Lately, I’ve been saying that keeping up with AI feels a bit like being stuck on a treadmill that only speeds up. Just when I think I’m catching my breath, something new barrels in. In the past few weeks alone, I’ve heard about “vibecoding”—the emerging ability to speak complex code into existence like some kind of techno-conjuring spell—and OpenAI’s latest image tools, which have taken deepfakes from disconcerting to downright uncanny. |
CfLT Newsletter
The posts below are from the CfLT newsletter which includes curated, research-based digital resources to support ongoing faculty development and pedagogical engagement. As of August 2025, CfLT Director Karen Spierling oversees the content. Posts from July 2020-May 2025 were compiled by previous Director Lew Ludwig.
Teaching: Real World Connections, Active Learning, and Collaborative Knowledge-Building
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Teaching: Unpacking Complexity
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Teaching: Validity Matters More than Cheating
In a CfLT-sponsored webinar on assessment and gen-AI on March 3, Leon Furze (longtime educator, education administrator, and now Ph.D. candidate working on a dissertation on AI in writing instruction) shared an academic article, “Validity Matters More than Cheating,” which argues that academic integrity needs to focus on “assessment validity” rather than “cheating.” Cheating is a question of moral integrity, whereas validity is a process by which educators ensure that students have met learning outcomes.
Tidbit: Revitalizing Your Course at the Halfway Mark
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| We’re at that critical midpoint, and it’s all too easy to coast (or crash) until finals. But midterm is our golden chance to step back and see if we’re still on the path we laid out at the start. A few small tweaks now can save us—and our students—a heap of stress when crunch time rolls around. |
Teaching: Kids These Days Can’t Read
I’ve been in education long enough to recognize this as a familiar faculty lament. Over the years, I’ve heard numerous concerns:
- Kids these days can’t compute a square root.
- Kids these days can’t graph (or factor) a third-degree polynomial.
- Kids these days can’t use an abacus.
You see the pattern. It seems that the longer we teach, the more likely we are to encounter this sentiment.
Teaching: Responsive Teaching in Action
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Teaching: Magic School AI
Despite Sydney Green’s proficiency with AI prompting, she often finds extracting specific tasks from advanced models like ChatGPT or Gemini to be time-consuming and sometimes unproductive. To address this, she turned to Magic School AI, a platform offering over 80 AI-powered tools designed to assist educators with lesson planning, assignment creation, and material generation. It’s user-friendly, click-based interface allows users to interact without the need for specialized prompts.
Teaching: Teach Students How to Make Informed AI Decisions
My approach to AI in my writing courses is primarily to teach students how to make informed decisions about when it is appropriate and inappropriate to use AI. Part of this involves helping them understand what they do and don’t learn when they use AI. To that end, I include an AI policy statement on every assignment as well as a table that identifies what students learn if they use AI for some tasks vs.
Tidbit: Adopt or Resist? Beyond the AI Culture Wars
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| I was talking with Matt Kretchmar after our recent session with Leon Furze on “Understanding GenAI in Education: AI and Assessment.” He was very excited about Leon’s approach to move beyond merely moralizing about students cheating and focusing on how to productively live with this new reality. In particular, Leon emphasized a shift in perspective:
In Validity matters more than cheating the authors argue convincingly that the concept of cheating is an unproductive frame for academic integrity, and we should instead re-centre the concept of “validity” in assessment. |