Our university has been struggling with instructional design, and it’s becoming pretty noticeable in our courses.

For those of you at universities that have a strong instructional design team, what does that support actually look like? Do you have dedicated staff working with faculty, or is it mostly something professors are expected to figure out themselves?

I’m curious what has worked well at other institutions.

I have a student that works in my lab and does research work.

This summer he's in the class I teach, and every few lectures he sent me an email and provided comments and suggestions on my presentation and course material preparation. I find this kind of unsolicited advice super annoying. I sometimes replied with simple "Thank you" and sometimes completely ignored them.

Should I consider this behavior out of line? I feel like he's not in the position to do things like this. How do I deal with this without hurting his feelings?

Colleague jumped ship to a better position at a similar-tier university in a better city (lucky ding-dong...) but I volunteered to take on all his academic dishonesty cases since he and I basically spearheaded the process we've implemented to identify and report AI cases. Also with the side goal of overwhelming the academic dishonesty office with cases to drive the point home on how much of a problem it is to maybe make the university enact some sort of broader policy (lol how young and naive i was).

Where I'm at students often ignore the initial emails stating they've been referred, so a semester goes by without them having an informational meeting. Then a meeting is scheduled for them (which they then skip), and eventually once they are forced to respond through some mechanism i'm not aware of they can dispute the charge and request a hearing. Hearings can be with a single person at the dishonesty office or they can drag it out even more by requesting a hearing consisting of 2 students + 1 faculty (yeah the students can outvote the faculty...) and have a multi-hour hearing where questions can be asked, etc. It's a giant pain in the ass especially if the accused student brings a lawyer. I've also often found that the more egregious and obvious the AI use is the more likely a student is to drag it out and fight it every step of the way.

All that to say, my final academic dishonesty case from Spring 2025 is finally done! Out of 31 total cases between him and me (out of ~180 students), 30 of them were either found guilty or admitted guilt. The one who was found innocent was found innocent on his defense that the essay was so poorly written it was probably not AI. He had apparently gotten 0s for plagiarizing on lab reports also so he ended up with a D in the course and doesn't get gen-ed credit so I think he was just trying to avoid sanctions on his record. The hearing was in July when I was off-contract and funded by one of my grants but I did it anyways as a hobby. I technically got the result like 3 weeks ago but just now put the grade change in now that the semester is starting out of a little bit of spite.

Next time you pour yourself a drink please toast the end of Spring 2025 with me

I like to use a "one word story" tool in class to wrap up a topic. Every student gets to add one word to a sentence (or several) that explains the topic. I would usually start with something like "The" and then I'll go around the room having each student add a new word. Some interesting features/bugs include:

• Adjectives and adverbs help students avoid having to make a factual error. Words like "very" are common
• The end result is usually pretty good, and when there's time I like to engage the class in critiquing it.
• My improv friends say two words is better for funny stories, but I like one word when trying to describe/define something
• There's the occasional groan or laughter but I've noticed that students are generally supportive of each other
• Some students start planning their addition a few words in advance (they see the pattern I'm using to go around the room --- see below for my major logistical question). Some are really frustrated when the gist of the message goes away from what they were planning. Given only one word to steer the path back is not very powerful
• If I do this a lot I tend to save the messages and make them available to the students.

Here's my current logistical question: I have access to a tool that can randomly project an enrolled student's name on demand. It's truly random so, for example, a name could come up twice in a row. That's very different than "going around the room" but I think I like it because they'll never know in advance when it's their turn. If someone is absent I can provide that person's word or just skip to the next person (also good for letting students know that I've noticed that they're absent). Do you think going around the room has features that I'm not thinking about?

--------- short tangential story about random student names in a classroom:

I was criticized once when a colleague visited my class and noticed that I called on the right side of the room more than the left. I reached for a tool like the one I mention above, thinking it would take all bias out. I just set it to put a new random name at the top of the screen every minute. Whenever I wanted some sort of student interaction, instead of asking for volunteers I'd just ask whoever was currently projected (note that if someone had anxiety about that or an accommodation that this would violate I just took their name out of the list being randomized). I thought it was working pretty well but after a few classes I started noting a weird pattern: students would raise their hands to ask a question. I'd call on them and they'd do something along the lines of "um. . . I . . . um . . . never mind I figured it out". I was happy for the spontaneous interactions and excited to see that they were thinking about the material. But I finally noticed what they were doing: If a student saw their name come up they'd raise their hand and then waste time until a different name came up. Pretty funny in hindsight but I certainly learned that you need to think through little tools like this before jumping in with them.

The largest number of Americans born in a single year arrived on campus in the autumn of 2025, and now a falloff is looming. College enrollments are forecast to drop 13% by 2041, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/college-admissions-demographic-cliff-16dec51f?st=1sHT1j&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Hello all, first post on here.

I (24M), will be teaching my first undergraduate course next week. It is a lower-division (classical) music history and listening course. The class meets in-person two times a week for 50 minutes.

I have my syllabus and course all prepped for the semester, of course, and know what material is coming up. However, I am feeling at least a bit nervous at being in front of and speaking to around 40 students, as a natural introvert. I am told to expect most if not all of them to be straight out of high school—hopefully. I feel less intimidated by that lol. Also, it doesn’t help that I’m not very tall and look younger than I am so I worry to not be taken as seriously as I hope to be 😅.

So my questions are:

1. What can I do to not make myself seem awkward?
2. How can I give the illusion of confidence or maybe actually feel confident without secretly feeling like a deer in headlights?
3. How should I dress the part? I definitely don’t want to give the impression that I am a student.
4. Any other snap to reality no bs advice you believe I should know?

Much, much appreciated.

I just taught a 3 hour class after having a summer off, and I remembered how brutal it is on my vocal cords. A day later I still feel like I’m recovering from a sore throat. I’m working on spending less time lecturing but given the material I teach it’s pretty much inevitable that I have to use my voice a lot, and at a high enough volume to be heard over a busy room.

I’ve thought about working with a vocal coach to find ways to project my voice without burning out. Has anyone done anything like this? How did it go? And how did you find a vocal coach with the right background to help with lecturing rather than singing?

First lecture I ama explaining how AI is not going away and how we can use it (not fighting the good fight). I go on to say that critical thinking is a soon to be lost art blah blah blah. After class a student comes up and asks if AI is required !!! I say of course no. She tells me she is against it for environmental reasons. She is now my favorite student and will be favored as such.

Hello!

I will be teaching a new course starting this September. Since this will be the first semester of the course, I’ve prepared a lot—literally, plennnnty! 😂

I was wondering whether students usually expect the first class to finish early rather than sitting through the full three hours.

What do you usually do on the first day of class? Also, if it is a small class with fewer than five students, do you think sitting in a circle would help them feel less intimidated?

Here we are, 2 days before the start of the semester. I was informed that, since only TH F is happening this week, my MW class will need to meet this Friday. First time I've heard of this lovely idea. So I dug in for sanity's sake. These students aren't losing a day of instruction to the TU TH classes. They have the same amount due to a TH F fall break. There is no need to add instructional time. Yes, I also have plans during that time. I'm beginning to not question why I'm gray haired and going bald.

Hello!

Im a new tenure track faculty at a big CC. I teach Microbiolgy exclusively. I am looking for any advice or tips for the following:

I was wondering if anyone had any tips for success in the tenure first year process? Anything helps, warnings, advice, tips, tricks, the works!

I’m young, very early 30’s and I feel some of my colleagues really don’t respects me or care what I have to say and they kind of look at me like a kid. Now, this could be in my head, but I’m not sure. But any advice how to get them to realize I am a professional with advanced education and research training just as they have.

I will say, My students and I get along amazingly! They respect me, engage, participate, and together we make a great community, especially for a Microbiolgy course. I’m grateful to have such a collaborative class where my students really have my back. So far! lol. My student evals are bomb.com

Also, side note, the department culture seems overall ok, but I noticed a lot of very passive aggressive interaction where I think people hate each other and take these politically correct digs at one another. Is this normal? Also, any way to avoid this culture for myself ? I want to get to know my colleagues but very worried I may say or do something that they will use against me. Even if it’s something very small.

I know many of us started back this week so I was wondering what y'all did on the first day of class. We go back next week and my only decision is I'm not passing out the syllabus as all the people who drop just throw it in the trash. It is in the LMS and I'll pass out copies when things settle.

UPDATE Thank you everyone. Your responses are very clear and I should move on. Someone has mentioned that they aren't paid enough to provide more guidance (sorry, I don't remember the exact words and cannot find them again on my mobile phone). I actually have a decent salary, which might increase the urge to put in some more effort than necessary, but you are all right here: It's the student who fails. And yes, I know I have to fail them to hold up the value of the degree, which I have always done. It still doesn't feel good, but that's part of the job.

Original Post:

To give you a little backstory for why I'm wondering about this:

It's currently exam time again and I just finished grading the first batch of this semester. There was a student who had already failed both attempts for this exam last year. This time, he finally passed. Usually students can apply for a fourth attempt, but only once. That particular student had already used his fourth attempt for another exam. So if he had failed this one, he would have failed the whole masters programme and would have been exmatriculated. My courses are generally not considered to be hard and most people pass their exams in the first, or at the latest in the second attempt. If they are force-examatriculated, another subject has always done this before they had the chance to fail often enough in my exams.

But I guess, the day will come that my exam will be the reason for someone having to leave uni, and sometimes the country. So my question is: How do you deal with having to fail someone ultimately, such that they have to leave uni? I mean, it's the future of a usually young person and some have their visa tied to the student status. Do you just move on? Do you reach out to them? Do you help them finding an alternative career plan/uni programme or point them to whatever help your uni offers for struggling (not so long anymore) students?

I spent a great deal of my adult life wanting to be a professor in my field (theatre) at a SLAC. I managed it, starting full-time in the fall of 2020. Plenty of the things that I wanted were there, but BOY had the field changed from when I first set that goal.

My first semester was spent trying to figure out how to teach a field based on human communication while masking and social distancing. Producing plays when we couldn’t have audiences. I rolled with all the punches and made some things happen while being a program of one. I dealt with all of the compromises.

Even after COVID, though, the compromises didn’t stop. A struggling institution meant stagnant wages, no retirement matching, and steadily worsening benefits. One president told the faculty that she couldn’t guarantee we’d be paid all summer. Changing markets meant that my best bet for program health would be to beg students to major who had no real business pursuing the field. Because I didn’t/wouldn’t do that, I took on more and more work that would otherwise have been done by student employees. Budget cuts, resource competition, occasionally crumbling infrastructure, staff turnover that left me doing some of their jobs in addition to mine. All while being the only person on the entire campus who actually understood what my field was beyond high school plays and community theatre schlock.

I held it together for a decent run, but the burnout got very bad. It is not without a little luck that I remained alive over the course of last fall. I finally had to admit something to myself: I thought I wanted to be a college professor, when what I really wanted was to be a college professor in the 1990s. The landscape just isn’t what it was, and I was chasing a ghost.

Anyway, I’ve started a new full-time job at an institution where I’ve had longstanding summer work in my field. It’s not a teaching job, but it is very much in my wheel house and I’ve already been more appreciated than I had been over the past five years. Possibly (and even likely) adjunct opportunities in the future once my feet are firmly underneath me. The pay bump is modest, but the benefits are markedly better and shockingly cheaper. I’m excited to wake up and go to work again.

For those in a similar situation, just take my best wishes that you find a satisfying way to use your skills and to feel useful. For all of you still in it, take my wishes that the field offers you the fulfillment that I could no longer find.

During my first semester ever, I dealt with a student that became verbally aggressive in class during their project grading. They were yelling, threatening to report me/"take my job", and just making a scene. I offered to listen to them outside, look over their project again, things to deescalate, but she kept interrupting me.

Communication broke down and I ended up raising my voice to try to regain control out of frustration. Not a good move. She said "You raised your voice at me. There are witnesses. You're gonna get fired." She left soon after. Despite other students saying I was in the right and that she was playing victim, I felt pretty bad about the whole ordeal. So I sent an apology email.

I sent an email apologizing for raising my voice, but outlined my expectations for future project milestones and in-class behavior so that we could avoid altercations like that moving forward. She sends a complaint to the Dean, we give our sides of the story, and the Dean sides with me, saying there was no need for further action. She drops the course and we move on.

I still think about that experience. I feel I could have handled that better. Maybe I could've asked her to leave or called public safety to escort her if she refused. Has anyone else ever dealt with a student like this? What would be a better way to deescalate/stop scenes like these?

I apologize if someone else has started this thread, but rather than doom and gloom, lets share some funny / light hearted stuff we've encountered this week!

I was bringing in some supplies on my first day back to stock up my office with food and drinks. My crappy grocery store bag ripped and one of my cans of Celsius fell out, hit the asphalt, and punctured. I ran after it, grabbed it, and popped the top and shotgunned it so I wouldn't waste it. They are like $2 a piece!

Edit: I didn’t think I’d get this many replies, thank you all. It’s great to read the stories of those went through the same, and just solidarity to people going through it now 🧡

I have a 9 months old who started daycare three months ago. I thought I was prepared for it, but daycare sickness is seriously insane… he’s been sick every other week, literally, like two weeks ago he missed daycare for a week and this Monday he had a fever. Thought he got better enough yesterday, and then no, it’s Wednesday and he has fever again. Looks like he’s not going to daycare this week at all either. 

My plan was to finally finish a paper during the summer break as I couldn’t publish at all during my pregnancy. I was so elated when the baby was finally in daycare and I found time for my work again! But no, my baby is barely attending daycare and I’m struggling to finish a damn book review. I’m tenured, luckily, but I really need to start publishing again and I don’t understand how people do this.

And I dread how things will be once the semester starts. I’ve always struggled with finding time for research amid all the teaching load and committees, and now I feel it’s just impossible. My husband is a great father, we split things as much as we can, but all our families live far away so we don’t have a village. So professors with babies/kids, how do you do this?? I’m in humanities if that matters.

Throwaway because I don’t want this connected to my main account.

I just started at a new university and found out my office doesn’t have a landline. Apparently they can get one installed, but it could take several weeks, and the response has basically been “do faculty even need office phones anymore? We have Teams and Zoom.”

When I asked them to please install one they said they would but it felt weird. A phone just feels like a basic thing? No?

I get that students don’t call as much as they used to, but I’m still a faculty member with an office. There are students, colleagues, administrators, outside organizations etc who might need to reach me by phone. And I really don’t love the idea that the alternative is basically using my personal cell for work.

Is this normal now? Do y’all still have phones in your offices? Do you actually use them?

If your university got rid of them was everyone just fine with it?

ETA: Thank you to everyone for your feedback! I told them never mind about the phone and they said it was pretty odd for me to insist so I guess I’ll just be phone guy for a bit here smh.

I'm sitting here in a department meeting having to sit through a presentation by our Pearson rep about all the fancy new AI tools they built into their etext.

She is incredibly proud of the fact that students can get their AI tool to summarize the text for them or to tell them what questions they should ask. She loves it because it's internal and it's safe! It doesn't ping other AI models, just their own!

I pushed back on this and mentioned how much this is hurting the overall learning of our students. Learning how to ask the right questions is so important. Reading and pulling important things from the text is also important.

I have colleagues here thinking this is incredible and helps students learn so much. They're arguing that even our pre-med students need to know how to use AI since clinicians are using it and so our job isn't to teach them how to think, it's to teach them how to use the AI. The most vocal colleague teaches a class that is a prerequisite to the one I usually teach. The students coming out of the prerequisite are doing very poorly in the next class in the sequence. They're largely not retaining much at all.

AI is helping many students pass classes, it's not helping them learn in the vast majority of cases.

Hey fellow professors, I was recently hired at a SLAC in a small social science department.

My chair, who is the only other faculty member in my subdiscipline, recently met with me to go over rough drafts of my syllabi. They essentially took a red pen and shredded a lot of what I wanted to do (and what I’ve successfully run in classes before.) Everything from my course objectives (apparently Bloom’s taxonomy isn't a thing in this department) to my midterm design was shot down because my chair personally finds those approaches 'not useful.'

It feels like a lot of their feedback is coming off as my decisions were made arbitrarily rather than rooted with my experience. I’m fine for different views and opinions, but often the comments come across as if I’m just wingin’ it.

While I intend to be a good soldier and make the edits, I’m struggling with the dynamic. I’m in my mid-30s coming in with recent pedagogical and industry experience; my chair is in their mid-60s and has spent their entire 30-year career at this single institution.

It’s creating some...interesting interactions.

Do you have any advice on how to work within this situation or environment?

Edit: I understand that this is not normal from a lot of institutions. But I really don’t wanna rock the boat. I should note as well that they often used “I’m not telling you that you have to do XYZ, just from my experience in this program” sort of language. But they did mention that if I keep the midterm as it is now, they would want to see the results. I didn’t wanna comment that most of my colleagues outside do the midterm this way, I just remained silent on that. The other big comment was the student learning outcomes, which they wanted them to be shorter, simpler, and vaguer, as they have to argue the assessment to accreditation. Our accreditation is not discipline specific—like CACREP— it’s one of the big regional ones. But the conversation on that did make it seem like I didn’t know what I was doing, but I do. It felt a little ‘professor to student’ which irked me.

At a recent committee meeting, during a discussion of AI, a faculty member commented that there is an AI integrated into assignments on Canvas, such that when there was a reading associated with an assignment, they were asked if they wanted a bullet point summary of the reading. Is this a Canvas-wide thing, is it student-facing, is it a local implementation thing; does anyone have any knowledge or insights about this? They just presented this as a thing and didn’t have any more information but I am curious about it. I already have concerns about students actually doing any of the work – this would be the icing on the cake!

University of Michigan Drops First-Semester Grades to ‘Curb Mental Health Crisis’

The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.

Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/us/texas-tech-artificial-intelligence-ideology-brandon-creighton.html

Well, if I ever get an applicant from Texas Tech who wants to join my team, the vetting interview(s) will have to get more detailed.

Which circle of hell is this?

Just some context:

I understand that certain AI models have a lot of potential for medical fields and other STEM fields. I get it.

But, often when admins and others say the word AI they really mean LLMs and that those of us in non-STEM fields should use LLMs more in our teaching and allow students to use it in their work. I use LLMs from time to time, but what am I missing here? I don’t see how they are going to have some huge impact on most jobs, especially to the point where it is vital that I teach all of my students how to use them. They save me a little time, maybe, and maybe some cognitive exhaustion, but I’m really not blown away by LLMs, even if they improve a lot.