Et Tu, PowerPoint? Teaching Through Tech Trouble
Nichole DeWall
July 13, 2026
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Like many faculty, I’ve long assumed that building custom digital tools was work that belonged to someone else. I am not a programmer, but over the past year, I developed a series of interactive web applications for my anatomy and physiology courses using generative AI.AI
Diving into the world of academic research feels like learning a new language for novice researchers. Concepts like ontology, epistemology, research paradigms, and methodology can be daunting. To help our graduate students learn research methods, we built an AI agent that guides them through the
When faculty tell me their online students “just don’t engage,” I always want to ask a simple question: Do your students actually know you? Not your credentials. Not your syllabus. You.
A business major must tell a teammate their work is jeopardizing a project. A nursing student listens as a patient hesitates, clearly withholding something important. A new professional struggles to push back against an unfair workload. These moments arise in different fields, yet they share
We have all been there: sitting alone with a microphone, narrating slide after slide, wondering whether our students feel a connection to the person behind the screen. In online pedagogy, research tells us that social factors such as instructor presence are a key driver of
There’s a lot of discussion in higher education about “AI literacy” and the need to teach it but less clarity about what AI literacy really is. Once we understand what AI literacy is, we will see how and why we need to teach it.
Think back to your first year as a college student. In September and October, you were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, walking in with a fresh stack of notebooks, organized notes, color-coded highlighters, and every intention of being the student who stayed ahead. For the first few
Traditional instructor-led videos, such as introductory videos and module overviews with assignment details, can offer students valuable guidance. But these are often prerecorded for repurposing and may not align with the students’ immediate needs or any portion of the course when they need the most
Many of us worry that generative AI will do students’ thinking for them. But what if the process of generating AI content—in this case, an image—actually forces a deeper level of critical analysis? To facilitate critical thinking skills about AI, we designed an assignment that
