Curriculum, Assessment & Teaching Transformation Blog

Alarm bells are sounding about a new danger lurking in the halls of academia. Misunderstood and operating in the shadows, it is assumed to be drawing students into its clutches with the promise of easier, less time-consuming schoolwork. It asks us what we need and then supplies the fix. What is this menace? Artificial intelligence.

The transition from Blackboard to Brightspace is finally complete and the fall semester has started. As you begin teaching your courses, our learning designers have some suggestions and tips to optimize Brightspace and create an engaging course that everyone will benefit from and enjoy

As the spring semester comes to a close and the summer months quickly approach, we want to provide you with essential information that will help you with the transition to Brightspace, the university's new Learning Management System (LMS), and highlight some of the exciting features that instructors and students will find helpful.

Understand how to tackle five of the top accessibility issues to help you create accessible content.

With the prevalence of digital content in our everyday lives, it’s important to understand why digital accessibility is important and how you can ensure your content is accessible.

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is the systematic inquiry into student learning and teaching practices in higher education. Participating in inquiry, particularly adjacent to or outside of one’s home discipline, affords an opportunity for scholarly growth. It also provides a reflective metacognitive exercise as faculty seek to identify and continually refine efficacious pedagogy.

Teaching large classes can be a challenge for some instructors, with challenges including lack of flexibility, class climate management, difficulty of setting and enforcing classroom behavior, minimum attention to students, limited monitoring of students’ learning and difficulty in engaging students to activities (Fortes, & Tchantchane, 2010). This project explored techniques and teaching methodologies that experienced instructors may have, which can ultimately be shared with their peers to address these challenges.

The mention of Artificial Intelligence programs like ChatGPT – or Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer – will cause readers to recoil with emotions including but not limited to anxiety and anger. For faculty and support staff considering how best to move forward in a world where ChatGPT is a reality, I recommend familiarizing yourselves with the Academic Integrity policy here at the University at Buffalo.

The purpose of this study is to explore variables contributing to differences in student assessments of overall instructor quality from 2017-2019. Using data from 362,238 course evaluations, across four semesters (Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019), this study asks, “What instructor, student, and course variables predict overall evaluation of instructors?”

The end of the semester doesn’t have to be exhausting. Taking time for yourself during fall recess to recharge. Reflection is crucial step to this process. I encourage you to challenge your students to do the same.