Tag: Courses

  • How to make online courses more engaging – Campus Review

    How to make online courses more engaging – Campus Review

    Surveys show the challenge clearly. In New Zealand, students report feeling less engaged online than in traditional classrooms. In the US, 78 per cent of learners say face-to-face courses hold their attention better.

    This pattern appears globally, and universities often identify the same cause: conventional courses are simply too long and dense for digital formats. So how do we make online learning both simpler and more engaging?

    Why engagement drops in online university courses

    Most online courses still mirror traditional academic structures. Long lectures, heavy materials, and limited interaction assume learners will consume content the same way they would in person – but that rarely happens.

    In physical classrooms, engagement comes naturally through conversation, questions, and shared energy. Online, those moments are harder to recreate. Without interaction, digital learners can easily feel isolated or overwhelmed by complicated terms and information overload – and motivation quickly drops.

    The three pillars of engagement

    Fortunately, research and practice point to three proven solutions: microlearning, interaction, and personalization.

    1. Microlearning
    Bite-sized modules help learners absorb information faster and stay focused. Studies show microlearning leads to up to 60 per cent faster completion and 50 per cent higher engagement. Over 70 per cent of Gen Z and millennials prefer short, digestible content over long lectures – and it’s easy to see why. Smaller lessons feel manageable, rewarding, and easy to complete.

    2. Interaction
    Gamified tasks, simulations, and quizzes turn learners from passive viewers into active participants. Studies show that interactive simulations can boost retention by 67 per cent. In some cases, gamified online learning can be even more engaging than traditional classroom discussions because every learner participates equally.

    3. Personalisation
    When training adapts to a learner’s goals or progress, it becomes more meaningful. 78 per cent of teachers confirm that personalisation drives higher motivation and completion rates. It makes learners feel seen, and helps them focus on what really matters to their growth.

    Why short courses are easier to build than ever

    Many institutions want to create short, interactive, and personalised courses but worry it will take too much time or too many resources. That was true in the past, when updating course structure meant redoing everything manually.

    Now, new authoring tools make the process fast and scalable. For instance, iSpring Suite AI helps educators design short courses directly in PowerPoint, complete with quizzes, interactive scenarios, and gamified elements. Its templates and built-in content library significantly cut course creation time down from months to weeks.

    Middlesex University adopted iSpring Suite to increase learner participation through shorter, interactive, and personalised experiences. The result? Over 12,000 quiz views in a single academic year.

    With AI-assisted authoring, educators can also now test and refine ideas in real time – no large teams or budgets required.

    Creating digital courses is as easy as designing a presentation, and you can try it free for two weeks.

    The bottom line

    To keep learners engaged, universities must rethink course design and focus on shorter, interactive, and personalised learning experiences. These formats match how people actually consume information today.

    The next generation of online education won’t just replicate traditional classrooms It will redefine engagement. And with the right tools, creating meaningful digital learning experiences is now faster, simpler, and more accessible than ever.

    Find out how iSpring Suite AI can turn slides into engaging courses in minutes and register for your two week free trial.

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    Email [email protected]

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  • Designing AI-Resistant Assignments in Educational Leadership Courses – Faculty Focus

    Designing AI-Resistant Assignments in Educational Leadership Courses – Faculty Focus

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  • Designing AI-Resistant Assignments in Educational Leadership Courses – Faculty Focus

    Designing AI-Resistant Assignments in Educational Leadership Courses – Faculty Focus

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  • So you’ve been accused of harbouring “Mickey Mouse” courses at your institution…now what?

    So you’ve been accused of harbouring “Mickey Mouse” courses at your institution…now what?

    Margaret Hodge’s 2003 speech to the Institute of Public Policy Research on “achieving excellence and equality in post-16 education” tells us that even under New Labour policy announcements on higher education were “long-awaited.”

    The speech illustrates how then, as now, the government was grappling with questions of growing and massifying participation while retaining the sector’s global competitiveness; promoting specialisation and collaboration; boosting quality and civic engagement.

    Hodge had taken to the stage to explain the government’s plans for driving up HE participation to at least 50 per cent of young people and signal the themes of its forthcoming higher education strategy – but warned that doing so via “stacking up numbers on Mickey Mouse courses” was “not acceptable.”

    Hodge’s usage shows that she – or her speechwriter – assumed that the meaning of the term “Mickey Mouse course” was widely understood. But as DK has explored elsewhere on the site, Mickey Mouse’s meanings when applied to higher education have shifted and evolved according to cultural context.

    What has remained consistent, however, is the assumption that there is a chunk of HE provision that all right-thinking people can see obviously shouldn’t “count” as HE – because it’s unserious, or too popular, or on a topic that’s not traditionally been seen as academic or, in the recent analysis from the Taxpayer’s Alliance, ideologically suspect.

    Let’s imagine you’re a university press officer looking at a message on your phone or a note in your email inbox requesting that you explain succinctly by 3pm today why it’s entirely sane and reasonable to offer courses in e-gaming, fashion, filmmaking, tourism, mental health, gender identity, outdoor learning, climate change, sports or any one of a long tail of stuff the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus wouldn’t see the point of. What’s your strategy?

    Make it go away

    Back in 2003, the BBC reports that Margaret Hodge swiftly felt the sharp end of university leaders’ tongues, who apparently said her remarks were “offensive” and “ill-informed.” It’s hard to imagine a government minister getting such short shrift from the sector today – while some of the issues might look similar, the political landscape has changed enormously.

    Even so, Option One, the dismissive approach, is seductive. There are several flavours of dismissive available: you could point out that higher education institutions hold their own degree awarding powers, are responsible for their own quality and academic standards, and curriculum, and that ergo, any course provided by a legitimate HE provider is de facto itself legitimate. Or you could question the motives of the questioner and suggest that the framing is a political act designed to discredit universities and higher education by those who wish the sector ill. The moral high ground feels pretty good, and has the advantage of refusing to concede the principle of the question, but it doesn’t necessarily contribute to public understanding of contemporary higher education.

    A whole bunch of institutions approached for comment simply did not respond – possibly because they were asked to do so during the Christmas break but it may also have been because they refused to dignify the question with a response, an approach that might be characterised as Option One (b).

    De-escalate

    The institutions who chose to respond to the Telegraph when confronted with the evidence amassed by the Taxpayers’ Alliance seem to have in the main gone for Option Two: explain and clarify – and try to wedge in a plug for the institution.

    Thus the University of Cumbria’s spokesperson explains that its MA in outdoor experiential learning is “designed for those passionate about transforming education, inspiring sustainability, and reshaping how we engage with experience in learning” – and notes that the university is in the top ten for graduate destinations. The University of Nottingham’s spokesperson points out that its workplace health and wellbeing course is postgraduate level, and therefore not taxpayer funded – and says the course encourages “a rigorous scientific approach that fulfils and exceeds legal requirements to support organisational performance and effectiveness and enhance worker productivity.”

    There are absolutely merits to this approach – essentially it smothers the reputational fire with approved corporate narratives. When the Telegraph comes to call during the Christmas break you probably don’t lob your scanty communications resources at anything other than de-escalation. This, arguably, is not the moment to start a media scrap and find yourself inadvertently the “face” of the Mickey Mouse debate. Experience shows that that sort of thing can haunt your institution for ages and goodness knows everyone’s got enough to worry about without that.

    Engage in the debate

    But we should give at least a decent bit of consideration to Option 3: full-throated defence offered in language that people recognise as meaningful. That means more or less grudgingly accepting the premise that it’s hard for everyone to see why some lucky, lucky students get to study something as fun and creative and glamorous as fashion or “the outdoors” or identity or filmmaking. It involves painting a succinct picture of what these subjects achieve for students, and industries, not in big picture stats but in human terms, in stories.

    I have two children, one in a state primary which, like many, have invested in a forest school. When my son was in reception he got to learn outdoors once a week; since then it’s been once a term at most. I can’t believe I’m the only parent of an active kid that is troubled by how little time the system affords kids to learn in and about nature.

    Or, not to make this all about my kids, but being a parent computer games are a pretty big feature of my life. I can see how gaming can offer opportunities for my kids to problem solve and develop tactical and situational awareness, but I want to be sure they are safe when they do that – thanks, e-games courses.

    Or, I’m a middle aged woman who sometimes struggles to find clothes that feel right for my professional and personal identity. Or I’m someone who wants to understand why the gender identity “debate” has become so toxic and what my orientation to it should be. Or I’m worried that my efforts to put my rubbish in the right bins isn’t going to deliver on that net zero target and is that even a useful target anyway?

    OK, my preoccupations are very obviously filtered through the lens of middle-class London liberal. I’m not suggesting I’m a typical Telegraph reader – but I’m using my own sense of what the existence of these courses might mean for me to illustrate the point that lots of them touch people’s everyday concerns in ways that could be surfaced more powerfully.

    The “Mickey Mouse” accusation runs deeper than notions of social irrelevance, however – inherent in the proposition that something is “Mickey Mouse” is calling into question whether these are subjects and courses that deserve to be part of the thing we call higher education. And that’s a much harder challenge to defend because doing so may feel like to do so requires a referral back to expertise, or knowledge that is inaccessible to the common reader and therefore will struggle to “cut through” in any media response.

    Outside the realm of quality and standards regulation the question of why something is a legitimate source of higher education study speaks to the range of conceptions of higher education value. Is it worthwhile because there is labour market demand for it, because it is sufficiently complex to constitute a structured body of knowledge that merits deep intellectual engagement, because the resourcing required to study it is only accessible in higher education contexts, because of its wider social relevance or some thrilling combination of all these? And how on earth do you capture all that in a media quote?

    I’ve been puzzling over this all week, and have come to the conclusion that there can’t be a silver bullet on how to defend the HE-ness of any given course, especially when the framing of the scepticism is so multi-faceted. One person’s useful market labour skills is another person’s intellectual lack of rigour. There’s no easy “win” available for this argument – but there might be a position to take that feels authentic and worthwhile that is rooted in the course’s own conception of itself and its meaning and value set within the wider institutional framework of mission and purpose.

    Latent to salient

    It’s not, I think, that institutions and their staff have no sense of why their courses are meaningful as higher education, but that this knowledge is so deeply embedded in the structures and cultures of the institution as to be almost entirely latent and unarticulated. Yet to be able to capture any of this pithily and in the teeth of a sceptical line of questioning that knowledge needs to be explicit and intentionally surfaced.

    Any institution will have a stock of anecdotes, insight and ideas about why their courses matter, in human terms. This knowledge isn’t always held in comms teams, who are not always linked closely with the nuts and bolts of the academic endeavour . It’s not an easy ask, but I’d argue that it’s worth comms teams spending some real time in some of the university’s less “mainstream” course offerings, putting forward the sorts of the challenges around value that a hostile media outlet or think tank might present and understanding the nuances of the answers before working them into something media-friendly. Don’t just talk to the programme leaders, ask to audit the classes. Direct experience trumps course marketing brochure every time.

    Because when it comes to that unexpected phone call or email asking for the justification for these woke, un-rigorous, pointless degrees, and deciding how best to respond, it’s great to at least have the option to explain why these courses are not merely legitimate higher education provision, they are essential for the furtherance of human flourishing.

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  • Identifying “mickey mouse” courses | Wonkhe

    Identifying “mickey mouse” courses | Wonkhe

    St Valentine’s Day, 1966. Salem, Oregon.

    State legislator Morris Crothers (Salem-R), a qualified doctor, is unhappy with a Bachelor’s degree in Medical Technology offered by the Oregon Technical Institute (OTI, formerly Oregon Polytechnic).

    The Capital Journal reported his words:

    a mickey mouse degree that would not allow those earning it to practice in most Oregon laboratories.

    His issue isn’t with the content of the degree, but with his perception that it does not qualify a graduate to perform certain licensed tests (including the pre-marriage test for syphilis) in the state of Oregon. I say perception because it turned out he was wrong and the course was accredited – 131 graduates were already employed by the state. His real issue was that OTI wasn’t a proper four-year college, and had low entry requirements.

    OTI chancellor RE Lieuallen responded (as recorded in The Oregonian): “Here we get into the question of the liberal arts background … some people would say that a job-oriented programme is better”.

    Crothers withdrew his accusation, claiming “the news media quoted me a little out of context”.

    This is the earliest published newspaper use of the pejorative term “mickey mouse degree”. And it betrayed a lack of understanding, and a certain level of snobbery, rather than academic failings.

    From Morris to Maurice

    In the academic literature a letter to journal American Speech from Michigan State University’s Maurice Crane slightly predates Salem’s tawdry tale: in 1958 (volume 33, number 3) his letter (“Vox Bop”) offers a partial lexicon of historic midwestern jazz slang, in which he observes:

    Incidentally, a mickey or Mickey Mouse band is not merely a ‘pop tune’ band … but the kind of pop band that sounds as if it is playing background for an animated cartoon. […] This term, which has been around almost as long as Mickey Mouse himself, has also come into common parlance in another sense at Michigan State, where a ‘Mickey Mouse course’ means a snap course, or what Princeton undergraduates in my day called a gut course

    It’s unhelpful to have slang defined by reference to earlier slang, but Collins dictionary tells us a snap course was “an academic course that can be passed with a minimum of effort”.

    For things dismissed as “hobby courses” – usually arts, crafts, and leisure pursuits – there is a suspicion that such provision lacks academic rigour. The economic value argument is less pronounced here – the sheer size of the Disney industry is just one example of just how much money and time human beings devote to hobbies and interests.

    The jazzman’s derivation is interesting in that jazz is itself based on “pop tunes” – the distinction Crane draws is around the manner of playing rather than the repertoire itself. Whether you play them with a “hip” jazz inflection or a “square” pop sensibility these are difficult tunes that are challenging to play and perform well.

    Morris dancing

    The first UK press sighting of the term was in 1972 – the Nottingham Guardian Journal published a letter from an irate Loughborough resident concerning governance problems at the Institute of Race Relations (a “so-earnest group of sociologists, permissives, and mickey mouse degree holders all speaking at the same time.”)

    Here the mouse is used to infer suspicions about the political project underpinning a degree course – in the same way that the likes of the Taxpayers Alliance is able to classify courses on topics as complex and crucial as climate science and mental health as being “mickey mouse.”

    Although Margaret Hodge famously used the term in a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research on 13 January 2003 she did not coin the phrase. Her perhaps ill-chosen words masked the actual intent of her speech – she was attempting to encourage the growth of two-year foundation degree provision in subjects that met the needs of local industry. This is a diametrically opposite position to the one taken by Morris Crothers – which serves to illustrate why the idea has become so useful. A “mickey mouse degree” is simply a term for higher education provision that the speaker doesn’t like.

    Many of the early media examples on this side of the Atlantic are actually playful subversions of the trope (University of Exeter drama lecturer Robin Allan received “Britain’s first PhD on Walt Disney” in 1994 – the Torquay Herald Express tells us that Mickey himself turned up on graduation day!) suggesting that the term had currency long before the term was introduced to the parliamentary record. That wasn’t Margaret Hodge either – Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes used the phrase to defend the University of Westminster from that attack in the media, in a debate on the private City of Westminster Bill in June 1995.

    You’re so fine you blow my mind

    So to describe a course as “mickey mouse” is to make a judgement that it is either academically frivolous, politically suspect, or economically worthless: and – importantly – popular. A drawing of an anthropomorphic rodent is worthless, while Mickey Mouse himself is worth billions of dollars to the Disney corporation: to use the term is to ignore a widely perceived value in favour of your own judgement.

    For this reason, a list of “mickey mouse courses” – such as the one published by the Telegraph on 3 January is the purest expression of the long running “low quality courses” debate. It floats free of metrics and data simply to reinforce prejudices.

    The 787 courses identified by a researcher (Callum McGoldrick) at the Taxpayers’ Alliance were selected based on his own judgement and assigned to one of five categories:

    • Fashion (including textiles and jewellery)
    • Games (by which I mean computer games industry related courses)
    • Media (film, photography, and – with apologies to Maurice Crane – both jazz and popular music)
    • Woke (inevitably – mostly things to do with ethnicity, gender, mental wellbeing, and sustainability)
    • Misc (which includes specifically leisure-linked vocational courses, and more general arts and crafts provision)

    There’s no distinction drawn between undergraduate, postgraduate, and non-credit-bearing provision, and (as the article illustrates) not all of the courses described are currently recruiting or funded via student loans. Courses were drawn from a series of freedom of information requests – so the list, as well as being arbitrary, is not exhaustive. It covers just 51 providers.

    It feels like a horribly labour intensive way of getting an article into the Telegraph, and as a service to contrarian think-tanks everywhere I’ve built a little tool to optimise the process. Just type a word that makes you angry into the box on the left and you get both a count and a complete list of currently recruiting undergraduate courses with that word in their title to give you that special tingly feeling.

    [Full screen]

    The bigger question

    In a 2003 article for the Guardian, Emma Brockes examined the “mickey mouse” course industry in the light of Margaret Hodge’s comments noting that “every generation has its Mickey Mouse degrees – arts subjects were mocked in the 60s and 70s, sociology in the 80s and gender studies in the 1990s.” She noted:

    “There are degrees made ludicrous by virtue of their specificity (a BA (Hons) in air-conditioning). There are degrees ridiculed for their non-specificity (citizenship studies, which, to its detractors, is so broad that it might as well be called “shit that happens in the world” studies). There are the apparent oxymorons – turfgrass science, amenity horticulture, surf and beach management and the BSc from Luton University in decision-making, which begs the cheap but irresistible observation, how did those on the course manage to make the decision to take it in the first place?

    She hangs her piece on an interview with the news editor of the Coalville and Ashby Times – one Paul Marston, a recent media studies graduate from De Montfort University. Though he does mount a defence (which Brockes rather snootily describes as half-hearted) of the relevance and interest of his degree, he laments that:

    I’m finding it difficult to move on in my career now, and I do put that down partly to my degree. It was very general, very broad, good for keeping my options open, but it doesn’t seem to have prepared me for anything much else.

    The early 00s were perhaps not the most auspicious point to begin a career in local journalism, but linkedin does confirm that Marston has had a successful career in media and communications – currently leading internal communications for defence company MBDA. It’s not clear his media studies degree directly prepared him for that role, but it feels reasonable to suggest it may have had an impact, in the same way that niche, broad, and oxymoronic courses help graduates into careers all the time.

    The “mickey mouse” accusations seldom have much to do with actual concerns about course quality. You’ll look in vain for any sign of the kind of courses that OfS and DfE are currently concerned about (franchise delivery, business studies), and the only time you see a link to metrics is with graduate salaries (which, I would argue, says more about low pay in certain industries than any failings of the courses themselves).

    It is easy and unsatisfying to critique the methodology, because (as with everything like this) the methodology isn’t the point. The prejudice, and the way people respond to it, is a much bigger issue.

    On the recent Taxpayers’ Alliance efforts, researcher Callum McGoldrick told the Telegraph:

    Taxpayers are sick of seeing their hard-earned cash subsidise rip-off degrees that offer little to no return on investment. These Mickey Mouse subjects are essentially a state-sponsored vanity project where universities fill their coffers while the public picks up the tab for loans which will never come close to being fully repaid. We need to stop funding hobby courses and start prioritising rigorous subjects that actually boost the economy and deliver value for money

    As much as the current fashion for skills planning (at levels from the local to the global) and vocational training speaks to the anxieties of a government and nation increasingly unsure of itself in a radically changing world, there’s also a sense in which it is a kind of play-acting. Sometimes we don’t think the skills we need are skills at all: while manufacturing in the UK is healthier than popularly imagined we obsess over ensuring we have the skills we need to to do that, and there is far less attention devoted to the myriad professions that keep our theatres and venues delighting audiences. We clearly need both, for our economy to thrive.

    In 1960s Salem, Morris Crothers was concerned about prestige and employer value – but his perspective was at odds with that of actual employers. Mickey Mouse, as a cipher for the immense value embedded in things we dismiss or fail to understand, betrayed his anxiety that an old order was disrupted and a new one was being born.

    Whatever the next ten years look like, in the sector or the wider economy, our starting point has to be that what will be economically (or humanly) valuable – and what skills are needed to make that value work – are at best unclear. The state may have a legitimate interest in the overall mix of subjects provided: it may have an interest as a purchaser where particular skills or expertise will be needed.

    But we also need to admit as a society that we don’t know what we will need, and that learning for the sake of learning has a value that is a little bit harder to measure.

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  • Maoist leader Paka Hanumanthu shot dead in encounter, AI courses surge in India & more

    Maoist leader Paka Hanumanthu shot dead in encounter, AI courses surge in India & more

    Today’s News Headlines for School Assembly, December 26, 2025: Here are the news headlines for school assembly on December 26. A Maoist leader was killed in Odisha, Delhi’s fog eased, and Kerala introduced photo identity cards. Tarique Rahman returned to Bangladesh, blasts in Nigeria and Gaza. Australia faces England in cricket on Friday, while young Indians shine in chess. India’s GDP data defended, CTET window reopens, AI courses surge in 2025.

    National

    Paka Hanumanthu alias Ganesh alias Chamru, a top Maoist leader hailing from Telangana’s Nalgonda district, and three other Maoists were shot dead in an encounter in Odisha on the intervening night between Wednesday and Thursday, officials said.

    After days of recording dense fog conditions, the weather improved in Delhi early Thursday, with hardly any fog over at Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD) forecast.

    The Kerala government decided to introduce permanent photo-affixed nativity cards, doing away with the prevailing practice of issuing nativity certificates.

    International

    The son of former Bangladeshi president Ziaur Rahman and first woman Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, Tarique Rahman returns Thursday to the nation after a 17-year self-imposed exile.

    Blast at mosque in Nigeria kills 5 and injures more than 30 in an apparent suicide attack

    Blast in Gaza wounds a soldier as Israel accuses Hamas of ceasefire violation

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    Sports

    Steven Smith’s Australia will lock horns with Ben Stokes’ England in the fourth of the five-match Test series at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Melbourne on Friday.

    IM Ethan Vaz, WFM Shubhi Gupta win at National Junior Chess Championship

    Business

    Calling for a more even and symmetric evaluation of India’s economic performance, Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) V Anantha Nageswaran defended the GDP data and said “we don’t hear too many murmurs” when growth numbers disappoint.

    The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) assessment of India’s official statistics should improve significantly once the ongoing review of the key macroeconomic indicators is complete, according to Mridul Saggar, Chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee on the Index of Industrial Production (IIP).

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    Education

    The Central Board of Secondary Education will reopen the application window for the Central Teacher Eligibility Test (CTET) February registration for candidates who did not fill out the form.

    In 2025, courses on generative AI, artificial intelligence, data science, and cybersecurity, among others, were the top choices of Indian learners.

     

    © IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd

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  • Texas Universities Deploy AI Tools to Review How Courses Discuss Race and Gender – The 74

    Texas Universities Deploy AI Tools to Review How Courses Discuss Race and Gender – The 74


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    A senior Texas A&M University System official testing a new artificial intelligence tool this fall asked it to find how many courses discuss feminism at one of its regional universities. Each time she asked in a slightly different way, she got a different number.

    “Either the tool is learning from my previous queries,” Texas A&M system’s chief strategy officer Korry Castillo told colleagues in an email, “or we need to fine tune our requests to get the best results.”

    It was Sept. 25, and Castillo was trying to deliver on a promise Chancellor Glenn Hegar and the Board of Regents had already made: to audit courses across all of the system’s 12 universities after conservative outrage over a gender-identity lesson at the flagship campus intensified earlier that month, leading to the professor’s firing and the university president’s resignation. 

    Texas A&M officials said the controversy stemmed from the course’s content not aligning with its description in the university’s course catalog and framed the audit as a way to ensure students knew what they were signing up for. As other public universities came under similar scrutiny and began preparing to comply with a new state law that gives governor-appointed regents more authority over curricula, they, too, announced audits.

    Records obtained by The Texas Tribune offer a first look at how Texas universities are experimenting with AI to conduct those reviews. 

    At Texas A&M, internal emails show staff are using AI software to search syllabi and course descriptions for words that could raise concerns under new system policies restricting how faculty teach about race and gender. 

    At Texas State, memos show administrators are suggesting faculty use an AI writing assistant to revise course descriptions. They urged professors to drop words such as “challenging,” “dismantling” and “decolonizing” and to rename courses with titles like “Combating Racism in Healthcare” to something university officials consider more neutral like “Race and Public Health in America.”

    Read Texas State University’s guide to faculty on how to review their curriculum with AI

    While school officials describe the efforts as an innovative approach that fosters transparency and accountability, AI experts say these systems do not actually analyze or understand course content, instead generating answers that sound right based on patterns in their training data.

    That means small changes in how a question is phrased can lead to different results, they said, making the systems unreliable for deciding whether a class matches its official description. They warned that using AI this way could lead to courses being flagged over isolated words and further shift control of teaching away from faculty and toward administrators.

    “I’m not convinced this is about serving students or cleaning up syllabi,” said Chris Gilliard, co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute. “This looks like a project to control education and remove it from professors and put it into the hands of administrators and legislatures.”

    Setting up the tool

    During a board of regents meeting last month, Texas A&M System leaders described the new processes they were developing to audit courses as a repeatable enforcement mechanism. 

    Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs James Hallmark said the system would use “AI-assisted tools” to examine course data under “consistent, evidence-based criteria,” which would guide future board action on courses. Regent Sam Torn praised it as “real governance,” saying Texas A&M was “stepping up first, setting the model that others will follow.” 

    That same day, the board approved new rules requiring presidents to sign off on any course that could be seen as advocating for “race and gender ideology” and prohibiting professors from teaching material not on the approved syllabus for a course.

    In a statement to the Tribune, Chris Bryan, the system’s vice chancellor for marketing and communications, said Texas A&M is using OpenAI services through an existing subscription to aid the system’s course audit and that the tool is still being tested as universities finish sharing their course data. He said “any decisions about appropriateness, alignment with degree programs, or student outcomes will be made by people, not software.”

    In records obtained by the Tribune, Castillo, the system’s chief strategy officer, told colleagues to prepare for about 20 system employees to use the tool to make hundreds of queries each semester. 

    The records also show some of the concerns that arose from early tests of the tool.  

    When Castillo told colleagues about the varying results she obtained when searching for classes that discuss feminism, deputy chief information officer Mark Schultz cautioned that the tool came with “an inherent risk of inaccuracy.”

    “Some of that can be mitigated with training,” he said, “but it probably can’t be fully eliminated.”

    Schultz did not specify what kinds of inaccuracies he meant. When asked if the potential inaccuracies had been resolved, Bryan said, “We are testing baseline conversations with the AI tool to validate the accuracy, relevance and repeatability of the prompts.” He said this includes seeing how the tool responds to invalid or misleading prompts and having humans review the results.

    Experts said the different answers Castillo received when she rephrased her question reflect how these systems operate. They explained that these kinds of AI tools generate their responses by predicting patterns and generating strings of text.

    “These systems are fundamentally systems for repeatedly answering the question ‘what is the likely next word’ and that’s it,” said Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington. “The sequence of words that comes out looks like the kind of thing you would expect in that context, but it is not based on reason or understanding or looking at information.”

    Because of that, small changes to how a question is phrased can produce different results. Experts also said users can nudge the model toward the answer they want. Gilliard said that is because these systems are also prone to what developers call “sycophancy,” meaning they try to agree with or please the user. 

    “Very often, a thing that happens when people use this technology is if you chide or correct the machine, it will say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry’ or like ‘you’re right,’ so you can often goad these systems into getting the answer you desire,” he said.

    T. Philip Nichols, a Baylor University professor who studies how technology influences teaching and learning in schools, said keyword searches also provide little insight into how a topic is actually taught. He called the tool “a blunt instrument” that isn’t capable of understanding how certain discussions that the software might flag as unrelated to the course tie into broader class themes. 

    “Those pedagogical choices of an instructor might not be present in a syllabus, so to just feed that into a chatbot and say, ‘Is this topic mentioned?’ tells you nothing about how it’s talked about or in what way,” Nichols said. 

    Castillo’s description of her experience testing the AI tool was the only time in the records reviewed by the Tribune when Texas A&M administrators discussed specific search terms being used to inspect course content. In another email, Castillo said she would share search terms with staff in person or by phone rather than email. 

    System officials did not provide the list of search terms the system plans to use in the audit.

    Martin Peterson, a Texas A&M philosophy professor who studies the ethics of technology, said faculty have not been asked to weigh in on the tool, including members of the university’s AI council. He noted that the council’s ethics and governance committee is charged with helping set standards for responsible AI use.

    While Peterson generally opposes the push to audit the university system’s courses, he said he is “a little more open to the idea that some such tool could perhaps be used.”

    “It is just that we have to do our homework before we start using the tool,” Peterson said.

    AI-assisted revisions

    At Texas State University, officials ordered faculty to rewrite their syllabi and suggested they use AI to do it.

    In October, administrators flagged 280 courses for review and told faculty to revise titles, descriptions and learning outcomes to remove wording the university said was not neutral. Records indicate that dozens of courses set to be offered by the College of Liberal Arts in the Spring 2026 semester were singled out for neutrality concerns. They included courses such as Intro to Diversity, Social Inequality, Freedom in America, Southwest in Film and Chinese-English Translation.

    Faculty were given until Dec. 10 to complete the rewrites, with a second-level review scheduled in January and the entire catalog to be evaluated by June. 

    Administrators shared with faculty a guide outlining wording they said signaled advocacy. It discouraged learning outcomes that describe students “measure or require belief, attitude or activism (e.g., value diversity, embrace activism, commit to change).”

    Administrators also provided a prompt for faculty to paste into an AI writing assistant alongside their materials. The prompt instructs the chatbot to “identify any language that signals advocacy, prescriptive conclusions, affective outcomes or ideological commitments” and generate three alternative versions that remove those elements. 

    Jayme Blaschke, assistant director of media relations at Texas State, described the internal review as “thorough” and “deliberative,” but would not say whether any classes have already been revised or removed, only that “measures are in place to guide students through any adjustments and keep their academic progress on track.” He also declined to explain how courses were initially flagged and who wrote the neutrality expectations.

    Faculty say the changes have reshaped how curriculum decisions are made on campus.

    Aimee Villarreal, an assistant professor of anthropology and president of Texas State’s American Association of University Professors chapter, said the process is usually faculty-driven and unfolds over a longer period of time. She believes the structure of this audit allows administrators to more closely monitor how faculty describe their disciplines and steer how that material must be presented.

    She said the requirement to revise courses quickly or risk having them removed from the spring schedule has created pressure to comply, which may have pushed some faculty toward using the AI writing assistant.

    Villarreal said the process reflects a lack of trust in faculty and their field expertise when deciding what to teach.

    “I love what I do,” Villarreal said, “and it’s very sad to see the core of what I do being undermined in this way.”

    Nichols warned the trend of using AI in this way represents a larger threat. 

    “This is a kind of de-professionalizing of what we do in classrooms, where we’re narrowing the horizon of what’s possible,” he said. “And I think once we give that up, that’s like giving up the whole game. That’s the whole purpose of why universities exist.”

    The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

    Disclosure: Baylor University, Texas A&M University and Texas A&M University System have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

    This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.


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  • Intersession Courses

    Intersession Courses

    Colleges on the typical semester schedule often have an intersession also called a January term—that fills some of the gap between the end of the fall and the start of the spring. Intersessions typically last only a few weeks, if that, and they’re intended to allow students to pick up a single class during time they otherwise wouldn’t have any. They can be particularly helpful for student athletes whose seasons dominate one semester or the other; moving some credits to the January term can allow students to take a slightly lighter load when they’re competing.

    I’ll admit that I’m a fan of intersessions. Intersession courses tend to have much higher completion rates than semester courses. Some of that may be self-selection, but I think most of it comes from a combination of single focus and a relative lack of time for life to get in the way.

    When I was an undergrad, intersession courses were different from the courses offered during the semesters. They were usually interdisciplinary and often fairly idiosyncratic. They were some of the best classes I had in college.

    But that was at a small liberal arts college that didn’t have to worry about its credits transferring to other places. In the community college setting, transferability matters, so the courses tend to be more compressed versions of the same courses that get taught in the long semesters. In my perfect world, we’d have the same curricular freedom that the tonier four-year places have, but that doesn’t seem to be the direction of things. Still, I have to admit that offering the plain-vanilla introductory gen eds works well for attracting “visiting” students who are matriculated elsewhere but who are home over the break. It allows them to pick up transferable credits at lower cost. If our stuff got too idiosyncratic, we might lose that market.

    My current college is the first one I’ve worked at in which intersession straddles the Christmas break. Everyplace else, it started right after New Year’s, typically ending just before Martin Luther King day. I’m not sure why we straddle the break; I’ll be curious to see its effect on success rates. It seems like it would depress the enrollment of visiting students, which makes it all the more curious that we do it this way. 

    So, some questions for my wise and worldly readers.

    Have you had an intersession success story? Alternately, did something crash and burn?

    Have you noticed that certain kinds of courses fit the format better than others? If so, which?

    And is there a good argument for having it straddle the break?

    I’d love to hear responses via email at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com, or on Bluesky, where I’m at @deandad.bsky.social. Thanks!

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  • Courses Studying Trump Proliferate, Risking President’s Ire

    Courses Studying Trump Proliferate, Risking President’s Ire

    Donald Trump’s second term in office continues to confound onlookers. Yet a growing number of universities around the world are offering courses for students to try to make sense of the mercurial president.

    The University of Pennsylvania has launched Climate and Environment Journalism: Truth-Telling in the Trump Era through its English department and American Conservatism From Taft to Trump for political science students. The New School’s Donald Trump as History module will aim to explore the “Trump phenomenon” and how it alters views of U.S. history, while the University of Washington offers a special Trump in the World module.

    Universities outside the U.S. are also involved. First run in 2017, Trumpism: An American Biography is an optional module for second-year history students at the University of Sheffield, which explores how U.S. history can shed light on the present.

    Andrew Heath, lecturer in U.S. history at Sheffield, told Times Higher Education that part of the module’s purpose was to get students thinking about the history of terms such as populism that are “often thrown around in the media to make sense of Trump and Trumpism,” and to encourage them to think critically about the way that comparisons are invoked.

    But teaching about such a fast-moving political situation is not easy. “It’s a module that always poses challenges—readings can quickly feel dated; teaching it in an election year last time around was harder. Every iteration of the unit needs significant updating,” added Heath.

    Christopher Breem, managing director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Pennsylvania State University, said it is always hard to teach about something going on in the present. But this is often what students are most interested in because they recognize that it is important to them and their future to understand it, he said.

    “I think if you are up front with students that there are unavoidable risks associated with teaching any subject in real time, they accept that.”

    Breem, who taught a course on Trump’s unorthodox campaign in 2016, said there are positive sides to it as well, allowing lecturers the opportunity to talk about populism in U.S. history, and about similar populist movements throughout the world.

    “If you use Trump as an opportunity to talk about where we are and how we got here, you can end up with a really good class.”

    The University of East Anglia is offering an optional module on MAGA: Donald Trump and Twenty-First Century America, University College Dublin has a Trump’s America option, and the University of Southern Denmark has one on U.S. society under Trump.

    During the first Trump presidency, some academics came under an intense national spotlight for their courses that explicitly referenced him. One professor who previously taught a course mentioning Trump said the whole experience was “unpleasant,” with staff and the university receiving numerous phone calls and emails.

    “The university took my information off the website, and we had a police officer outside of the classroom,” the professor said. “I turned on my house alarm during the day. Frightened, I turned down opportunities for press interviews.”

    The academic, who wished to remain anonymous, said it was hard to keep up with the constant change and disruption of the Trump administration but that students were very engaged.

    And they said academics have a professional and ethical responsibility to talk about Trump’s policies in classes, if it is related to course content, but should “tread carefully on how public you make it.”

    However, Richard Lazarus, professor of law at Harvard University and course director for a module on environmental law under Trump, said he had “zero” worries about drawing the ire of the administration.

    “We are not advocates who use our classes to tell students what action they should take. We are teachers and scholars who inform our students, give them the skills to think in a rigorous, disciplined way, and with integrity. They then decide how to use their skills.”

    Other new courses for this year include the People’s Guide to Trumpism at the University of San Francisco and Trump vs. Science at Hampshire College.

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  • Texas A&M Requires Approval for Courses That “Advocate” Certain Ideologies

    Texas A&M Requires Approval for Courses That “Advocate” Certain Ideologies

    Courses that “advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity” now require presidential approval at Texas A&M system campuses, the system Board of Regents decided Thursday.

    Faculty members and external advocacy groups say the new rules violate academic freedom, and for many professors, questions remain about how the policies will be implemented and enforced. Approved in a unanimous vote after a lengthy public comment period, the policy changes fit a pattern of censorship at Texas A&M that escalated after a video of a student challenging an instructor about a lesson on gender identity went viral, leading to the instructor’s firing and the resignation of then-president Mark Welsh.

    Dan Braaten, an associate professor of political science at Texas A&M San Antonio and president of the campus American Association of University Professors chapter, said he was shocked “at the egregiousness” of the policies, but not surprised by them.

    “Faculty are extremely worried,” Braaten said. “They’re wondering, can they teach the classes they’re scheduled to teach in the spring? Who’s going to be looking at their syllabi? … Is the president of each A&M university going to have to approve every syllabus? Are there penalties for any of this? It’s just a complete … serious violation of academic freedom.”

    The board approved the new rules as revisions to existing system policies. A policy on “Civil Rights Protections and Compliance” will be amended to state that “no system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity unless the course is approved by the member CEO.” It will also define “gender ideology” as “a concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing, and disconnected from, the biological category of sex.”

    Similarly, “race ideology” is defined as “a concept that attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity, accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy or conspiracy, ascribe to them less value as contributors to society and public discourse because of their race or ethnicity, or assign them intrinsic guilt based on the actions of their presumed ancestors or relatives in other areas of the world. This also includes course content that promotes activism on issues related to race or ethnicity, rather than academic instruction.”

    Teaching Versus Advocacy

    A previous version of the revision proposed that no system academic course will “teach” race or gender ideology, but the verb was changed to “advocate” before the policies were presented formally to the full board. It’s unclear how the system will differentiate between advocacy and regular instruction on these topics. Representatives for the board on Wednesday declined to comment on the policies ahead of the board vote. They did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s questions after the policies were approved.

    A second policy on “Academic Freedom, Responsibility and Tenure” previously stated that “each faculty member is entitled to full freedom in the classroom in discussing the subject that the faculty member teaches, but a faculty member should not introduce a controversial matter that has no relation to the classroom subject.” The approved amendment adds that faculty members may not “teach material that is inconsistent with the approved syllabus for the course.”

    In a partially redacted Nov. 10 email obtained by Inside Higher Ed, a Texas A&M faculty leader said that administrators at several universities were already discussing implementation plans ahead of the board vote. An administrator also told the faculty leader that the changes to the policy would not likely lead to a formal syllabus-approval process and instead are intended to keep course content aligned with learning outcomes.

    The board received 142 written comments ahead of Thursday’s vote, and eight faculty members spoke out against the policy changes during the meeting’s public comment period. Several of them also called for Melissa McCoul, the professor fired in September, to be reinstated.

    “This is not university-level education, it is cruelty and political indoctrination in wolf’s clothing,” said Leonard Bright, a professor of government and public service and president of the Texas A&M College Station AAUP chapter. “I would need to tell my students that ‘What you came here to learn, I’m unable to tell you, because I’m restricted to tell you that information, even though such knowledge is available at every major university in this world.’”

    Sonia Hernandez, a liberal arts professor who teaches about Latin American history, shared a past example that highlighted the pitfalls of the new policies.

    “I had a student once who took issue with my discussion of the importance of military history. He was against war and felt strongly about war’s damaging effects on society, yet it was full academic freedom—not cherry-picking of topics, not advocacy, not ideology—that allowed me to share research on the intersections of war and identity with my class,” Hernandez said.

    Two faculty members—finance professor Adam Kolasinski and biomedical engineering professor John Criscione—spoke in favor of the policy changes.

    “I don’t think somebody should be able to say that Germans born two generations after the Holocaust somehow bear guilt for the Holocaust, because that’s really what’s being prohibited here,” Kolasinski said. “My colleagues seem to think that the policy says something it doesn’t.” Kolasinski also suggested the board change the language back from “advocate” to “teach.”

    AAUP president Todd Wolfson urged the board to reject the proposed policy changes in a statement Tuesday. So did Brian Evans, president of the Texas Conference of the AAUP, which includes faculty at Texas A&M campuses.

    “By considering these policy changes, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents is telling faculty, ‘Shut up and teach—and we’ll tell you what to teach,’” Evans said in the statement. “This language and the censorship it imposes will cause irreparable harm to the reputation of the university, and impede faculty and students from their main mission on campus: to teach, learn, think critically, and create and share new knowledge.”

    In a Monday statement, FIRE officials wrote, “Hiring professors with PhDs is meaningless if administrators are the ones deciding what gets taught … Faculty would need permission to teach students about not just modern controversies, but also civil rights, the Civil War, or even ancient Greek comedies. This is not just bad policy. It invites unlawful censorship, chills academic freedom, and undermines the core purpose of a university. Faculty will start asking not ‘Is this accurate?’ but ‘Will this get me in trouble?’ That’s not education, it’s risk management.”

    AI-Driven Course Review

    Also on Thursday, the board discussed a detailed, systemwide review of all courses using an artificial intelligence–driven process. The system has already piloted the review process at its Tarleton State University campus, where most of the courses that were flagged are housed in the College of Education, which includes the sociology and psychology departments, the Nov. 10 email from a faculty leader stated. Board members said they intend to complete the course review regularly, as often as once per semester.

    “The Texas A&M system is stepping up first, setting the model that others will follow,” Regent Sam Torn said about the course review at Thursday’s meeting.

    The system will also use EthicsPoint, an online system that will allow students to report inaccurate, misleading or inappropriate course content that diverges from the course descriptions. System staff will be alerted when a student submits an EthicsPoint complaint, and if the complaint is determined to be valid, it will be passed along to the relevant university.

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