Thriving Mid-Semester: Tips for Higher Ed Instructors

Maggie Grady: 0:03

Welcome to The Teaching Table, a monthly podcast where we'll engage in insightful conversations about the dynamic world of teaching, learning and technology within higher education. Brought to you by the University of Buffalo Office of Curriculum, Assessment, and Teaching Transformation, and made possible by the generous support of the Genteels' Excellence in Teaching Fund, this podcast aims to shed light on the pathways to educational excellence. I'm Maggie Grady, a learning designer within CATT, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Dr Jeffrey Kohler, Associate Director of Teaching Transformation within CATT, as we delve into best practices and recommendations for faculty at the mid-semester mark. Welcome, Dr. Kohler, and thank you for joining me.

Jeffrey Kohler: 0:46

Thank you, Maggie. Thanks for inviting me to participate in this podcast. I'm looking forward to sharing any insights that I can about teaching here at UB with our listeners.

Maggie Grady: 0:58

Can you please tell our audience a little bit about your background in teaching?

Jeffrey Kohler: 1:03

Sure! I've been teaching at the university level for about 16 years now. I started out actually here at UB as a TA in the history department. I earned my PhD there in 2013. I've taught not only here at UB but also other colleges in Western New York, and I also spent time as faculty at Bard College and in my current role here in CATT, together with my team of learning designers, Maggie included, we are helping to promote student success by improving the quality of teaching at UB. Really, that's what's paramount, for our office is trying to promote student success, and so we provide regular programming for faculty and instructional staff at all levels, including those faculty who are on the tenure ladder clinical faculty adjuncts, teaching assistants really anybody who has a student-facing role that involves some form of instruction.

Maggie Grady: 1:59

So today's topic is mid-semester preparation and practices. I have some questions for you about how faculty can prepare for the mid-semester point and how to survive all of the exam grading, research papers and all at the same time still delivering effective teaching to their students. So to begin my first question we have received many questions within CAT about grade books and grading, in particular within UB Learns. What are some things faculty can do in this main to help them survive the midterm crunch?

Jeffrey Kohler: 2:32

Well, I think the first thing to remember is that you know we've made it halfway right. That's a huge accomplishment in and of itself. We've survived. We've gotten to the point now where we can sort of look back and say, okay, what went right the first half of the semester, maybe what we need to do some correction for the second half, but overall, you know we've hit a landmark and that's a good thing. So let's look at it from that perspective. A couple of things I would suggest. First is that when you're constructing your midterm exams or creating assessments and thinking about how you're evaluating your students, consider taking formative feedback, not just now, but especially now, I think, if we're again, we're considering the midterm point, take some formative feedback from your students and that can really help you identify areas of need. One example that I use in my courses is a minute paper, and what you can do is give that either at the beginning or the end of a particular class session. Just have students write for a minute about an aspect of the course. You can ask them to identify something that they felt was relevant about that class, something that they took home that they thought was particularly important to them. You can also ask them about what they felt was missing or if there was some aspect of that class or that lesson that they didn't really understand or there's a concept that they're not grasping. It's a really effective way for you to get feedback from the students and sort of keep your finger on the pulse of the class, while also being a low stakes, you know, anonymous way to have students give you some of that information that you're looking for and to provide a better experience for them. So I use that in my courses. I think that works really well. I would also suggest that faculty are looking at their learning outcomes, you know. So go back to that syllabus, which you may not have looked at since the first week of the semester or really talked about, and make sure that you know the assessments that you are implementing, your exams and your assignments and things like that. Make sure that that really is addressing what you are expecting your students to learn and take away from your course. You know, if you're expecting them to master a particular skill, is what you're asking them to do able to showcase that? Is that really proving to you that they are capable of exercising that skill and that they have developed and mastered that skill over the course of your class. If it's missing the mark, that's okay. It just means that you have the second half of the semester to kind of go back and reassess and say, all right, let's think of what we can change to make that a more accurate way of getting at that learning outcome. And I would say too, obviously, faculty. We're all dealing with the stress and anxiety of midterms, but keep in mind that students are also experiencing that as well, and also, if you have TAs too, they're going through the same exact thing. So I would say, make sure that you're aware of resources that are available on campus and share those with your students, such as counseling services. This is an anxious or an anxiety inducing moment, if you will, and I think that anything that you can do to help provide students with some relief from that not only is going to make your life easier, but it's also going to make sure that your students are at their best to perform their best in your classes. Not to be pretentious, but I think that there's oftentimes this gap between students and faculty and they feel like they can't really relate to their faculty members, and so when a professor is genuinely interested in your well-being or is taking the time out of their schedule to say hey, is everything going OK for you in this class? Are you struggling? Or again vice versa, if you have a situation where a student is excited that you're reaching out and saying I noticed that you're doing a great job in the class and here's something that might take your interest to the next level, or you might want to read a little bit further on this particular subject or something, I just think it can make all the difference between a student who is just sort of getting by in class and someone who is really investing themselves in the class and trying to get out of it the most that they can.

Maggie Grady: 6:46

All about the student's success.

Jeffrey Kohler: 6:47

That's right. That's what we're here for.

Maggie Grady: 6:49

An area of concern this academic year has been the use of AI, or artificial intelligence. It seems like faculty aren't quite sure what to do if they suspect a student is using AI. What would you recommend, especially since they will be expecting to see more use of AI at this crucial exam time?

Jeffrey Kohler: 7:07

I think they should give up now. I think it's all over. We're all going to lose our jobs. It's pretty much done for. Ai is a scary thing. I think it's something that everyone is dealing with, regardless of whether it's academia or other industries. This is something that everyone has questions about, and not just from a. In the case of academia, plagiarism or what have you. It's an ethical question. There's things that go beyond higher education, if you will. For me, if I'm making recommendations to faculty, I would say start with using the tools that are at your disposal. Even before AI had this surge in 2023, UB has been on the cutting edge of trying to prevent academic dishonesty and trying to respond to these questions. For example, setting up your assignments in a way that uses the lockdown browser. That's not necessarily a cure-all for AI, but it's a tool that I think a lot of faculty are familiar with and can help mitigate its use, particularly on exams and things like that. When it comes to written assignments, from a best practices standpoint, I think it's important that not only do you create them in UB Learns, as we talked about before, making sure that you're setting them up accordingly and using the grade book properly, but it's also about understanding what UB Learns can tell you about those assignments submissions from students. UB Learns employs turn it in, which is there for checking in on plagiarism, but now it also includes an AI detector and that is separate from the plagiarism score. If you are familiar with looking at the generated report for plagiarism on turn it in, you'll want to note that there's also a separate numerical value a percentage value, for AI detection now as well. Turn it in is actually one of the better tools for AI detection. I know that. I've talked with faculty who are just kind of plugging in portion of a student response into Google or something and seeing if it comes up, or they're using free AI detectors online, and I don't want to be libelous, but to me, I don't know how reliable that is. However, turn it in can do a really great job of detecting AI, or at least as good of a job as we can in the current state of where things are at with AI, and so what you have to do is basically some deductive reasoning here. It's not something where it's a silver bullet, right. So if you get a certain percentage score in turning in as it relates to AI, you're going to need to do a couple of things. You're going to have to look at the information in context. You're going to have to, you know, investigate a little bit more, have a conversation with the student. I think that's really important too. You know, it's not something that should be done in a vacuum and it's like you're building a case against a student before you even get a chance to talk to them. That's not really appropriate. You want to make sure that you're doing your due diligence here and you're trying to figure out if, in fact, this is a valid you know, if this detected true, legitimate academic dishonesty or AI use or what have you, or if it's something that may be a mistake. We've actually seen that quite a bit. We've seen a situation, multiple situations, not just now, but we have a lot of faculty that will come to us and say, well, oh my gosh, my student submitted this work and it's, you know, less than zero percentage is being marked as AI or plagiarism, and a lot of that comes out when you think about assignments where there is a template, where there's something where you're going to see repeated text that's used across all student submissions. It's a false positive right, and so you just want to be careful about those types of scenarios as you're preparing to respond to concerns about AI in your classroom. I want to give a shout out to Kelly Ahuna and the Academic Integrity Office here at UB. They have done a great job. They have a really great protocol when it comes to dealing with suspected cases of plagiarism and AI use and things like that. I have, I would say, unfortunately, had to go through that myself with certain students and you know it's not a pleasant experience. Obviously, no one wants to have to deal with that. No one hopes that someone's going to cheat or to engage in academic dishonesty. But I will say Kelly's office does a great job of helping you as a faculty member. Kind of steer your way through that successfully and take a lot of the pressure off you as faculty. In fact, I will say that you know when we see faculty coming to our office and saying, oh my gosh. Well, I have a situation where I think a student has used AI, but I don't want to report it because I hear that you know it's going to create a lot of problems, either for the student or it's going to make my workload a lot more. I have to worry about this case Now. That's really not the situation. Again, you know I won't presume to speak for Kelly. You can definitely check out the Office of Academic Integrity's website, but there's a very clear protocol of how the case is handled and how faculty can get resolution there, and there's protections there for both the faculty and the students. So you don't have to worry about a situation where you know if you are suspecting AI and you potentially submit this as a case to Kelly's office. It's not going to create a larger scenario where a student is going to have a problem if they were in fact not, if it wasn't a true instance of academic dishonesty. But even with that protocol, the first step is contacting the student. Right is to talk with them and ascertain exactly what's going on. And so, again, don't hit the panic button. You know when you see a certain percentage, you know there's probably false positives in there not saying that they always are but you know, don't get too excited if you see the plagiarism detector or the AI detector come up with a certain score. Do your due diligence. You know, read what your students have written, have the cited sources and, again, you know, make sure that you're having a conversation with your students before you make any accusation.

Maggie Grady: 13:34

Keeping the lines of communication open between you and the student.

Jeffrey Kohler: 13:37

Absolutely.

Maggie Grady: 13:38

So last question I have for you. My students didn't do as well as I thought they should, or they aren't quite getting the concepts the way that I would have expected in my course, in my class, and I want to make sure that they're doing well. What would you recommend?

Jeffrey Kohler: 13:53

Well, I think, first of all is, again, we're at a good point in time of the semester to do that reflection, right. That, as a faculty member, if you are sitting there and you're looking at your students and you're genuinely concerned at how they're doing in your class and You're saying, well gosh, I wish they were here, but they're not quite there yet, you know, that's. That's really admirable, right, that you're doing that level of reflection, and I wish that more faculty would engage in that. What I want to say, though, is that you know, start by going back to your syllabus and go back to those learning outcomes, as I mentioned earlier today, the content that you've created, the assessments that you've, you know, designed the activities that you're having your students engaged in. Make sure that they're relevant and that they're necessary and that they're aligning with what the course expectations you had set out that to be at the beginning of the semester, that they're still, you know, in line with that. Now, I'd also say that you want to make sure you're not judging your students too harshly. I think that happens quite a bit right, where we say, you know, we obviously hope that all of our students are gonna get a 100, and we say, wow, I'd love to give everybody an A. You know, obviously, hopefully, that they legitimately earned it. We're not talking about great inflation, necessarily, but just the idea in general, right, that you know we want our students to succeed, and so you know, if a student didn't do great on the midterm exam, but they're doing really well in other areas, you know, they're doing well on their homework, they're doing well in group work, they're doing well on Discussion responses, things like that. You know it might be time for you to review the assessment itself. It may not be the student, it may be that the exam is not designed really well, and think about where those problems might be. You know, are you asking the right questions to get at that answer, to demonstrate the student has mastered the skill or the subject matter that you're looking for from them? Don't be afraid to address the fact that you are maybe expecting a little bit more out of your students. I'm not saying to you know, come into lecture and browbeat your students and say that everyone did a terrible job. That's, that's absolutely not what I'm saying. But what I'm thinking of is, you know, it's okay to talk with your students about an exam and say, hey, that was really tough, you know, and that I was hoping that everybody would be doing a better job. But, you know, get their feedback, you know. Did they feel like the exam questions were fair? Did they feel like the questions were appropriate, based on what had been learned or had been described in lecture, you know, and clarify those muddy areas.

Maggie Grady: 16:22

These have been some great suggestions and thank you for so much for taking the time to meet with me today. Do you have any final takeaways?

Jeffrey Kohler: 16:30

Just remember that you are not alone, right, as a faculty member, if you're a teaching assistant, if you are, you know Anyone that's in an instructional role and you're at this midterm point and you're saying, oh my gosh, you know it's, it's been a battle to get here. You're not by yourself. Everyone is dealing with that at this point and, and you know anything that you know you're going through, I can almost guarantee you that someone else has done it before and has gotten through it and has made their way to fall semester, or I should say to, to the, to the end of the semester, to May, and you know may is not that far away, basically. So you know, really, at the end of the day, you can do it. You, you are able to get there and you know you're gonna let your you know students succeed and and you're gonna do your best to get them there. So I would say just to just to hang in there and, as I mentioned to, you know our office is here to support you. So it's not something where you are on an island, you know. You can come to talk with us, you can talk with your chair. I mean, these are all things that you can do if you feel like you need some external Observation or some external supports to help get you to where you need to be. If you are successful in your teaching, your students are going to be successful, and I think that's really important to remember. We're not just telling you to. You know, emphasize student success for the fun of it. It's because we want to see your students succeed, we want you to succeed, and so, again, it's it's. It's a very Synergistic situation. So I would say you know you're halfway there, hang in there and you know may is here before you know it.

Maggie Grady: 18:07

Thank you for joining us today at the teaching table. Today we discussed mid-term best practices with Dr. Jeffrey Kohler. Be sure to connect with us online at buffalo.edu/catt that's CATT, or email us at ubcatt@buffalo.edu.