A few weeks ago, I went to my daughter’s open house at her high school and had a chance to meet her teachers. One teacher stood out to me from what he said about “wanting to be genuine” with his students as much as possible because that would create a more effective learning environment for them. At first, it seemed like such a strange thing to say. How could he not be genuine with them? Wasn’t he always himself? And if he wasn’t being genuine, then what was he doing?
As I started to think about it, though, I had to appreciate the honesty of his comment and admit the odd disconnect between who we are as teachers in the classroom and who we are outside of it. As much as we’d like to think that those two things, those two people, those two selves, are largely the same, it might not be the case. As with many professions, we craft or adopt a voice or a persona to meet the demands of our positions. While we are responsible for shaping our voice and embodying our role in a given situation, is our teaching persona who we “genuinely” are? Is a lawyer being genuine when they speak to a jury in a courtroom? Is a doctor being genuine when they talk to their patients in a hospital? Are they being “real” in those situations?
I want to believe, in the words of Popeye, that “I yam what I yam” and that I “yam” still me, whether I’m in the classroom or not. Who I am in that space is simply one version of me—just as I’m a different version of myself at a family gathering, my daughter’s high school open house, or even waiting in line at the DMV. The roles may shift, but the core of who I am remains constant across all those situations.
By the same token, the voice that just announced a quiz on Thursday or that told the students how to navigate our course management system doesn’t sound at all like the one that talked about basketball with my dad or commiserated with a neighbor about the increase in our taxes. In the service of my job responsibilities and course learning outcomes, do I really become someone else? In the classroom, to put it as The Fixx did in 1984, “Are we ourselves?”
In The Art of Teaching, Jay Parini is quick to dismiss these questions, since “authenticity” itself is, he argues, yet another “construction” and “[t]he notion of the ‘true’ self is […] utterly false” (2005, 59). (Don’t look now, but a philosophical rabbit hole about the nature of the self is about to open on your browser.) Be that as it may, we usually have a sense, just as my daughter’s teacher did, of when we stray too far from that “construction” that feels “right” for us and that we would, rightly or wrongly, refer to as who we are.
Probably like so many of you, I still think about my first semester of teaching and all the anxiety that went along with it. I spent weeks getting ready, thinking about what I was going to do, writing out lectures, and planning assignments. But, when I finally made my way to the classroom, everything seemed off, wrong, and unfamiliar. I had no frame of reference for who I was in that space. The nervous voice that spoke was clearly mine, but it was also one I didn’t exactly recognize. I burned through what should have been a one-hour lecture in thirty minutes, and I struggled to fill the remaining time with questions for the class. When the students didn’t answer right away, I started to answer them myself. Walking back to my car that day, I wondered why anyone would do this job or how anyone did. And I was horrified by the thought that I would have to go back and stand there—again and again and again. What had I gotten myself into?
In the weeks and months that followed, I thought about the teacher that I was supposed to be (or that I thought I was supposed to be), as compared to the teacher that I was. More than twenty years later, I still think about that. I saw other professors who knew or seemed to know exactly who they were, what they were doing, and why they were doing it. Sometimes, I talked to them about how they taught a lesson or designed a class. I also drew on the memory of past instructors and tried, at times, to work on variations of teaching techniques that I had seen them use so well.
As much as I admired how some other professors managed a class discussion or set up a group activity, my attempt to recreate their class or draw on their lesson plan always felt unnatural and forced, like a strained karaoke version of another singer’s hit. I found that I was usually more comfortable being myself, as opposed to doing a bad impression of someone else. And what I continue to work on is what makes sense for me in my class, as opposed to thinking about how someone else might handle it or what would be an effective lesson for a different professor. How do I want to present the material, and what do I want students to get out of it?
This discussion has become especially relevant in the post-pandemic years, as authenticity has emerged as a key component of the solution for many overwhelmed educators, alongside a growing focus on trauma-informed teaching practices. In a Faculty Focus piece on inclusive teaching, Jackson Christopher Bartlett recommends “threading[ing] authenticity through our courses with genuine attempts to connect with our students” (my italics, 2023). In a recent Harvard Business Publishing essay, Lan Nguyen Chaplin similarly believes that “students thrive in classrooms where their professors show vulnerability” (2024). And, as Inside Higher Ed’s Ashley Mowreader reported this past summer, SUNY Oneonta is piloting a “Pedagogy of Real Talk” program, drawn from the work of Paul Hernandez, where faculty members “share their own stories with students” as a way of building relationships and, ultimately, “increas[ing] their academic success” (2024).
If these authors are right, students aren’t just looking to be “educated by instructors,” if they ever were; they want to be taught by people. In being real, in being vulnerable, in being honest with our students about why we love our discipline, about why we got into teaching, about what we struggled with along the way, we “[show] ourselves,” in Hernandez’s words, “that we are [people] before we are teachers” (2022, 24).
As I continue to think about what that teacher said that night, especially in light of this call for authenticity, the “genuine” challenge for many, maybe all teachers in the classroom in terms of their personas and their voices is just this, to get back to who they really are. In this regard, our careers in the classroom, like our lives themselves, are about this journey of figuring ourselves out—at the front, at the back, or even in the middle of the room. And now, it’s exactly what we need to do, as both we and our students find ourselves in that room after all those experiences away from it.
Douglas L. Howard, PhD is academic chair of the English department on the Ammerman Campus at Suffolk County Community College. He is the editor of Dexter: Investigating Cutting Edge Television and co-editor of The Essential Sopranos Reader, The Gothic Other, and with David Bianculli, Television Finales.
On our way to developing a curriculum for implementable real-world projects in professional classrooms, an interesting thing happened: Generative AI became ubiquitous. This provided a new perspective on the ideas we established in our previous article, Why Can’t Your Real-World Project Live in the Real World? (Faculty Focus, March 2022.)
In that article, we made a case for enabling real-world clients as partner educators. We tested this theory by working with a client, Artists Alliance Incorporated, a non-profit arts organization in New York City, who needed to rebuild its web presence. While we successfully redesigned the client’s website, we learned during this experience that the 15-week course structure presents a challenge for the production of an implementable project that has real-world impact. Why? Because there’s limited time for the students to gain the professional knowledge needed to generate recommendations that are implementable, and because of the limited capacity of the partner to consistently engage in answering questions about the project for the students. So, in trying to resolve these issues, we wondered, “Could we use generative AI to ‘hack time?’”
Where to begin hacking
The time-intensive elements we believe need to be “hacked” to help students develop the skills necessary to effectively respond to the client’s needs are:
Bringing the students up to speed on content knowledge so they can provide a viable scope to the client
Providing the students feedback on their thinking and recommendations without overloading the client
With the introduction of AI, we wondered if it could be used to augment the access students have to the teacher and the client. For example, could AI be harnessed to help students understand the core concepts of the course and increase their foundational knowledge? Could it also give on-demand feedback based on the client’s stated needs? Both are time-intensive, yet essential, components for implementing a real-world project.
To test our thinking, we developed two generative AI bots and introduced them to our students in a course we were teaching. One was a “Subject Knowledge Bot” (SKB), trained on introductory course content, and the other was a “Project Knowledge Bot” (PKB), trained on transcripts from a client interview detailing their business goals. The SKB provided students with timely knowledge to support the development of their ideas and solutions, while the PKB reduced demands on the client’s time by offering students project-specific insights.
So, how did the bots do?
We piloted the two bots in a Strategic Communications course taught at the NYU School of Professional Studies, Division of Programs in Business, during the spring 2024 semester. During the course, students were asked to redesign a monthly newsletter sent out by the administration to internal stakeholders. To start, the students were given previous newsletters to better assess their quality and efficacy based on the foundational concepts of internal communications being taught in the course. The students submitted their personal assessments and course examples to the SKB, requesting the bot’s feedback. Based on the bot’s response, the students developed a set of recommendations for how the administration could improve the newsletter. The purpose of this exercise was to strengthen the student’s knowledge of internal communications and fill in any gaps students may have had in their understanding. The bot streamlined the time required to build and enhance the students’ knowledge base, enabling students to respond more swiftly to the client’s needs.
After faculty review, the students shared their recommendations with the PKB, which had been trained on a transcript of an interview we conducted with the client. In the interview, the client discussed and assessed their newsletter, focusing on layout, design needs, and the suitability of the content for the target audience. Using the bot’s feedback, the students reevaluated their recommendations and prepared a revised response. The students then developed a final presentation outlining what they considered to be their top recommendations based on their conversations with the PKB. The project concluded with the client selecting the most viable ideas, which were then used to produce a year-end newsletter presented as “for-students, by-students.”
What comes next?
When we began this effort, we assumed that AI could provide a way to strengthen the student-client relationship by giving the students unrestricted access to:
the skills and strategies taught in the course using a bot trained on the course content and
the client using a bot trained on the project requirements and needs.
Based on what we had previously discovered (Is Your Real-World Experience Real Enough?Faculty Focus, March 2020), our thinking was that deepening the linkages between the learner and the client could foster a collaboration that would lead to an implementable project.
Overall, the bots were successful because they helped the students achieve several outcomes in a shorter period of time. The students became better versed in basic strategies for stakeholder communications, and the bots provided immediate feedback on their communication recommendations. These aspects had previously been challenging due to the constraints of the course schedule and the impracticality of expecting clients to address the high volume of student inquiries.
While we were pleased with the experience and the students were able to produce recommendations that were implemented by the client, we believe it is still too early to determine how effective this approach would be in applied classrooms on a broader scale. For example, some issues that still need to be addressed include:
Access to Generative AI tools: For this pilot, students had to have access to paid ChatGPT accounts to use the bots we designed, and those who did not had to use untrained, free-tier generative AI tools.
Strengthening student AI skills: Unfortunately, many of the students resorted to using the bots to simply write their recommendations, not recognizing the bot as a conversational and collaborative partner.
However, despite limitations, we believe there is real potential for AI to “hack time,” i.e., respond to some of the real challenges we, as teachers, have faced in working within a 15-week timeframe to produce implementable projects in professional, applied classrooms. We intend to continue utilizing AI in this manner while refining our approach based on our findings. This includes enhancing the bots’ knowledge base, improving equitable access to the bots, and developing clearer norms and guidelines for their use.
Dr. Paul Acquaro is a lecturer at FOM University of Applied Science for Economics and Management in Berlin and an adjunct assistant professor teaching online with New York University’s School of Professional Studies. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in database development, web technologies, IT management, business communication, and project development. Acquaro has over 20 years of experience in information technology, communications, and curriculum development and teaching, and earned a doctorate in education, focusing on instructional technology from Teachers College, Columbia University. Among his many interests is exploring how to combine the possibilities of online learning and the power of problem-based pedagogy.
Dr. Steven Goss, Ed.D., is a clinical faculty member and chair of the Management and Technology program in the Division of Business Programs at NYU School of Professional Studies (NYU SPS). He joined NYU SPS after serving as the Dean of the School of Professional Studies at Manhattan University. Before Manhattan, he led several successful online initiatives at Teachers College, Columbia University, Bank Street College of Education, and New York University, including The Center for Faculty Innovations in Teaching and Learning at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. He has taught diverse student audiences, including K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students. His courses closely relate to his academic interests, including online education, technology innovation, and experiential learning. He has received awards from The Association for the Advancement of Education in Computing (AACE) and the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) for his research on learner-centered online education. Dr. Goss received his Ed.D. in Instructional Technology and Media from Teachers College, Columbia University. He has published a book on practices for transformative online teaching through Teachers College Press, titled Transforming Online Teaching in Higher Education, Essential Practices in Engagement, Inquiry, and Equity, with co-authors Dr. Robin Hummel and Laura Zadoff.
In a recent article, “Dear Prospective UAGC Students: Stay Away,” a professor from the University of Arizona discourages students from attending the University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC). Unfortunately, this article was based on the author’s perspective rather than on facts and thus lacked the academic rigor of factual data from credible sources. This opinion piece was a collection of baseless assumptions, completely overlooking the true mission of UAGC, its faculty, and the diverse students we proudly serve. Frankly, the article has no merit.
There is power in knowledge and truth. As such, the article could have accurately depicted the realities of UAGC instead of relying on inaccurate critiques about educational quality, enrollment numbers, adjunct faculty, and alleged student dissatisfaction. To set the record straight, UAGC is committed to providing online higher education for non-traditional students, including working adults, military personnel, parents, and underserved communities. Our students juggle countless responsibilities, and UAGC offers the flexibility and support they need. UAGC is vital in making higher education accessible to those who need it most, breaking barriers that traditional institutions often ignore.
Furthermore, UAGC is unwavering in its commitment to supporting students, staff, and faculty, ensuring consistent educational quality and professional growth. As we continue to evolve, we focus on transparent evolution and collaboration, learning from past oversights to create an environment where our students can improve employment opportunities. Our pursuit of high-quality education is not a destination but an ongoing journey to which UAGC is deeply committed. Like any reputable university, we conduct regular course and program reviews, embrace continuous improvement, and acknowledge areas for development as a perpetual process. This commitment to educational quality is a cornerstone of our institution, ensuring our students receive the best education possible and can be confident in our dedication to their success.
The UAGC faculty, the backbone of our institution, is growing increasingly weary of misleading and disparaging remarks against the university and the faculty. It is time to move forward constructively and collegially. In the name of higher education, we implore you to stop defaming our university, staff, faculty, and students. To that end, we welcome meeting and educating any skeptical faculty or staff on our university’s mission and approach to serving non-traditional adult learners. Above all, we’re eager to clear any misconceptions by providing accurate data, helping to ensure that your words align more closely with the truth moving forward.
As we look to the future (Dr. Cabrera), the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed the unprecedented G.I. Bill into legislation, stated, “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor” (Roosevelt, n.d.).”
Yvonne M Lozano, Ph.D. UAGC Faculty Council Co-Chair Teresa Handy, Ph.D. UAGC Faculty Council Representative Deanna Lauer, UAGC Associate Faculty Council Representative Carl Marquez, UAGC Faculty Council Representative Cara Metz, Ph.D. UAGC Faculty Council Co-Chair Darla Branda, Ph.D. UAGC Program Chair
For a number of faculty members, the threat of censorship is so pervasive on campuses across America that not even the cloak of anonymity is enough to make them feel safe expressing their ideas.
What we found shocked even us here at FIRE. A deeply entrenched atmosphere of silence and fear is endemic across higher education.
We found that self-censorship on US campuses is currently four times worse than it was at the height of the McCarthy era. Today, 35% of faculty say they have toned down their written work for fear of causing controversy. In a major survey conducted in 1954, the height of McCarthyism, by the sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens, only 9% of social scientists said the same.
Front page of The Michigan Daily newspaper on May 13, 1954.
In fact, the problem is so bad that some academics were afraid even to respond to our already anonymous survey for fear of retaliation. Some asked us by email, or in their free response replies, to keep certain details they shared private. Some asked us to direct all correspondence to a private personal email. Others reached out beforehand just to confirm the results would truly be anonymous. Still others simply refused to speak at all.
For some, the danger is clear and concrete. As one professor wrote, “I am not at liberty to even share anonymously for fear of retribution.”
For others, it’s more nebulous, but the fear is no less real.
“I almost avoided filling out the survey for fear of losing my job somehow‚” one professor told us, adding that they “waited about two weeks before getting the courage to take the risk.”
It is totally unacceptable that this is a reality on today’s campuses.
For what I’m paid to teach the courses that I do, it’s just not enough to outweigh the risk of potential public excoriation for wrong-think and its personal and professional impact on myself, my family, and my business.
We at FIRE even had to devise additional ways of disguising academics and their schools so others could not “out” them using their responses, including by describing certain schools in general terms such as “a flagship state university in the south.” As one professor remarked, “The fact that I’m worried about even filling out polls where my opinions are anonymous is an indication that we, as institutions and as society, have lost the thread concerning ideas.” This person isn’t wrong.
So the next time you’re talking politics with friends or having dinner conversation, remember this fact — four times as many faculty are scared to speak candidly than at the height of McCarthyism!
FIRE SURVEY: Only 20% of university faculty say a conservative would fit in well in their department
Press Release
A third of faculty say they self-censor their written work, nearly four times the number of social scientists who said the same in 1954 at the height of McCarthyism.
Few other university issues — arguably, few other issues in America, period — matter more. The exchange of ideas and information is the entire reason universities exist. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” For more than a third of faculty, that ending has already begun.
Consider this final heartbreaking message from an educator who told us they felt the urge to self-censor on the survey even though it was anonymous.
“I had already decided that this year will be the last one I teach at the university,” they reflected. “For what I’m paid to teach the courses that I do, it’s just not enough to outweigh the risk of potential public excoriation for wrong-think and its personal and professional impact on myself, my family, and my business.”
Read the full report and learn more about the full extent of what the climate of higher ed is doing to faculty’s search for truth in higher education today.
First snowflakes of the season today. Winter is settling in out here in the Pennsylvania countryside. It’s quiet, no birdsongs in the morning, few leaves left on the trees to rustle, and frost muting the crunch of those on the ground. In the woods where I walk, the silence brings everything else into sharper focus.
We don’t always think about silence positively. Visitors sometimes tell us it’s too quiet out here. They feel anxious. Silence can be awkward—we’ve all that those moments of not knowing what to say. It can also feel like an affront. Ask a question in class, hear the silence, and feel a small surge of anger. It’s a confrontation. It’s students’ way of saying that they don’t want to sit at this learning table we’ve so carefully set. The emotions motivate us to act. We move in, force a response that then disappoints.
Silence does have all these negative meanings but in courses it can also provide the space needed to process the question, to search for the answer, to contemplate possible responses, to think of the question that comes before the one that’s been asked. And there are other positive meanings to silence as well. Sometimes there are no words; the best response is reverential silence. “Under certain conditions, silence might be the most appropriate response, because it is only in silence that any possible meaning can be found.” (p. 197) We stand in silent awe before a sunset, a masterpiece, or a selfless sacrifice.
I need silence to think, to focus, to concentrate. For some of us that may not be the absence of noise but a kind internal quiet like the woods here in winter, that settling sense that comes when things are as they should be. The space has been cleared and now thinking can occur. Parker Palmer describes “the vital role silence has always played in the life of the mind. Imagine Charles Darwin observing his finches or Jane Austen facing a blank page or Karl Marx at his hushed table in the British Museum or Barbara McClintock journeying inward to imagine herself as a gene.…How sad it is that the academy seems to understand so little of silence, that academics so often confuse the capacity to make public noise with true intellectual powers.” (p. 164)
But there is something wonderful about noise in the classroom or an online discussion. Students talking, making comments, to each other, preferably about the content. Students impatiently raising their hands while I’m talking, thinking what they’ve got to say is more important, and sometimes it is. One comment after another popping up on the screen. But to orchestrate the chaos of a classroom and make room for learning I have to be quiet inside. I can unfurl classroom dynamics only when I give them my full undivided attention.
We need silence to listen—to ourselves and to others—and that’s the silence we have such a hard time finding. We listen to others, but with thoughts racing as we construct a response. We wait for that short pause and quickly interject what we have to say. We don’t have time, can’t find a place and sometimes simply ignore the need to listen to what that voice inside has to say. It rarely speaks loudly but it affects teaching dramatically.
We pause, we reflect, and in the stillness we have a chance to listen to the small voice inside.
December is a noisy month but mostly it’s full of good sounds; music we love, family conversations, relatives arriving, friends checking in, excited children, food preparations, gatherings around tables, hustling and bustling. But it’s also a season that lends itself to quiet times. Another set of courses has ended, another year is all but over. We pause, we reflect, and in the stillness we have a chance to listen to that small voice inside. It speaks truth about who we are as teachers, as family members, and friends. It’s the voice that honors what we’ve accomplished and yet calls us to be more. It makes us feel thankful. We have work to do that matters and makes a difference.
My thinking about silence has been changed by a long and difficult piece I’m making my way through. I’ll put the reference below although it’s not light holiday reading. It’s big on understanding silence more broadly and positively. “The Western mystics and Eastern Buddhist masters prompt us to learn how to experience silence, to ‘wrap our words around spaces without words and leave them wordless.’” (p. 200) That’s a fine thought for the season.
Maryellen Weimer, PhD has edited The Teaching Professor since 1987. She is a Penn State Professor Emeritus of Teaching and Learning. In addition to editorship of the newsletter, Dr. Weimer has authored and edited eight books; most recently Learner-Centered Teaching and Enhancing Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning.
References
Zemlylas, M. and Michaelides, P. (2004). The sound of silence in pedagogy. Educational Theory, 54 (2), 193-2004.
Palmer, P. (2002). “Meeting for Learning” revisited: Trailing Quaker crumbs through the wilderness of higher education. M. L. Birkel, ed., The Inward Teaching: Essays to Honor Paul A. Lacey. Richmond, Indiana: The Earlham College Press.
Course withdrawals carry significant academic and financial consequences for students and universities. Studies consistently demonstrate that withdrawing from first-year courses can greatly increase a student’s risk of discontinuing their studies, reducing their likelihood of completing a degree (Akos & James, 2020).
TORONTO – October 22, 2024 – Top Hat, a leading provider of student engagement solutions for higher education, has released the first significant finding in an ongoing research initiative with Indiana University exploring the impact of student engagement leveraging Top Hat on retention and academic outcomes. The study, involving an analysis of hundreds of courses from the Spring, Summer, and Fall semesters of 2023, observed that the use of Top Hat by instructors resulted in an 11.5 percent decrease in the mean student withdrawal rate compared to similar course types without using the platform. In absolute numbers, this would equate to approximately 289 of the sampled Indiana University students continuing their course work during the 2023 academic year. The findings highlight the positive impact of integrating Top Hat into course delivery on student retention, particularly in introductory courses that often have higher drop-out rates.
The Top Hat platform empowers educators to use frequent low stakes assessments to increase student engagement during lectures through interactive polls, quizzes, and discussions. The use of frequent low stakes assessments have been shown to improve student confidence, academic outcomes and retention (Meer & Chapman, 2014). The principles of active learning can also be extended outside of class through Top Hat Pages, a content editing and personalization tool that enables instructors to create or customize their own interactive learning materials. Every interaction is captured by the platform, providing students with real-time feedback, while empowering faculty with data-driven insights they can use to identify struggling students and improve the impact of their instruction.
“Indiana University is deeply committed to the success of our students, and the findings from this research demonstrate how the thoughtful integration of instructional technologies has contributed to strengthening our undergraduate retention,” said Gina Londino-Smolar, Ed.D., Teaching Professor at IU Indianapolis. “Implementing active learning and frequent assessment, which have been shown to improve student outcomes, has been an important focus for us and our partnership with Top Hat has been instrumental in enabling us to scale these practices across our institution, ensuring a consistent, high quality learning experience for our students.”
The study’s primary objective is to evaluate the influence of Top Hat on various student outcomes, with an initial focus on withdrawal rates—a key indicator of student success. The collaborative research project, approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB), involved analyzing data from thousands of individual courses. From the original large dataset, similar courses based on discipline and level were identified in order to equalize the sample size and undertake a more accurate analysis. After filtering the dataset, 235 unique Top Hat courses were compared against a similar set of 235 unique courses that did not use Top Hat.
Indiana University began working with Top Hat in 2017 and, based on high rates of faculty adoption, made the decision to offer the platform free of charge to all students by entering into an enterprise license agreement the following year. By addressing concerns around equity, student affordability and ensuring compliance with respect to data privacy and standards for web accessibility, adoption has increased substantially. For the 2023/2024 academic year 1,022 faculty and 51,679 students across more than 1,900 individual courses from all nine IU campuses used Top Hat to enhance learning.
“This study reinforces the importance of providing faculty with tools that make evidence-based practices, like active learning, easier to adopt,” said Maggie Leen, CEO of Top Hat. “The data speaks for itself—when instructors have access to the tools to support effective teaching methods, it can lead to stronger student engagement and higher persistence. We’re proud to be part of Indiana University’s efforts to increase on-time graduation rates for their students.”
The 2030 IU Strategic Plan has one pillar dedicated to Student Success and Opportunity with a commitment to student affordability and experience throughout their educational journey to have success in the workplace and beyond. The incorporation of Top Hat to engage students with the course content, reducing withdrawal rates, can be seen as a direct contribution to the pillar for student success.
Since its founding in 2009, Top Hat has continued to introduce new features to make proven teaching methods more accessible to instructors. Most recently, Top Hat announced the release of Ace, an AI-powered teaching and learning assistant that enables instructors to generate assessment questions and discussion prompts based on their lecture slides and course materials. As a personalized study assistant, Ace allows students to break down challenging concepts, find guidance tackling difficult homework assignments, and create on-demand practice questions they can use to prepare for high stakes assessments.
The initial findings will inform both Indiana University and Top Hat’s future strategies for enhancing student outcomes. The research initiative is currently focused on identifying patterns of usage by instructors across disciplines and their impact on student engagement and academic performance. Ongoing analysis is exploring the impact of Top Hat on the academic experience of various student populations, including historically underrepresented groups with a focus on how the platform supports equitable access to learning, improves engagement, and contributes to closing achievement gaps.
About Indiana University
Indiana University (IU) is one of the nation’s leading public research universities, with 90,000 students across 930+ academic programs, seven campuses, two regional academic centers and nine School of Medicine campuses. Since 1820, Indiana University has helped students create brighter futures while also driving innovation, from breakthroughs in DNA technology to cancer research to trailblazing cultural programs and resources. IU is home to world-class academics with the country’s largest medical school, the world’s first school of philanthropy, the top-ranked Kelley School of Business and O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, and the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, the nation’s first school of informatics. The university’s campuses are united by IU 2030, an aspirational vision for a bold and ambitious future focused on student success and opportunity, transformative research and creativity, and service to the state of Indiana and beyond. Learn more at iu.edu.
About Top Hat
As the leader in student engagement solutions for higher education, Top Hat enables educators to employ proven student-centered teaching practices through interactive content and tools enhanced by AI, and activities in in-person, online and hybrid classroom environments. To accelerate student impact and return on investment, the company provides a range of change management services, including faculty training and instructional design support, integration and data management services, and digital content customization. Thousands of faculty at 750 leading North American colleges and universities use Top Hat to create meaningful, engaging and accessible learning experiences for students before, during, and after class.
TORONTO – September 19, 2024 – Top Hat, the leader in student engagement solutions for higher education, today announced the release of its latest faculty survey report, From Promise to Practice: Harnessing Gen AI for Evidence-Based Teaching. The report details the current use of AI among 300+ college and university educators in improving the quality and impact of instruction.
Key findings:
Faculty who receive formal training are more likely to agree generative AI is helpful in enhancing course design and delivery and to use AI for guidance on incorporating evidence-based teaching practices.
While ChatGPT debuted almost two years ago, only 12% of instructors use generative AI on a daily basis to support their teaching practice.
Institutions are not meeting the demand for faculty development. Of the 49% percent who’ve received training on generative AI, 48% have relied on organizations outside of their institution.
The conversation around AI has been dominated by concerns over academic integrity and growing urgency to promote student AI literacy. What has received less attention is the role of AI in supporting evidence-based teaching practices proven to positively impact student persistence and success.
“Using AI to improve course design and delivery remains a promising yet largely unrealized opportunity,” said Dr. Bradley Cohen, Chief Academic Officer at Top Hat. “By putting evidence-based teaching practices at the heart of efforts to advance faculty adoption of AI, institutions stand to realize the combined benefits of ensuring more faculty appreciate the potential value of AI—while advancing teaching methods shown to improve student persistence and success.”
The report found that most instructors express optimism about the potential of AI to enhance instruction. Yet lack of exposure and inconsistent training remain key obstacles in realizing the potential of AI in accelerating evidence-based teaching practices like active learning, frequent low-stakes assessments, and helping students to ‘learn how to learn.’
Read the report, along with insights and guidance on accelerating faculty AI adoption.
About Top Hat
As the leader in student engagement solutions for higher education, Top Hat enables educators to employ proven student-centered teaching practices through interactive content and tools enhanced by AI, and activities in in-person, online and hybrid classroom environments. To accelerate student impact and return on investment, the company provides a range of change management services, including faculty training and instructional design support, integration and data management services, and digital content customization. Thousands of faculty at 750 leading North American colleges and universities use Top Hat to create meaningful, engaging and accessible learning experiences for students before, during, and after class.
Martine Cadet interviews me about faculty online presence for the professional development workshop she’s hosting at her university. What is faculty online presence? How can a personal academic website help professors and the people they care about? Let’s talk about your digital footprint as an academic.
Jennifer: Hi everyone, this is Jennifer van Alstyne of The Social Academic. Today I have a special guest who’s actually going to be interviewing me, Martine Cadet.
I’m so excited we’re recording this video as part of a faculty development workshop that you’re doing for your university. So let’s chat about online presence for academics. I’m happy to answer your questions.
Martine: I love it. Thank you so much, Jennifer, for taking the time to meet with me. It’s such an important topic, right? Being digital today is like, you know, brushing your teeth every day. It’s like a no brainer. Everybody has their phones and laptops.
I’m an adjunct professor, and I have found that several of my peers are not actually active digitally. And one of the things that came up is having a website. Mind you, digital marketing includes social media for sure, but it also includes that digital presence online overall websites and blogs and conversations like this on channels and podcasts and so on.
Today, I’m so excited to tap into your expertise in this area of building an academic website. I’m, I’m so excited. And so I have four questions that I truly believe will help any, you know, academic person to identify how important it is to explore having a website or perhaps if they already have one, to continue to maintain it and make it better. And so I’d love to dive in. If you’re ready, let me know, Jennifer, because I can’t wait to hear your expertise.
Jennifer: I am ready.
Martine: Wonderful. And so to get started, I wanted to ask you, Jennifer, can you explain the concept of a scholarly website and why it’s important for faculty to have one, even if they already have a strong presence on social media, why should they even look into kicking off a website and or maintaining one?
Jennifer: That is such a great question. I feel like so many faculty want a website. They’re not really sure if it’s for them, or they think that they don’t want a website, but actually it would really meet all of their professional goals. So let’s chat about it. What is a personal academic website? Well, it’s a place online that you own, that you control, where you can share things like your academic bio, a photo of you, and links to anywhere else that you’re online, whether it’s your faculty profile, your social media accounts.
The thing I love about personal websites for professors is that they can grow as big as you need them to be. They can change their shape and what they hold in terms of the contents and what you wanna share over time. So if you just want a one page personal website that has what we talked about, your bio, your headshot and contact links, that’s great. That’s a perfect place to start from.
But some of the professors that I work with have really extensive needs for their website. They’re trying to reach new audiences. They’re trying to communicate with their current collaborators, you know, attract research funders, share their publications, and really be helpful for their students. There is a teaching aspect to this that I think a lot of people don’t realize that they can have with their personal website. So a personal website can be anything you want it to be. And that’s the beautiful thing.
Professors, if you’ve been thinking about a website for yourself, I want you to know you can have one. You could definitely create your own personal website, or you can hire a professional to create one for you. But it can be up in as little as an hour with a service like Owlstown from my friend, Dr. Ian Li, that is an academic website builder that really supports you to make this a reality like today.
But for some people, you know, it takes a lot longer than that. I don’t want you to think it needs to go up fast or it needs to take a long time to be a good website. You can have the website that you want and that you need for your academic life.
Martine: I love that. And so having a website, the takeaway here, I’m getting right, Jennifer, you can be on social media, but it’s like this added bonus for you, right? To do all those things that you wanna do, that you share, sharing your research, engaging with your students, and so on and so forth.
Let’s talk about that content creation a little bit more. You touched on different aspects of the website that could have the content, either the bio and you know, information about your social and whatnot.
But let’s dive in for one that’s just starting out. Let’s just say I’m a faculty. I wanna do a website. I don’t have one. Can we briefly go back to that content creation and perhaps the resource that you shared is actually a template that’s prompting faculty to include that content. Like can you walk us through the most important content pieces as we get started? That should be there.
Jennifer: Definitely. So, yes, the tool that I mentioned, Owlstown does walk you through all of these steps. So if you have pieces and parts of your academic life, you’re not sure how to bring them together, it’s a step-by-step process that will guide you through that. I want you to know that it is very supportive.
But for anyone who’s looking to build a website outside of Owlstown, or who is gonna be working with a professional to make your website, let’s talk about the content that you need. Definitely a bio that’s the most important thing that you can put on your personal academic website. And you want your bio not to be the standard academic bio that you have. Maybe on your faculty profile, it needs to do a little bit more work because the people who see your academic bio are other academics. There are people who are probably seeing you at a conference, who are gonna be talking with you about your research. But people who come across your personal academic website might be from a variety of fields or countries. They may need a little bit more support to understand who you are, what you do, and the things that you value and care about most as a professor. So I want you to take some time and be introspective when you’re writing that bio to, to really help you make it feel like you, but also communicate with that wider audience. I want the media, the public, and your friends and family to also be able to understand you and connect with what you do based on what you share there. So academic bio is the number one thing that you’ll want to gather.
You’ll also want a headshot, a photo of you. Now, that can be a little bit tricky for some people. You know, I just did my first professional photo shoot. I had an amazing photographer for my engagement photos. And it was so much fun. If you can afford or want to work with a professional photographer, I highly recommend it. It was an amazing experience.
But for the longest time, I have only used selfies on my personal academic website. So I don’t want you to think you have to go out and spend money. You can take your phone and go take some selfies. You can ask a friend or a colleague to take some photos of you. I’ve actually done that for friends, for their first books and for a grant award. Things like, I love taking photos of other people. So I want you to know, you probably have someone in your life who’s willing to take a photo of you too.
There’s lots of opportunities to work with the people around you to create content, but sometimes a selfie is the easiest thing to do. Prop it up on some books. Take that photo with a timer and just call it a day. If you can get your photo and your bio, you can have a personal academic website. You don’t really need anything more than that.
Definitely gather your social media links if you have them. But the truth is, a lot of people with personal websites, maybe not on social media, or maybe they’re not super active on social media or that account that they made, they haven’t actually touched it in like four years. That’s okay.
That’s one of the things I love about personal academic websites. It’s this great tool to help share your online presence and the things that you care about, even when you’re sleeping, even when you’re not active on social media, even when you’re traveling for conferences or grants and you don’t have time to check your phone or don’t want to because you’re so focused on what you’re doing at hand. I want you to have those privileges. And when you have a personal website, it’s doing that work for you even when you’re not working. So I really love that.
Now, in terms of growing the site, there is more content to gather and some of that content, in fact, most of it is probably in your curriculum vitae (CV). So updating your CV and then seeing the different pieces of your life that feel important to you, whether it’s publications, speaking engagements, media mentions, or actually talking about your students and mentees and the people that you collaborate closely with that information. You’ve probably already done the hard work of gathering quite a bit of it. And so placing it on your personal academic website just from your CV, is an improvement.
Now, if you can also go in and add things like abstracts for your talks or publications, links to maybe the conference program or a video of that speaking engagement, if there is one. These are all ways to enhance your website, but I don’t want you to feel like if you don’t have these right at the start that you can’t hit publish, you totally can. Your website can grow with you over time.
Martine: Wonderful tips. My goodness, Jennifer. So good. I love the tip about the selfie. So good. ’cause I know as a faculty, we’re so busy, right? With our work and it, it’s so refreshing to hear the tips that you gave about, you know, reach out to a colleague to take your picture, take a selfie. It’s okay. Right?
I wanna hone back into the statement that you made that I love so much for my next question, when you said, let the website do the work for you, right? And I wanna go back to that.
You mentioned that a website has the added value here for us faculty is to be able to engage with our students, other faculty members and beyond. But how do we get them to come and to see it? Let’s talk about that engagement, right? Yeah. This whole SEO, you know, search engine optimization and website, it kind of scares me. What are your tips with that?
Jennifer: That’s a great question, actually. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a client just last week. We were looking over his new website together. It was a redesign from an existing personal academic website that he already has. And we’re right at the end of this project. And so there’s always this like, “Ooh, like is this gonna do everything I need” kind of feeling? And he said, “My current website doesn’t get a lot of views. Like, is this going to reach people?” And the answer is yes. If you do the work to share it, if you make it available, if you mention it to people, people are gonna come regardless of if they’re Googling you or not. You are someone who is on campus meeting people all the time. You have students coming to your classes. You have students considering your classes. You have people considering your talk for, you know, programs and conferences that they’re running. You have people who are thinking about potentially reaching out and working with you. But when you have that online presence, it’s doing a lot of that kind of in-person work with you.
It’s not like you don’t exist as a person anymore. You have an online presence, but your online presence enhances what people can learn about you even when you’re sleeping, even when you’re not in the room. And this is really important for scholars who, you know, maybe don’t have the funds to travel all the time. Or, who really need their work to reach people beyond their university, beyond their state, or even their country.
Online presence is something that can spark further conversations. But the first step is always being willing to share it yourself first. So places like your email signature, your social media profiles, your faculty profile, making sure that you mention your bio in, or excuse me, you mention your website, URL when you’re sharing your bio with event organizers and with other people who mention you in the media, you have agency and helping people find your website because they’re going to be searching your name and finding your website without you too.
But I want you to remember, like you, you shouldn’t hide your website once you’ve created it. There’s no reason to feel embarrassed or anxious. It’s not self-promotion. It’s actually helping people because when they’re on your website, they don’t have to be there. It’s not like social media where they’re scrolling and like they’re forced to, you know, take a quick look at what you share.
A website is exploratory. It sparks curiosity and it’s an invitation for people to learn more about you for the things that they wanna learn. And they can click off at any time. So I don’t want you to feel icky or negative about sharing your website. But sharing your website is definitely the first step. Google and other search engines, they’re gonna crawl your website. They’re going to start serving it in search results when people Google your name, potentially when people Google topics about your research. So that’s gonna do the work too. There are multiple ways that people can find you and your website, and I want you to know that you have responsibility, but also online that’s gonna do a lot of the work for you.
My favorite part about having an online presence with a personal academic website is it facilitates word of mouth references and collaborations. So if you have a collaborator who has an upcoming graduate student who’s interested in the same research as you, they’re looking for a postdoctoral position next year, that person can easily share your personal academic website with a really great potential applicant for your postdoc position. It facilitates that word of mouth connection that people have. It helps ’em better be able to share who you are and what you care about with other people who they think might be a really great fit to connect with you. So I really love that. It’s just, it’s yourself, it’s the people around you and it’s all of those kind of benefits of being online. So search engines can find you that can help share your website.
Martine: Oh, so good. You know what I love the most in all of this, the biggest takeaway that I’m taking from you here is this mindset shift that you shared about your website is not to be yourself promotional tool. It’s more about presenting yourself so you could help people.
Yeah, like when you said that, I’m like, “oh my gosh, that makes so much more sense,” right? Because then I feel more at ease to share what it is that I can help others do, right? I love this mindset statement that you shared such great nuggets. I wish I could be with you forever.
I have one more question for you, Jennifer. And that’s the big one in regards to what you shared that you said the online world is here and it’s here to stay. And it’s evolving, evolving very, very fast. I mean, two decades ago it wasn’t even half of what it is today.
And so my last question to you, Jennifer, as this whole digital landscape grows every day, what would you recommend a faculty to make sure that they keep in mind to ensure that their website remains relevant and that, you know, they, they update it? Because again, two decades ago it was a completely different experience and who knows what it’s gonna be next year, two years from now? What are your suggestions based on how you see the digital landscape is evolving to ensure that we do if we have a website?
Jennifer: Yeah, that is a great question because I wanna protect your futures too. Like, I’m not gonna give you information or guidance that’s gonna steer you down the wrong path and be a waste of your time. I like personal academic websites for professors because it is lasting. It’s not gonna disappear like if a social media platform no longer exists.
Your website not going to go away if you stop using it or stop having time or attention for it. At minimum, I recommend updating the content once a year. So if you can put a reminder in your calendar to, on that date every year you spend an hour looking through your website pages, just making a list,
what needs to be changed
what needs to be added
what needs to go away because it’s no longer relevant
If you can do that once a year, your website is gonna be doing far better than the vast majority of personal websites because most go un updated.
You know, most people, like, once they create it, it’s there and they’re like, I did the work. But the truth is that Google search engines and the people who are coming to your website, they need new and relevant information. They need to know who you are, what you care about, and the work that you’re doing now and the people that you want to be working with in the future. So taking that time for an annual update for sure.
My second tip is really just being open. I mean, things are going to change over time. I had an amazing guest on The Social Academic just last month that was totally focused on augmented reality, virtual reality, gamification, and all these cool things in the classroom. I know that the way that professors communicate about who they are and what they do, that’s gonna change over time too.
But I’ve met so many people on social media who just say, I’m not gonna join because I don’t know what it’s gonna look like 10 years from now. People are looking for you today. They’re not caring about what you’re gonna be doing in eight years unless they care about you now. You have that opportunity to start reaching people this year, this week, this month.
I want you to have all of that time to be reaching the people who actually care, the people who you want to be having conversations with, the people who you want to be collaborating with, the students who you want in your courses. You have more agency in what you share about yourself online than you might expect.
A lot of people don’t realize they can meet so many goals with their personal academic website, but just being open to having one. Being open that your website may and probably will change in the future because you are gonna change in the future. And your needs and your interests are gonna change in the future.
That’s the best thing that you can do. Be adaptable. Be open to new ideas and open to change if something new that you’re interested in exploring comes up. I think if you do that, you’re gonna be golden. You’re gonna be in such a good place with your online presence, not just now, but long-term. I’m excited for you.
Martine: That’s wonderful. I love this tip about, just check it once a year, pick a time and I’m guessing it could be any time of the year. If you wanna do it right at the end of the year or perhaps over the summer. If you have that break in between semesters and you’re just getting ready for the next semester, like maybe that’s the time. I love that. And it’s so relevant. It makes sense.
This is great, Jennifer. I am so, so grateful for this conversation and I know my peers are gonna be excited to hear all the tips that you shared with us today from why having a website is important as a academic faculty, personal academic website is important from that point to what’s the content creation, how do you make sure that it’s engaging and does the work for itself and truly looking out for the future of it?
My goodness, you gave us everything. And now I’m like, okay, I’m going to do what you’re doing right now watching. Go to the description here and, and click, click, click. Because I understand how exciting it feels to be hearing such information.
Like you said, Jennifer, having an online presence is going to really, really bring a reach of things that you never could have ever imagined. I couldn’t agree more. And so thank you again for this wonderful conversation. Jennifer, you’re amazing.
Jennifer: Thank you. I have loved these questions and I hope that your faculty find it super helpful.
New research from CUPA-HR on the state of the faculty workforce in higher education shows that despite some growth in representation among tenure-track women and faculty of color in new hires, advancement to higher faculty ranks remains a barrier. What’s more, these promotion gaps are found in every faculty discipline.
CUPA-HR’s research team analyzed data from the Faculty in Higher Education Survey, a comprehensive data source that collects salary and demographic data by tenure status, rank, and faculty discipline, to evaluate representation and pay equity for women and faculty of color from 2016-17 to 2022-23.
In addition to the finding that women and faculty of color are not being promoted to senior faculty ranks at the same rate as White men, the data also show that women, Black, and Hispanic or Latina/o faculty are better represented in non-tenure-track than in tenure-track positions, and that pay gaps in non-tenure-track positions persist for these groups. Combined with the fact that these groups are less likely to be promoted to higher ranks in tenure-track positions, the result is that a substantial segment of faculty, primarily women and people of color, are employed in positions that pay lower salaries throughout their careers.
Other Findings
Tenure-track faculty positions are on the decline. There has been a decline in tenure-track positions and a corresponding increase in non-tenure-track positions over the past seven years. In 2016-17, tenure-track roles accounted for 73% of faculty, but by 2022-23, this proportion fell to 66%, with a marked increase in non-tenure-track positions over the last two years. Additionally, the percentage of new tenure-track assistant professor hires dropped in recent years, indicating a trend toward more new non-tenure-track hires.
The representation of women and people of color in tenure-track faculty positions is increasing, yet challenges remain. There was a notable increase in the representation of tenure-track (TT) women and faculty of color from 2016-17 to 2022-23. In 2022-23, more than one-fourth (26%) of TT faculty were people of color. This marks a 28% increase over the span of seven years, compared to 2016-17, when faculty of color constituted closer to one-fifth (21%) of all TT faculty. However, the growth in racial/ethnic representation still lags when compared to the demographic composition of U.S. doctoral degree holders. Further, despite strides toward pay equity for tenure-track faculty of color, White women in tenure-track positions still face persistent pay gaps in 2022-23.
Consensus – A Game Changing App for Faculty Researchers
Today, I started to utilize a new AI app for my research. This app, Consensus, is a game changer for faculty researchers. I wish that I had this app in graduate school – it would have definitely made life easier!
Step 1 – Here are some screen shots of the software. You can type a question in the box (yes, a question) and the system does the work. Yes, the work that you would usually have to do!
Step 2 – Then, AI does the rest. You receive AI-powered answers for your results. Consensus analyzes your results (before you even view them) and then summarizes the studies collectively.
Step 3 – You can view the AI-powered answers which review each article for you.
*I would also encourage you to review the article independently as well.
Step 4 – View the study snapshots! Yes, a snapshot of the population, sample size, methods, outcomes measured, and more! Absolutely amazing!
Step 5 – Click the “AI Synthesis” button to synthesize your results. Even better!
Step 6 – Use the “powerful filters” button. You can view the “best” research results by: a) population, b) sample size, c) study design, d) journal quality, and other variables.
I plan to make a video soon, but please take a look at this video to discover exactly how Consensus can help you in your research!
