Favourite podcast “Teaching in Higher Ed” on “teaching for integrity in the age of AI”

On one of my favourite podcasts, Teaching in Higher Ed, Tricia Bertram Gallant and David Rettinger talk with host Bonni Stachowiak about “teaching for integrity in the age of AI“.

The episode is brilliant as always, but I don’t have time for a long blog post, so here are two thoughts that I want to remember specifically:

First, reframing cheating, or even using GenAI shortcuts, from “that student really does not care about learning in my course” or “that teacher does not care about my learning” to accepting that there are a million of reasons for trying to be more efficient, and most of them have nothing to do with the other person and all to do with whatever the teacher or student has going on in their lives right at that moment. Taking ourselves and the emotion out of the situation makes it so much easier to deal with it! Treating it as a mistake rather than a crime that we need to police also makes it possible to approach it with a growth mindset so we can help students learn from it more easily, which is kinda the whole point of the job.

Second, here are three steps that are super helpful when we talk with students about academic integrity when there is the suspicion that they might have cheated:

1. Here is what I am noticing (sentences sound very much unlike you, fabricated quotes, no connection to what happened in class, whatever is making me suspicious)
2. Here is how I interpret my observations (you might have used GenAI to produce part of this work)
3. But I could be wrong, so tell me about your process in producing this work / the situation / …!

This is such a helpful script!

And in other news, some pictures from a recent sunset walk.

So dramatic!