thought leaders for the topic of AI. A lot of us are integrating it into our work, and I can see that continuing in the future. I think we all have a great idea about responsible use of AI, and I think that will definitely continue. Personally, I’m working on writing another book chapter. Most of my materials have been on doctoral researchers. So this new chapter is about doctoral research agency, where it’s based on a lot of material I’ve been looking into. Part of that should be focused on helping students to adapt and prepare for the future. As Yolanda noted, I think the skills of adaptation and integration are important, and AI could definitely help with that process. And yes, overall, just using AI to help prepare students for the future, whether it’s in the job market or for personal enhancement. I think that’s all important, and we could definitely motivate students in that way and help them to navigate that process.

Rebecca: Well, thanks for joining us. It’s nice to have a little case study of how a particular institution is working through AI.

John: And this is an issue that all campuses are facing. So it’s great to hear how you’ve been addressing it. Thank you.

Yolanda: Thank you for having us.

Orlando: Thank you.

Camille: Thank you so much. I hope that we were informative. We’re trying to move to cutting edge while keeping our tradition and our principles.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes 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.

[MUSIC]