It was a Friday evening when I saw a little ad on the bottom of my screen looking for online English instructors. I was in my second year of teaching on-ground at a local high school at the time, but I clicked on it and landed my first online position at ITT Technical Institute. I loved it and dreamed I could do it full-time one day—that was 22 years ago. I did my fair share of adjunct teaching before I landed a full-time position, which I’ve held for nearly a decade. In my 22 years of teaching online, I continue to learn new things about what it takes to thrive in the field.
1. Have a Unique Presence
If your picture or name was not attached to your online course, would your close colleagues be able to tell it was your classroom? If not, work on making your courses a place where your personality shines through your discussions, announcements, feedback, and daily interactions. Even if it’s just one thing, it can make you stand out and allow your students to remember you positively and even decades later. I use TikTok videos in my announcements to motivate students and in my discussions to add depth, and my students love it. I’m also highly spiritual, and students pick up on this right away through the questions I pose to them in our discussions, through the quotes I share, and through my interactions with them.
2. Be Real
Frank Kafka once said, “I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party, and I attended with my real face.” In a world that yearns for validation, often for things they are not, strive to be real. There is no shame in that. Your students will find the authenticity refreshing and see the classroom as a safe place to be themselves. When students receive you better, they are more likely to listen, communicate, inquire, and achieve.
3. Be in a Good Mood
Voltaire once said, “The most important decision you can make is to be in a good mood.” Creating a positive connection with students goes beyond just a strong first impression—it requires consistent pleasant interactions. If you have a rough day, approach the next one with a fresh, positive mindset. Even small gestures, like offering words of encouragement or simply asking how they’re doing, can have a meaningful impact on students, even if they seem unnoticed.
4. Start a Group Chat
Students want to feel like they belong. While social media has given the illusion that we are more connected, Americans face a loneliness epidemic (“America’s Loneliness Epidemic”). Giving students a space where they have a seat at the table will make them appreciate you and lead to stronger connections among everyone in the group. I like to share tips and tricks, resources, and other information that can benefit them. It’s a place where students can ask questions, share insights, and anything else they feel like sharing. This has made my courses more memorable and students often thank me for the opportunity.
5. Get to Know Your Dean
Regular one-on-ones with your dean will make you feel like you have the support you need to keep moving forward. I always look forward to the time I spend with my dean discussing ideas and getting her opinion on issues I’m facing in my classroom. Don’t underestimate how your dean can make you a better instructor.
6. Validate Feelings
Try to remember what it was like to be a student with questions or concerns. Students often have trepidation when it comes to approaching you. Be approachable and accessible so they have a chance to share their thoughts. While you may not agree with everything they are saying, they will appreciate that you validated their feelings.
7. Be Kind
Think of your favorite professor from your college days, the best doctor you ever had, or even a restaurant server whom you love to see. They all have one thing that makes us remember them fondly: Kindness. Strive to create a warm and welcoming environment that students can’t wait to be a part of and engage in. If maintaining a polite and pleasant tone feels challenging, consider using AI to help refine your language. Over time, it will become more natural, and the positive atmosphere it fosters will make it something you genuinely enjoy.
8. Accept the Present Moment
Spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle once said, “Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.” No matter how meticulously we plan, not everything will go as planned. What’s important is embracing reality and making the best of the situation. Whether it be a student arguing about a grade or new requirements put on faculty, avoid getting frustrated and find the silver lining in every situation. It may be a blessing you will look back on with a smile.
9. Use PTO
How many times have people said after a good vacation that they are ready to get back to work? The rest and relaxation will make you feel like a new person with a kinder and more generous attitude. Take time to unplug, and if you can’t, weave in activities that bring you joy into your weekly schedule.
10. Move Your Body
Move your body—walk, lift, run—anything to clear your mind. To stay fully present with your students each day and prevent burnout, prioritize your own well-being first. Find a movement that works for you and get consistent with it. The consistency of that will help you be more consistent with other good habits.
11. Remember Why
Years and decades of teaching will make you forget the “why” question. We often tell our students to think of why they embarked on the journey of higher education to help them excel and find higher levels of satisfaction, but we don’t often give this question serious consideration ourselves. The answer can bring us closer to loving what we do in the classroom.
What would you add to the list?
Dr. Noura Badawi has been teaching online for 22 years.
A May 2024 Student Voice survey found 28 percent of college students say they have “not much trust” in their president and other executive-level officials, which was 18 percentage points higher than students’ distrust in professors and 13 percentage points higher than their trust in academic department leaders.
An additional 19 percent of students said they were not sure if they trust their president, for a total of 52 percent of students indicating they have at least some trust in their campus executives.
Students at private nonprofit institutions were mostly likely to say they did not have much trust in their president (48 percent) compared to their public four-year peers (30 percent) or those at two-year institutions (18 percent).
“Trust is in very short supply on campuses. We do not see deeply trusting environments on campus very quickly,” said Emma Jones, executive vice president and owner of higher education consulting group Credo, in a Jan. 29 webinar by the Constructive Dialogue Institute. “By and large, I find campus leaders to have incredibly trustworthy behavior … but they are not trusted in their environments.”
Institutional leaders can employ a variety of strategies and tactics to gain greater trust.
Creating a foundation: A 2024 report from the American Council on Education found presidents are in agreement that trust building is a key competency for being a campus leader. Presidents told researchers they need to be present with their constituents, create opportunities for various stakeholders to share their views on issues related to the institution and surround themselves with diverse voices, according to the report.
In the webinar, experts shared what they believe helps build trust between executive-level administrators and the students they serve.
Demonstrate care. Humanity is a key factor in trust, in which a person recognizes the uniqueness of each person and builds relationships with them, Jones explained. During this present age, it is particularly important for campus leaders to see and acknowledge people for their humanity.
Watch your tone. Generic or trite messages that convey a lack of empathy do not build trust among community members, said Darrell P. Wheeler, president of the State University of New York at New Paltz. Instead, having transparent and authentic communication, even when the answer is “I don’t know,” can help build trust in a nebulous period of time, Jones said.
Engage in listening. “People want you to be compassionate, but they really want to have their own space at times to be able to express where they are [and] not for you to overshadow it by talking about yourself in that moment,” Wheeler said during the webinar.
Create space to speak with students. Attending events to listen to students’ concerns or having opportunities for students to engage in meetings can show attentive care, Victoria Nguyen, a teaching fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told Inside Higher Ed.
Foster healthy discourse. While presidents should strive to be trusted among their community members, too much trust can be just as destructive as too much distrust, Hiram Chodosh, president of Claremont McKenna College in California, said in the webinar.
Trust yourself. Earning trust requires self-trust, Chodosh said, so presidents should also seek to cultivate their own trustworthiness.
Presidential Engagement: College presidents can step outside their offices and better engage with learners. Here are three paths they are taking.
Being visible on campus. Creating opportunities for informal conversation can address students’ perceptions of the president and assist in trust building. Some presidents navigate campus in a golf cart to allow for less structured interactions with students. The University of South Alabama president participates in recruitment trips with high schoolers, introducing himself early.
Hosting office hours. Wheeler of SUNY New Paltz hosts presidential office hours for students once a month in which they can sit down for coffee and chat with him. Students can sign up with a QR code and discuss whatever they feel called to share. At King’s University in Ontario, the dean of students hosts drop-in visits across campus, as well.
Give students a peek behind the curtain. Often, colleges will invite students to participate as a trustee or a board member, giving them a voice and seat at the table. Hood College allows one student to be president for a day and engage in ceremonial duties and meetings the president would typically hold.
Republicans’ long-sought goal of shuttering the Education Department got a boost this week as several media outlets reported the Trump administration was finalizing plans for an executive order to wind down the agency.
Trump added to the speculation, telling reporters Tuesday he wanted his education secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, to put herself out of a job. Then, on Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said getting rid of the department is “an idea whose time has come.”
The specifics and timing of the executive order are still unclear, though media reports say the directive could instruct department officials to shut down some programs not directly approved by Congress or come up with a plan to move functions to other departments in the federal government. At the very least, the Trump administration wants to see a much smaller version of the department, particularly because only Congress can actually eliminate the agency.
More than 4,000 people currently work for the department, which was created in 1979. In fiscal year 2024, the department had a $80 billion discretionary budget. Its spending makes up just over 2 percent of the federal budget.
Some conservative think tanks have been planning for the department’s demise for years. Most recently, Project 2025, a policy manual for the second Trump administration, detailed how to dismantle the agency—from which offices to shutter to which ones to move.
While those plans delve into all the department’s functions, much of the recent commentary about why the agency could go revolves about its role in K-12 education, largely ignoring how shutting it down could affect higher education.
But the federal government is deeply embedded in higher education, thanks to the billions it sends to colleges and universities each year. Unwinding the department would be complex and likely disruptive for colleges and the students they serve.
“That’s not something our community could handle at this point in time,” said Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy and federal relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, on an episode of the organization’s podcast this week. “From our perspective, it’s highly unlikely that such a transition would be quick or smooth.”
As talks ramp up about the department’s future, here are the five key roles the department plays in higher education—and what could happen to them if the agency is shuttered.
Each year, the Education Department issues about $100 billion in student loans and doles out more than $30 billion in Pell Grants to more than six million low-income students. More than 5,000 colleges and universities are eligible for federal financial aid.
The department’s Office of Federal Student Aid manages the government’s $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio, oversees contractors who service those loans, carries out many of the regulations related to higher education and holds colleges accountable. Under the Biden administration, for example, FSA issued $61.7 million in fines and cut off aid to 35 colleges for violating federal law and rules.
The Trump administration hasn’t said what would happen to federal financial aid programs, or to the more than 1,600 employees who work for the Office of Federal Student Aid, if the department goes away. But some conservative plans recommend moving the whole system to the Treasury Department.
Proponents argue that moving the system to the Treasury makes sense given that the department already deals with money and lending. Additionally, they say the switch shouldn’t be too disruptive or leave students and colleges worse off. Critics of that plan disagree and question whether the Treasury has the capacity to administer the federal student aid program.
Enforces Students’ Civil Rights
While federal financial aid is key to helping students access college, the department’s Office for Civil Rights helps to ensure they are protected from discrimination once on campus.
The OCR can have a direct impact on students and colleges through investigations of complaints or guidance that prompts institutions to change their policies or rethink their civil rights offices. Colleges watch the agency’s actions closely to avoid running afoul of federal law.
In recent years, the office has seen a record number of complaints from students who allege violations of their civil rights, though the agency has struggled to keep up with the growing caseload. Biden administration officials pleaded with Congress last spring for more funding to hire 86 employees who could investigate complaints. As of last March, 557 employees worked for OCR, according to department budget documents.
The office received 22,687 complaints in fiscal year 2024, and the Biden administration projected that number to grow to nearly 24,000 in 2025. Most of the complaints in the past year related to sex-based discrimination, while 37 percent alleged discrimination based on disability. In many cases, seeking help from the federal office can be a last resort for students.
Project 2025 recommended moving OCR to the Justice Department and limiting enforcement to litigation.
Manages Grant Programs
The Education Department sends millions of dollars appropriated by Congress to colleges and universities that help to support student success, childcare on campus and other priorities for lawmakers.
In fiscal 2024, Congress allocated $3.3 billion toward higher education programs. That includes a $400 million fund to directly support historically Black colleges and universities as well as a $229 million grant program for Hispanic-serving institutions.
The department also spends about $2.14 billion on Federal Work-Study and supplemental grants to directly support low-income students.
Some institutions rely on federal support to stay open. For instance, Gallaudet University, a school for the Deaf in Washington, D.C., gets its own line item in the federal budget. The university was created by Congress and received $167.3 million in fiscal 2024, which was about 65 percent of Gallaudet’s annual revenues, Forbes reported this week.
Trump sent a shock wave through higher ed last week when his administration threatened to freeze all federal grants and loans. College administrators and lobbyists representing them warned of devastating consequences if that source of funding was turned off.
While a federal judge blocked the freeze from taking effect, the Education Department is reviewing many of the grant programs for compliance with Trump’s recent executive orders that target diversity, equity and inclusion. That review could threaten to shut off some of the programs, though technically only Congress has that authority.
Gathers Data on Students and Institutions
Researchers and policymakers rely on reams of data that the Education Department collects about students and institutions in order to better understand higher ed. As some federal databases have gone dark in recent weeks, some advocates and researchers have worried about the future and security of the department’s data.
From annual surveys conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics to the National Student Loan Data System, the data offers insights into student enrollment, graduation rates, earnings, student lending and more. In 2015, the department made that data more accessible when it launched the College Scorecard.
The future of those databases is unclear if the department goes away. Project 2025 and other analysts have recommended moving the National Center for Education Statistics to other agencies—the Bureau of Labor Statistics, perhaps, or the Department of Commerce’s Census Bureau.
But few proposals suggest getting rid of the data-collection responsibilities altogether. In fact, Project 2025 declares that the federal government’s only role in education policy should be “that of a statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states.”
Oversees Colleges and Universities
The federal government works with states and accreditors to oversee colleges and universities—a three-pronged system referred to as the triad. Getting rid of the Education Department would throw the triad into flux. That would likely mean less red tape for colleges but fewer protections for students.
The department recognizes accreditors who in turn recognize colleges. Institutions can only access federal financial aid if they are accredited by a department-recognized accrediting agency and have the necessary approval from state authorizing agencies.
The Biden administration sought to require accreditors to set benchmarks for student achievement and give states more authority over distance education. Neither of those proposals moved forward, but the push shows the federal government’s role in overseeing other members of the triad in addition to colleges.
Project 2025 proposed to remove accreditors from the triad or give states more authority to authorize accreditors, breaking the federal government’s hold over the process.
In each of those cases, the “offending party” invoked academic freedom or freedom of speech as a defense to pressures brought on them, or procedures initiated against them, by university administrators. The traditional discourse of academic freedom or free speech on campus has focused on threats from inside the academy of the kind that led Franke and others to leave their positions.
Today, threats to academic freedom and free speech are being mounted from the outside by governments or advocacy groups intent on policing colleges and universities and exposing what they see as a suffocating orthodoxy. As Darrell M. West wrote in 2022, “In recent years, we have seen a number of cases where political leaders upset about criticism have challenged professors and sought to intimidate them into silence.”
We have seen this act before, and the record of universities is not pretty.
During the 1940s and 1950s, an anticommunist crusade swept the nation, and universities were prime targets. In that period, “faculty and staff at institutions of higher learning across the country experienced increased scrutiny from college administrators and trustees, as well as Congress and the FBI, for their speech, their academic work, and their political activities.”
Today, some believe, as Nina Jankowicz puts it, that we are entering “an era of real censorship the likes of which the United States has never seen. How will universities respond?”
If academic freedom and freedom of expression are to be meaningful, colleges and universities must not only resist the temptation to punish or purge people whose speech they and others may find offensive; they must provide new protections against external threats, especially when it comes to extramural speech by members of their faculties.
They must become active protectors and allies of faculty who are targeted.
As has long been recognized, academic freedom and free speech are not identical. In 2007, Rachel Levinson, then the AAUP senior counsel, wrote, “It can … be difficult to explain the distinction between ‘academic freedom’ and ‘free speech rights under the First Amendment’—two related but analytically distinct legal concepts.”
Levinson explained, “Academic freedom … addresses rights within the educational contexts of teaching, learning, and research both in and outside the classroom.” Free speech requires that there be no regulation of expression on “all sorts of topics and in all sorts of settings.”
Ten years after Levinson, Stanley Fish made a splash when he argued, “Freedom of speech is not an academic value.” As Fish explained, “Accuracy of speech is an academic value … [because of] the goal of academic inquiry: getting a matter of fact right.” Free speech, in contrast, means “something like a Hyde Park corner or a town-hall meeting where people take turns offering their opinions on pressing social matters.”
But as Keith Whittington observes, the boundaries that Levinson and Fish think can be drawn between academic freedom and free speech are not always recognized, even by organizations like the AAUP. “In its foundational 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure,” Whittington writes, “the AAUP asserted that academic freedom consists of three elements: freedom of research, freedom of teaching, and ‘freedom of extramural utterance and action.’”
In 1940, Whittington explains, “the organization reemphasized its position that ‘when they speak or write as citizens,’ professors ‘should be free from institutional censorship or discipline.’”
Like the AAUP, Whittington opposes “institutional censorship” for extramural speech. That is crucially important.
But in the era in which academics now live and work, is it enough?
We know that academics report a decrease in their sense of academic freedom. A fall 2024 survey by Inside Higher Ed found that 49 percent of professors experienced a decline over the prior year in their sense of academic freedom as it pertains to extramural speech.
To foster academic freedom and free speech on campus or in the world beyond the campus, colleges and universities need to move from merely tolerating the expression of unpopular ideas to a more affirmative stance in which they take responsibility for fostering it. It is not enough to tell faculty that the university will respect academic freedom and free expression if they are afraid to exercise those very rights.
Faculty may be fearful that saying the “wrong” thing will result in being ostracized or shunned. John Stuart Mill, one of the great advocates for free expression, warned about what he called “the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.” That tyranny could chill the expression of unpopular ideas.
In 1952, during the McCarthy era, Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter also worried about efforts to intimidate academics that had “an unmistakable tendency to chill that free play of the spirit which all teachers ought especially to cultivate and practice.”
Beyond the campus, faculty may rightly fear that if they say things that offend powerful people or government officials, they will be quickly caught up in an online frenzy or will be targeted. If they think their academic institutions will not have their back, they may choose the safety of silence over the risk of saying what they think.
Whittington gets it right when he argues that “Colleges and universities should encourage faculty to bring their expertise to bear on matters of public concern and express their informed judgments to public audiences when doing so might be relevant to ongoing public debates.” The public interest is served when we “design institutions and practices that facilitate the diffusion of that knowledge.”
Those institutions and practices need to be adapted to the political environment in which we live. That is why it is so important that colleges and universities examine their policies and practices and develop new ways of supporting their faculty if extramural speech gets them in trouble. This may mean providing financial resources as well as making public statements in defense of those faculty members.
Colleges and universities should also consider making their legal counsel available to offer advice and representation and using whatever political influence they wield on behalf of a faculty member who is under attack.
Without those things, academics may be “free from” the kind of university action that led Franke to leave Columbia but still not be “free to” use their academic freedom and right of free expression for the benefit of their students, their professions and the society at large.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
Some students may need to take a leave of absence for their mental health before returning to an institution. Here’s how the institution can help.
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In the past few years, more students have shared the toll their mental health can take on their academic pursuits. Recent surveys of students who left higher education prior to completing a credential or degree reveal that mental health challenges or stress are primary reasons why they discontinue their education.
Some learners opt to take a pause, withdrawing from the university for a semester or longer to prioritize their health and wellness.
To promote student completion and success, institutions can consider formal procedures and initiatives targeted toward easing the transition of re-enrollment after a voluntary mental health leave of absence.
The background: Colleges have historically offered students the opportunity to temporarily unenroll to address health conditions, but only more recently has that definition expanded to include students’ mental health.
“Such policies and practices actually discourage students—not just the student with a mental health condition, but all others—from seeking help,” according to a 2021 report from Boston University and the Ruderman Family Foundation.
A recent survey from the Princeton Review found 43 percent of colleges and universities now have an official support program in place for students returning from mental health leave of absence.
However, there is little consistency in policies and practices regarding medical or psychiatric leaves of absence, according to the BU report: “Students are often left to confusing, conflicting information and sometimes, discriminatory policies and practices that make a return to higher education difficult.”
State policymakers have worked to expand the conditions included in leave-of-absence policies at institutions to recognize mental health difficulties.
In May 2024, Maryland passed legislation that expanded formal health withdrawal policies at public institutions to include mental health. The legislation also requires institutions to provide partial refunds for students who withdraw for physical or mental health reasons in the middle of the term.
A 2022 bill introduced to the New York State Legislature would require university systems to review enrollment and re-enrollment policies for students who take extended mental health leaves.
Students Taking Action
Active Minds, a youth-led mental health advocacy group, developed a guide for students who are advocating for improved leave-of-absence policies at their institution.
How to help: Some of the ways institutions assist learners are through:
Outlining the return process. The University of Southern California offers a step-by-step outline of the different offices a student must contact to re-enroll. Stanford University also created a Returning to Stanford booklet to answer frequently asked questions.
Providing coaching services for returners. Institutions, themselves or in partnership with outside organizations, can deliver intentional coaching for skill development and resource coordination to re-enroll learners.
Connecting students with peers. Supportive communities can help reconnect students to the institution and affirm their commitments to healthy habits, like engaging in social activities or demonstrating good study behaviors. Georgetown University offers a special support group, Back on the Hilltop, for learners who are returning from a leave of absence or who have recently transferred.
Do you know of a wellness intervention that might help others encourage student success? Tell us about it.
Election Day in the U.S. is just around the corner. On top of carrying multiple academic and employment responsibilities, some students will also be voting for the first time. Others, such as those from marginalized or historically underrepresented populations, may be overwhelmed with what the election results could mean for them. In the lead up to Election Day, a healthy dose of empathy will be essential in ensuring students have a chance to fulfill their civic duty—and the opportunity to consider its consequences.
Being flexible with due dates, considering students’ wellbeing and ensuring learners are armed with the resources needed to vote are the most important things you can do as Election Day nears. Read on to learn how professors advocated for their students during the 2020 election—and how you can do the same.
Consider making November 4 and 5 free of assignments (or even classes)
Exams can cause some students a great deal of stress and anxiety. Lillian Horin, Biological and Biomedical Sciences PhD student at Harvard University, urges educators to keep BIPOC students in mind when scheduling high-stakes tests.
Professors: PLEASE don’t schedule examinations for directly after election night. In 2016, I had a biochem exam the day after the election. BIPOC students spent our election night begging our professor to postpone it. It intensified one of the most traumatic nights of our lives.
Consider swapping your exams or problem sets (Psets) with a trip to the ballot box. Jacob Light, Economics PhD student at Stanford University, writes that this simple gesture may allow students to exercise their civic duty.
In 2012 my linear algebra professor canceled our election week problem set because voting was more important. The gesture meant the world to me. Today I made the same argument on behalf of my students. #AcademicTwitter cancel psets during election week; your students want to vote
Other students like Anna-Sophia Boguraev, Bioengineering PhD student at Harvard Medical School and MIT, say that TAs have the power to amplify student concerns and requests—none of which should be ignored.
legit if you have any leverage w prof, use it to help students – when ppl started basically being like “we’re traumatized plz let us reschedule the midterm” on piazza, the TAs just deleted the posts w no response or acknowledgement bc the prof told them to. so like … not that
If your assignments can’t wait, build in flexibility and timeliness
Self-paced learning can allow students to visit the polls and complete coursework at a time that works for them—so says Jesse Fox, Associate Professor of Communication at Ohio State University.
US instructors: working on your syllabus?
🇺🇸Election Day is Tuesday, November 3🇺🇸
Please plan an asynchronous option that day. There are already enough efforts to impede & suppress voting!
Election Day can also be a good opportunity to let students catch their breath in your course. Give students a chance to study and review material that they haven’t had a chance to look over, suggests Scott Grunow, Instructor in English and Religious Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Same here. Kind of. They are working asychronously on an essay. Feedback week. No synchronous class. I will be available all week for drop in hours.
— Dame Scott G. Against Petty Persecutions/Vainglory (@scottgr60613) October 6, 2020
Should your institutions provide little leeway in your assessment choices, at least incorporate real-time events into your discussions. Derek Bruff, Associate Director, Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia, notes that relating course content to the election can help students see the value of what they’re learning.
What are you planning to do in class the day after the election? 1. Find a connection to your course topic (e.g. polling error in a stats course). 2. Acknowledge that it was a late, emotional night. 3. Don’t give a pop quiz.
Real-time political events and policy proposals can make for discipline-specific conversations. This also allows students to apply what they’ve learned in your class to the real world, as Andrea Gomez Cervantes, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Wake Forest University, proposes.
— Dra. Andrea Gomez Cervantes (she/ella) (@AndreaGC_soc) September 23, 2020
Mobilize your students to show up at the polls
Gen Z students are motivated to vote. In the 2018 midterm elections, the student turnout rate increased by 20 percent compared to the 2014 midterms.1 Ensure students are equipped with the resources to vote as soon as possible, writes Wendy Christensen, Sociology Professor at William Paterson University.
Don’t forget to include voting info in your Fall 2020 syllabus and online course module! Include any voter registration deadlines, registration info, drop off ballot info, AND the general election date Nov. 3rd. #GOTV#AcademicTwitter@AcademicChatter#AcademicTwitter
— Wendy Christensen 🏳️🌈🦉📚🍺 🏃♀️ (@wendyphd) August 19, 2020
Similarly, ask students about their voting plans. Consider working with your class to ensure they know where to go on November 5, suggests Margaret Boyle, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Bowdoin College.
Ensure your voter registration information and resources appeal to all students, regardless of what political party they support. Meghan Novisky, Assistant Professor of Criminology at Cleveland State University, emphasizes the importance of using non-partisan guidelines.
Suggestion for this fall: include (non-partisan) voter registration info for students in week 1’s course materials AND inform students election week will be assignment free in support of voter turnout. #phdchat#AcademicChatter
Some scholars like Sara Wheeler-Smith, Associate Professor of Management at Manhattan College, even plan to offer a grading incentive for visiting the polls.
With my chair’s approval, I’m offering extra credit to anyone who can demonstrate they voted. (Anyone ineligible can do an alternative assignment). If I were teaching on #ElectionDay I would have cancelled too.
Incorporate guest lectures and learn from your colleagues
Navigating election week with students in mind might be an unfamiliar undertaking. Consider leaning on faculty at your institution for support, writes Heather Mayer, Director of Educational Technology at Everett Community College.
Interested in hearing what people have planned. We’re developing a faculty workshop for the the week before to give people a chance to talk with each other about ideas and resources.
Some students may be undecided voters, while others may have missed the presidential debates. Incorporate forms of debate in your classroom—with the support of scholars from other institutions, as Yujin Jung, Political Sciences PhD student at the University of Missouri, plans to do.
Keep in mind the importance of mental and physical health
Check-ins with students have gained new meaning in the midst of an election. Andrea Kelley, Sociology Professor at the University of Michigan, tends to her students’ socioemotional needs before assigning readings and lectures.
I have built “self-care” weeks into all 3 of my courses during election week. No new readings, no graded assignments, just a check-in. We can’t self-care our way out of structural oppression and related stresses, but I can make sure my classes don’t pile on. #AcademicChatter
— Andrea D. Kelley, Ph.D., MSW (they/she) (@adkelleysoc) October 9, 2020
Election Day can come with a range of emotions for many students. Cate Denial, Distinguished Professor of American History, Chair of the History department, and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College, removes the expectation for students to pay attention and participate in class.
I will not be assigning reading for the week, and instead we’ll review whatever happens in light of what we’ve been learning. It will be completely on the fly, but I will not be expecting my students to be able to focus.
Bloom’s Taxonomy is probably the most widespread and enduringly popular model in education. It was created in 1956 by Dr. Benjamin Bloom and colleagues at the Board of Examinations, University of Chicago. In 2001, the pyramid was revised by Lorin Anderson, a student of Bloom’s, resulting in Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy.
Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy focuses on learning outcomes. The framework demands that very first thing that instructors need to think about is what students have to know by the end of the course. Learning objectives need actions to get to them. And Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy is hierarchical, requiring your students to achieve each level in succession—in order to understand a concept, you must remember it; to apply a concept you must first understand it, and so on.
There’s no doubt that this way of classifying educational objectives has been extremely useful to millions of teachers over the years. But for those who might not have had conclusively positive results evaluating Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy or incorporating it into instruction, it’s worth considering some more ways to think outside the pyramid to improve teaching and learning. Here are three things you could bear in mind when using Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy in your lesson planning.
1. Cultivate judgment rather than transmit information
The instructional strategies behind Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy require educators to begin with “lower order” tasks, arguing that students need to master these first. This means we front-load our courses with information: information that can be recalled, defined, identified or another objective in the lowest layer of the pyramid.
But constructivist theories of learning—and our own classroom experiences—tell us that learning does not happen through information transference alone. A learner is an not empty vessel into which we pour definitions. He or she is not going to truly understand something without interpreting it, questioning it, or relating to it.
So when designing your course, try to incorporate ways to strengthen and take advantage of their faculties of judgment.
What would it mean to cultivate judgment during a course? Start by doing. Engage your students to take action in some relevant way—through a lab experiment, for example, or by field research. Another way to do this is role-play. When I taught history, we started out by taking on the identities of various countries, coming to decisions supported by research and analysis. The historical facts—and there were many—were all taught in this context. In this way, facts are put into the service of learning, rather than becoming an initial goal in themselves.
2. Start, rather than end, with creativity
As educator Shelley Wright has pointed out, Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy gives the impression there’s a “scarcity of creativity.”1 Only those strong enough or talented enough to work their way up to the summit of the pyramid can be creative. The truth is that everybody is naturally creative—just think of a seven year-old at play—except that this way of being in the world is often squelched or squandered. Ken Robinson, for instance, has strongly argued that creativity is typically “educated out” of us.2
What could it mean to start with creativity? Have your students create on day one. (OK, maybe day two or three.) Wright explains how this works for her media studies class. Instead of beginning by laying out design principles and the history of media, she gets the students to make an advert mockup. Then they compare their mockups to published adverts. Wright helps them analyze differences and introduces, through student-facilitated research, the major principles and concepts of design that help them explain their own creation and those of others.
A create-first approach could work just as well in courses that are theory-rich and fact-heavy such as philosophy, literature, or science. In environmental science, for example, ask students to propose a solution to deforestation or ocean acidification. Then, starting from their contributions, explore the principles, factors, concepts, contingencies at play, including the ones that were omitted. Have students compare their solutions to others’. Get them to elicit the principle involved, the recent literature in the area, and articulate and fully describe the concepts and the facts.
3. Promote awareness instead of entrenching hierarchy
The stratification of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy into “lower” and “higher” order objectives sets up a value proposition. It leads educators to think that certain kinds of learning necessarily reflect superior kinds of cognition.
But as Roland Case argues, tasks at every level of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy can be performed thoughtfully or thoughtlessly.3 It is possible to defend a position in a completely superficial way. It is possible to propose a plan that lacks good judgment or analysis. It is possible to create something without building from a base of relevant knowledge. Indeed, that is why it’s necessary to practice and develop judgment, critical thinking skills and creative problem-solving.
When Anderson and Krathwohl revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, they accounted for this with a second scale for assessment called The Knowledge Dimension, which lies as another dimension or axis to the cognitive domain. One should assess each of the revised categories (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create) according to whether factual, conceptual, procedural or metacognitive knowledge is demonstrated.
If no category is higher or lower than any other, then leveling makes no sense. With proper consideration for The Knowledge Dimension, we are far from a pyramid… and always have been! But who knew? As Leslie Wilson points out, “what most educators are given in training is a simple chart listing levels and related accompanying verbs.”4
Bloom’s Taxonomy revised: A pyramid alternative
And so, if we want to engage students’ creativity, cultivate judgment and make sure that each stage of learning is fully developed and attuned to the right outcome, then organizing anew the existing structure of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy could go a very long way. Instead of a pyramid, how about a mandala?
Strange things happen when we feel beholden to a structure. If lesson planning with Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy hasn’t been working for you or your class, rethink the background on how it should be applied. Reconsider the way you’re assessing student learning. Break down the hierarchy and rebuild.
Illustration credits: CC-BY 2.0 Vanderbilt University; CC-BY-SA 3.0 K. Aqinsqatsi.
Related stories Bloom’s verbs and how to apply them to questions
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References
Wright, S. (2012, May 15). Flipping Bloom’s Taxonomy [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://plpnetwork.com/2012/05/15/flipping-blooms-taxonomy/
Parker, Q. (2018, October 3). The Possibilities of an Agile Classroom: Sir Ken Robinson [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://tophat.com/blog/sir-ken-robinson-qa/
Case, R. Unfortunate Consequences of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Retrieved from https://tc2.ca/uploads/PDFs/Critical%20Discussions/unfortunate_consequences_blooms_taxonomy.pdf
Wilson, L. O. (2017, January 20). Understanding the New Version of Bloom’s Taxonomy. [Blog post] https://thesecondprinciple.com/teaching-essentials/beyond-bloom-cognitive-taxonomy-revised/
In my last post, I explained how generative AI memory works and why it will always make mistakes without a fundamental change in its foundational technology. I also gave some tips for how to work around and deal with that problem to safely and productively incorporate imperfect AI into EdTech (and other uses). Today, I will draw on the memory issue I wrote about last time as a case study of why embracing our imperfect tools also means recognizing where they are likely to fail us and thinking hard about dealing realistically with their limitations.
This is part of a larger series I’m starting on a term of art called “product/market fit.” The simplest explanation of the idea is the degree to which the thing you’re building is something people want and are willing to pay the cost for, monetary or otherwise. In practice, achieving product/market fit is complex, multifaceted, and hard. This is especially true in a sector like education, where different contextual details often create the need for niche products, where the buyer, adopter, and user of the product are not necessarily the same, and where measurable goals to optimize your product for are hard to find and often viewed with suspicion.
Think about all the EdTech product categories that were supposed to be huge but disappointed expectations. MOOCs. Learning analytics. E-portfolios. Courseware platforms. And now, possibly OPMs. The list goes on. Why didn’t these product categories achieve the potential that we imagined for them? There is no one answer. It’s often in the small details specific to each situation. AI in action presents an interesting use case, partly because it’s unfolding right now, partly because it seems so easy, and partly because it’s odd and unpredictable, even to the experts. I have often written about “the miracle, the grind, and the wall” with AI. We will look at a couple of examples of moving from the miracle to the grind. These moments provide good lessons in the challenges of product/market fit.
In my next post, I’ll examine product/market fit for universities in a changing landscape, focusing on applying CBE to an unusual test case. In the third post, I’ll explore product/market fit for EdTech interoperability standards and facilitating the growth of a healthier ecosystem.
Khanmingo: the grind behind the product
Khan Academy’s Kristen DiCerbo gave us all a great service by writing openly about the challenges of producing a good AI lesson plan generator. They started with prompt engineering. Well-written prompts are miracles. They’re like magic spells. Generating a detailed lesson plan in seconds with a well-written prompt is possible. But how good is that lesson plan? How well did Khanmingo’s early prompts produce the lesson plans?
Kristen writes,
At first glance, it wasn’t bad. It produced what looked to be a decent lesson plan—at least on the surface. However, on closer inspection, we saw some issues, including the following:
Lesson objectives just parroted the standard
Warmups did not consistently cover the most logical prerequisite skills
Incorrect answer keys for independent practice
Sections of the plan were unpredictable in length and format
The model seemed to sometimes ignore parts of the instructions in the prompt
You can’t tell the quality of the AI’s lesson plans without having experts examine them closely. You also want feedback from people who will actually use those lesson plans. I guarantee they will find problems that you will miss. Every time. Remember, the ultimate goal of product/market fit is to make something that the intended adopters will actually want. People will tolerate imperfections in a product. But which ones? What’s most important to them? How will they use the product? You can’t answer these questions confidently without the help of actual humans who would be using the product.
At any rate, Khan Academy realized their early prompt engineering attempts had several shortcomings. Here’s the first:
Khanmigo didn’t have enough information. There were too many undefined details for Khanmigo to infer and synthesize, such as state standards, target grade level, and prerequisites. Not to mention limits to Khanmigo’s subject matter expertise. This resulted in lesson plans that were too vague and/or inaccurate to provide significant value to teachers.
Read that passage carefully. With each type of information or expertise, ask yourself, “Where could I find that? Where is it written down in a form the AI can digest?” The answer is different for each one. How can the AI learn more about what state standards mean? Or about target grade levels? Prerequisites? Subject-matter expertise for each subject? No matter how much ChatGPT seems to know, it doesn’t know everything. And it is often completely ignorant about anything that isn’t well-documented on the internet. A human educator has to understand all these topics to write good lesson plans. A synthetic one does too. But a synthetic educator doesn’t have experience to draw on. It only has whatever human educators have publicly published about their experiences.
Think about the effort involved in documenting all these various types of knowledge for a synthetic educator. (This, by the way, is very similar to why learning analytics disappointed as a product category. The software needs to know too much that wasn’t available in the systems to make sense of the data.)
Here’s the second challenge that the Khanmingo team faced:
We were trying to accomplish too much with a single prompt. The longer a prompt got and the more detailed its instructions were, the more likely it was that parts of the prompt would be ignored. Trying to produce a document as complex and nuanced as a comprehensive lesson plan with a single prompt invariably resulted in lesson plans with neglected, unfocused, or entirely missing parts.
I suspect this is a subtle manifestation of the memory problem I wrote about in my last post. Even with a relatively short text like a complex prompt, the AI couldn’t hold onto all the details. The Khanmingo team ended up breaking up the prompt into smaller pieces. This produced better results as the AI could “concentrate on”—or remember the details— one step at a time. I’ll add that this approach provides more opportunities to put humans in the loop. An expert—or a user—can examine and modify the output of each step.
We fantasize about AI doing work for us. In some cases, it’s not just a fantasy. I use AI to be more productive literally every day. But it fails me often. We can’t know what it will take for AI to solve any particular problem without looking closely at the product’s capabilities and the user’s very specific needs. This is product/market fit.
Learning design in the real world
Developing skill in product/market fit is hard. Think about all those different topics the Khanmingo team needed to not only know, but know their relevance to creating lesson plans well enough to diagnose the gaps in the AI’s understanding.
Refining a product is also inherently iterative. No matter how good you are at product designer how well you know your audience, and how brilliant you are, you will be wrong about some of your ideas early on. Because people are complicated. Organizations are complicated The skills workers need are often complicated and non-obvious. And the details of how the people need to work, individually and together, are often distinctive in ways that are invisible to them. Most people only know their own context. They take a lot for granted. Good product people spend their time uncovering these invisible assumptions and finding the commonalities and the differences. This is always a discovery process that takes time.
Learning design is a classic case of this problem. People have been writing and adopting learning design methodologies longer than I’ve been alive. The ADDIE model—”Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate”—was created by Florida State University for the military in the 1970s. “Backward Design” was invented in 1949 by Ralph W. Tyler. Over the past 30 years, I’ve seen a handful of learning design or instructional design tools that attempt to scaffold and enforce these and other design methodologies. I’ve yet to see one get widespread adoption. Why? Poor product/market fit.
While the goal of learning design (or “instructional design,” to use the older term) is to produce a structured learning experience, the thought process of creating it is non-linear and iterative. As we develop and draft, we see areas that need tuning or improving. We move back and forth across the process. Nobody ever follows learning design methodologies strictly in practice. And I’m talking about trained learning design professionals. Untrained educators stray even further from the model. That’s why the two most popular learning design tools, by far, are Microsoft Word and Google Docs.
If you’ve ever used ChatGPT and prompt engineering to generate the learning design of a complex lesson, you’ve probably run into unexpected limits to its usefulness. The longer you spend tinkering with the lesson, the more your results start to get worse rather than better. It’s the same problem the Khanmingo team had. Yes, ChatGPT and Claude can now have long conversations. But both research and experience show us that they tend to forget the stuff in the middle. By itself, ChatGPT is useful in lesson design to a point. But I find that when writing complex documents, I paste different pieces of my conversation into Word and stitch them together.
And that’s OK. If that process saves me design time, that’s a win. But there are use cases where the memory problems are more serious in ways that I haven’t heard folks talking about yet.
Combining documents
Here’s a very common use case in learning design:
First, you start with a draft of a lesson or a chapter that already exists. Maybe it’s a chapter from an OpenStax textbook. Maybe it’s a lesson that somebody on your team wrote a while ago that needs updating. You like it, but you don’t love it.
You have an article with much of the information you want to add to the new version you want to create. If you were using a vendor’s textbook, you’d have to require the students to read the outdated lesson and then read the article separately. But this is content you’re allowed to revise. If you’re using the article in a way that doesn’t violate copyright—for example, because you’re using it to capture publicly known facts that have changed rather than something novel in the article itself—you can simply use the new information to revise the original lesson. That was often too much work the old way. But now we have ChatGPT, so, you know…magic.
While you’re at it, you’d like to improve the lesson’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). You see opportunities to write the chapter in ways that represent more of your students and include examples relevant to their lived experiences. You happen to have a document with a good set of DEI guidelines.
So you feed your original chapter, new article, and DEI guidelines to the AI. “ChatGPT, take the original lesson and update it with the new information from the article. Then apply the DEI guidelines, including examples in topics X, Y, and Z that represent different points of view. Abracadabra!”
You can write a better prompt than this one. But no matter how carefully you engineer your prompt, you will be disappointed with the results. Don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself.
Why does this happen? Because the generative AI doesn’t “remember” these three documents perfectly. Remember what I wrote in my last article:
The LLMs can be “trained” on data, which means they store information like how “beans” vs. “water” modify the likely meaning of “cool,” what words are most likely to follow “Cool the pot off in the,” and so on. When you hear AI people talking about model “weights,” this is what they mean.
Notice, however, that none of the original sentences are stored anywhere in their original form. If the LLM is trained on Wikipedia, it doesn’t memorize Wikipedia. It models the relationships among the words using combinations of vectors (or “matrices”) and probabilities. If you dig into the LLM looking for the original Wikipedia article, you won’t find it. Not exactly. The AI may become very good at capturing the gist of the article given enough billions of those tensor/workers. But the word-for-word article has been broken down and digested. It’s gone.
Your lesson and articles are gone. They’ve been digested. The AI remembers them, but it’s designed to remember the meaning, not the words. It’s not metaphorically sitting down with the original copy and figuring out where to insert new information or rewrite a paragraph. That may be fine. Maybe it will produce something better. But it’s a fundamentally different process than human editing. We won’t know if the results it generates have good product/market until we test it out with folks.
To the degree that you need to preserve the fidelity of the original documents, you’ve got a problem. And the more you push generative AI to do this kind of fine-tuning work across multiple documents, the worse it gets. You’re running headlong into one of your synthetic co-worker’s fundamental limitations. Again, you might get enough value from it to achieve a net gain in productivity. But you might not because this seemingly simple use case is pushing hard on functionality that hasn’t been designed, tested, and hardened for this kind of use.
Engineering around the problem
Any product/market fit problem has two sides: product and market. On the market side, how good will be good enough? I’ve specifically positioned my ALDA project as producing a first draft with many opportunities for a human in the loop. This is a common approach we’re seeing in educational content generation right now, for good reasons. We’re reducing the risk to the students. Risk is one reason the market might reject the productket.
Another is failing to deliver the promised time savings. If the combination of the documents is too far off from the humans’ goal, it will be rejected. Its speed will not make up for the time required for the human to fix its mistakes. We have to get as close to the human need as possible, mitigate the’ consequences, and test to see if we’ve achieved a cost/benefit for the users good enough that they will adopt the product.
There is no perfect way to solve the memory problem. You will always need a human in the loop. But we could make a good step forward if we could get the designs solid enough to be directly imported into the learning platform and fine-tuned there, skipping the word processor step. Being able to do so requires tackling a host of problems, including (but not limited to) the memory issue. We don’t need the AI to get the combination of these documents perfect, but we do need it to get close enough that our users don’t need to dump the output into a full word processor to rewrite the draft.
When I raised this problem to a colleague who is a digital humanities scholar and an expert in AI, he paused before replying. “Nobody is working on this kind of problem right now,” he said. “On one side, AI experts are experimenting with improving the base models. On the other side, I see articles all the time about how educators can write better prompts. Your problem falls in between those two.”
Right. As a sector, we’re not discussing product/market fit for particular needs. The vendors are, each within their own circumscribed world. But on the customer side? I hear people tell me they’re conducting “experiments.” It sounds a bit like when university folk told me they were “working with learning analytics,” which turned out to mean that they were talking about working with learning analytics. I’m sure there are many prompt engineering workshops and many grants being written for fancy AI solutions that sound attractive to the National Science Foundation or whoever the grantor happens to be. But in the middle ground? Making AI usable to solve specific problems? I’m not seeing much of that yet.
The document combination problem can likely be addressed adequately well through a combination of approaches that improve the product and mitigate the consequences of the imperfections to make them more tolerable for the market. After consulting with some experts, I’ve come up with a combination of approaches to try first. Technologically, I know it will work. It doesn’t depend on cutting-edge developments. Will the market accept the results? Will the new approach be better than the old one? Or will it trip over some deal-breaker, like so many products before it?
I don’t know. I feel pretty good about my hypothesis. But I won’t know until real learning designers test it on real projects.
We have a dearth of practical, medium-difficulty experiments with real users right now. That is a big, big problem. It doesn’t matter how impressive the technology is if its capabilities aren’t the ones the users need to solve real-world problems. You can’t fix this gap with symposia, research grants, or even EdTech companies that have the skills but not necessarily the platform or business model you need.
The only way to do it is to get down into the weeds. Try to solve practical problems. Get real humans to tell you what does and doesn’t work for them in your first, second, third, fourth, and fifth tries. That’s what the ALDA project is all about. It’s not primarily about the end product. I am hopeful that ALDA itself will prove to be useful. But I’m not doing it because I want to commercialize a product. I’m doing it to teach and learn about product/market fit skills with AI in education. We need many more experiments like this.
We put too much faith in the miracle, forgetting the grind and the wall are out there waiting for us. Folks in the education sector spend too much time staring at the sky, waiting for the EdTech space aliens to come and take us all to paradise,.
I suggest that at least some of us should focus on solving today’s problems with today’s technology, getting it done today, while we wait for the aliens to arrive.
You want a new photo of yourself for your personal website. What’s the best way to take new photos? Here are 3 ways for you to get beautiful photos for your website.
Hi! I’m Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome to my blog about understanding your digital footprint in research and Higher Education. I help professors have an amazing online presence through my company The Academic Designer LLC. I empower academics to feel confident when showing up online.
A selfie is a photo that you take of yourself. You can use selfies on your personal website! The most popular way to take a selfie is with your phone camera. You can use the front camera of your phone, but you’ll take higher quality photos if you use the rear camera.
Look for a space with good lighting. You may find great natural lighting outside in the last hour before sunset. Or, if you’re an early riser (unlike me), try just before sunrise. Photographers call these periods the ‘golden hour’ because the light can be perfect.
Avoid a distracting background in your photo. When in doubt, you can take a photo against a neutral background like a wall. Then you can edit the photo to remove the background like I did for the selfie above.
Use a cleaning cloth to gently wipe the camera lens clean before you start your photo shoot.
Try holding the phone at different angles (slightly higher, slightly lower). You can also hold the phone out to your side and turn your head towards it. Don’t forget to smile.
Your phone camera may have settings to help you take a better selfie. For instance, there may be a portrait mode. Or, an option to take a wide selfie.
You can use your phone’s self-timer setting to take hands-free and full body selfies. You may want to prop up your phone using books. You could also invest in an inexpensive tripod or selfie stick.
Devices For Taking Selfies
Mobile phone
Camera
High resolution web cam
Other Tools To Help
Selfie stick
Tripod
Remote
Ring light
Books, a box, or other items to prop up your phone
Ask a friend or family member
One of the best ways to get a new photo of yourself for your website is to ask a friend or family member to help.
If you have a friend who is good at taking photos, great! You may not. That’s OK. What’s more important is that you have someone with you that you feel comfortable with.
My best tip is to ask your friend to take photos holding the phone vertically and horizontally. That gives you flexibility with what you use the photos for.
It’s possible that this photo shoot may not result in the photos you want. So don’t put too much pressure on your friend. Do encourage them to take lots of photos so you can choose the best ones. If you find photos you like in the set, ask your friend if they’d like to be credited as photographer when you share the photo online.
Hiring a professional portrait photographer is the best option. The mistake you want to avoid is asking for a headshot when booking your photo shoot.
Professional photographers have the gear, skills, and experience to take your new website photos. If you can afford a professional photo shoot, it’s your best option. You want to hire an experienced local photographer.
You may have a place to take your photos in mind. Professionals often include 1 location in your package, or shoot in their studio. Be sure to ask for their recommendations.
Photographs are the intellectual property of the photographer. You’ll need to sign a contract or licensing agreement for permission to use the photos. Help ensure you get the right license by sharing how you want to use your photos when booking your shoot. Most photographers have professional liability insurance.
You’re looking for a portrait photographer, not a headshot photographer. Be clear about how many photos you’re looking for, as your photographer may offer a ‘brand photo shoot’ or a ‘website photo package.’
Portrait photographers can ranges from $100-$400/hour in the United States. Local Facebook groups are often an effective way to find recommendations for photographers in your area.
Here are 3 ways to get new photos for your personal website
My name is Jennifer van Alstyne. I’ve been helping professors make beautiful personal websites to share their research since 2018. I’d love to help you!
