Generative AI as a Design Accelerator

Back in April 2023, I had the chance to visit Pennsylvania State University and to stop by Penn State’s Teaching and Learning with Technology group. I got a tour of the Dreamery, a flexible and innovative learning space named after Penn State’s famous creamery. The tour was led by Ryan Wetzel, manager of creative learning initiatives, and I was impressed by how Ryan and his colleagues were helping faculty and students at Penn State explore emerging multimedia technologies like virtual reality and generative artificial intelligence. See my newsletter from the time for a recap of my visit along with some photos of the Dreamer.

A lot has happened in the world of AI since then, so I thought it was time to reach back out to Ryan and see what his team has been up to. I learned that, among other things, they designed a number of AI experiences for faculty to use with their students. The idea is that an instructor would bring their class to the Dreamery or one of the other TLT learning spaces and have Ryan’s team walk their class through a set of activities designed to help the students (and the faculty member) increase their generative AI knowhow. While the products students create, either individually or collaborative, during these experiences are not traditional academic products (a board game, a hit single, a personal brand), the skills students develop in working with AI as part of creative design processes transfer across academic domains.

This week on the podcast, I'm excited to share my interview with Ryan Wetzel. He talks about shifting one's view of generative AI from an "advanced Google search" to something more like a "design accelerator," an approach that can help students explore topics in ways they wouldn't have felt equipped to otherwise. Students who aren't, for example, graphic designers, can use AI image generators to develop multimodal projects that explore course topics. The final product isn't as important as the process that led to it, a process that can move faster or deeper thanks to strategic use of generative AI. Ryan and team are also exploring how AI can function as something of an additional group member in student group projects.

​You can listen to my conversation with Ryan Wetzel here, or search "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app. And while you're in that app, go ahead and subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss future episodes.

UVA's Teaching Hub

Thanks in part to a writing retreat that the UVA Center for Teaching Excellence team held in December, the UVA Teaching Hub has a bumper crop of new collections this month. Each collection features a small set of resources curated around some teaching and learning topic. See below for some of the latest collections, and be sure to subscribe to the Teaching Hub newsletter for future updates on the growing website!

• ​Practical Approaches to Support Student Belonging in the Classroom and How Can Instructors Support Students' Self-Efficacy? - These two collections have been curated by my UVA colleagues Lindsay Wheeler and Lynn Mandeltort, and both point to practical, research-based strategies for supporting the affective dimension of learning for our students.
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• ​Reading Pedagogy - Jenae Cohn is the author of the 2021 book Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading, and she has curated this collection of resources around reading assignments and the teaching of reading skills that today's students need to develop. I learned a lot about reading pedagogy through this collection!
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• ​Collaborative Grading - I recruited my University of Mississippi colleague Emily Pitts Donahoe to curate this collection on collaborative grading, an alternative grading practice that Emily has written about extensively in her Unmaking the Grade blog. Emily has a book in progress about collaborative grading, and she knows this topic well.
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• ​Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the Syllabus - Samantha Chang (University of Toronto) has curated this set of resources on practicing UDL through that all-important course document, the syllabus. This collection will "help you create a more accessible and inclusive syllabus that reduces learning barriers and welcomes learner variability."
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• ​Making the Most of Office Hours - Here's a new collection from me, featuring some of the office hour resources I've shared here in the newsletter in the past. One resource I haven't shared here until now is an article about office hours written by several UVA Center for Teaching Excellence student consultants, sharing their perspectives on how instructors can make the most of office hours.
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• ​Example AI Syllabus Statements from UVA Faculty AI Guides - Our 2024-2025 Faculty AI Guides are faculty fellows helping their colleagues explore the role of generative AI in their teaching. The Guides have been doing their own explorations, and this resource features syllabus statements about AI from four of the Guides.

If you're interested in curating a Teaching Hub collection on one of your favorite teaching and learning topics, please reach out to me! We're happy to have folks external to UVA involved, and we do our best to make the curation process as easy as possible.

Thanks for reading!

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