I'm sending out the newsletter early this week because folks might be interested in attending a virtual event I'm participating in tomorrow. AI-Aware Teaching at the Perusall Exchange Thursday, May 14, 12pm Central: As part of Perusall Exchange 2026, my Norton Guide to AI-Aware teaching co-authors and I will be interviewed by Eric Mazur as part of a live recording of the Social Learning Amplified podcast--and you can attend! Just follow this link to register for the Exchange, which will...
11 days ago • 4 min read
Surviving Peak Higher Ed with Bryan Alexander The total number of students enrolled in US higher education institutions grew steadily in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. However that total peaked in 2011 at around 18 million students. It’s been declining ever since. You can imagine some of what that means—fewer students means less tuition, which means fewer faculty and staff and the closure of colleges and universities. US higher ed has been on the downhill across multiple measures for about 15...
16 days ago • 2 min read
Pre-Orders for the Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching I'm very exited to share that you can now pre-order The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching! Annette Vee, Marc Watkins, and I wrote this book to provide practical strategies for instructors across higher education to respond to the challenges and opportunities that generative AI presents in our teaching. We argue that being AI-aware means being clear on our course learning goals and objectives, understanding something about how AI works, and...
23 days ago • 2 min read
AI-Aware Math Teaching A few years ago, it was pretty easy for math educators to ignore generative AI. The chatbots of 2022 and 2023 were notoriously bad at math. But that’s no longer true! Today’s frontier AI models are very good at math—to the point of proving mathematical conjectures that have been open for decades. This week on the podcast, I have a roundtable discussion with some of my favorite math educators about the ways they're responding to AI's impact on the teaching of...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
It's Webinar Season With The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching coming out this summer, I've started lining up a few webinar appearances to help get the word out about the book. Here are three coming up in the next two months, all of which are free to attend. Cutting through the AI Noise: Claims about Learning, Cognition, and Critical ThinkingApril 22, 2026, 11am Central, hosted by Alchemy Conversations about AI in education often swing between extremes, from claims that it is “rotting brains”...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Teaching Civic Engagement Back in 2024, I asked political scientist and faculty developer Bethany Morrison on my podcast to share some strategies for teaching in U.S. presidential election year. She had so many resources to share that I then invited her to curate a collection of resources for the University of Virginia Teaching Hub on the topic of teaching for democratic engagement and civic learning. Once that collection was posted, a former Vanderbilt colleague and current English professor...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Around the Web This is the part of the newsletter where I link to things that I find interesting in the hopes that you do, too. This week, this is the entire newsletter! Education as the Lighting of a Fire: Personal Connection Strikes the Match - This is a preprint of a study by Steven Most and Nathan Clout of the University of New South Wales Sydney. Two groups of participants heard the same recorded lecture. One group was given a "relatable" backstory about the lecturer, the other was told...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
How well do you know the law as it applies to teaching? This week on the podcast, I talk with Kent Kauffman, author of Navigating Choppy Waters: Key Legal Issues College Faculty Need to Know. I invited him on the show because of all the stories we've seen in the last year about college and university faculty being accused by students of teaching something the student didn't the instructor should be teaching. These incidents have a lot of instructors worried about teaching controversial...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Learning How to Learn (with AI, Actually) I wrote the first draft of the “Using AI as a Tutor” chapter in the forthcoming Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, co-authored with Annette Vee and Marc Watkins. I pitched this chapter for the book because I was brought into the author team as the “STEM guy,” that is, a co-author who could bring some STEM education perspectives to the work, and because the number one use case of generative AI in STEM education that I hear about is students turning to...
2 months ago • 6 min read