S4 E31: Supporting Faculty in Today's Higher Education Landscape

Find out how the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence are natural collaborators as we navigate how to support faculty in today’s higher education landscape. In this episode, your host, Dr. Rachel Yoho, explores this dynamic educational partnership with guests Dr. Indigo Eriksen and Hector Revollo from NVCC. These two institutions share a region, many students, resources, and even faculty. Listen in to find out how our guests are supporting faculty to feel empowered in our current, challenging environment, particularly around artificial intelligence. 

Resource: ADVANCE: https://advancesuccess.gmu.edu/ 

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Rachel 0:08

Hello and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University. I'm very excited to be joined by some colleagues from Northern Virginia Community College, and we're gonna have a great conversation about some of the work that they're doing, some of their work, especially around teaching in the age of artificial intelligence. So I'll ask our guests to please introduce themselves.

Indigo 0:33

My name is Indigo Eriksen, and I actually have my PhD from George Mason, so this is a

Rachel 0:38

Woohoo.

Indigo 0:39

wonderful conversation. I'm the Director of Faculty Professional Development and as part of that, the Director of our Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence or CATE as we like to call her. And outside of that, I'm a former Professor of English at the Woodbridge campus and a poet.

Hector 0:58

My name is Hector Revollo, and I'm an Academic Technologist and part of the leadership team at NOVA's Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence, CATE. I've also had my Bachelor's at George Mason University, and in my role I support faculty and integrating artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and emerging technologies to enhance teaching and learning. I've led NOVA's AI Community of Practice, and I collaborate on a lot of XR and instructional design projects across the college as well.

Rachel 1:29

All right. Well that's great. Thank you both so much for joining us today. So as we get started, I see we have already lots of great connections, personal connections, degree connections. But before we get into all of that, can you tell us a little bit more about your center? So this Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence, or CATE at Northern Virginia Community College.

Indigo 1:51

Certainly, so like many centers, we used to be called CETL, the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, and during the pandemic we had a rebrand into CATE and then I joined as the interim director last year and then became the permanent director this year. Hector's been involved with CETL and CATE and some other things before me, so he'll have more to share about more of our background. But when we were CETL, we fostered community through some of our beloved programming, like the Teaching Squares, new faculty orientation, and PUP, which is our Winter Professional Development Conference. PUP stood for Power Up Your Pedagogy. And then when I joined as interim director, we renamed it to the Wonder Conference, which is an acronym for wisdom, openness, novelty, data-driven, engagement, and reflection to try to bring out those themes in the faculty professional development conference. But CETL has a long history at NOVA, and we have just begun our history as CATE.

Hector 2:50

So, like Indigo said, yes, I've been with NOVA for a while and in my previous roles I worked frequently with our previous program called CETL. And when I think back to those experiences that I've had with faculty, sometimes our faculty used to be either at GMU and then they taught at NOVA, or were teaching at both institutions. And a lot of times those faculty would come to me with simple questions that always turn into a bigger conversation because they face similar issues teaching at both institutions, you know, and then they often were recalibrating because of different expectations at different institutions, the different tools that we use and sometimes different assumptions about the students. So I think conversations with that faculty and those issues always shaped how I think about CATE's work right now, which is basically not pushing tools or trends, but trying to help faculty make sense of their teaching in real context.

Rachel 3:55

Yeah, I think that's such a great point, especially when we think about what are the tools that our faculty use as far as their teaching skills. We can always learn where to click or what educational technology or learning management system plugin type of tool is trendy or interesting, but I think that's such a great point, is how do we look at that skill building? So I think that also gives us a really good introduction into what we wanna talk about next, which is NOVA and Mason are really great educational partners in this Northern Virginia area. So can you tell us a little bit about your thoughts and approaches to educating in this community, with our community, and maybe with your friendly neighbors here at Mason?

Indigo 4:36

Right. So of course NOVA and Mason, we share a region, we share industry partners, we share students, and sometimes we even share faculty. So one of the things that comes to mind is collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. I think we are natural collaborators because of everything that we share, but we also are these natural collaborators because we have similar missions and visions and, to use a very technical term, vibes. So, um, for example, the Executive Director of Stearns was on my dissertation committee, so there's already this very cool bridge. A former NOVA faculty member is now a part of Stearns, Breana Bayraktar. So she and I collaborate a lot on alternative grading. And I just think that two-way street is such a beautiful model and something I really love that we can do together. And it's not just that the two year comes to the four year to learn things, but also the four year comes to the two year, and we create that shared community and shared resources and knowledge is such a beautiful thing that I love that we're able to do, and we really appreciate all of you. And of course, like Rachel, you came to our first virtual AI summit and that was such a really cool thing that made us really happy. So I'm all about collaboration and community. I'm probably the hippiest one on our team. So those are the things that come right to my mind when I'm thinking about how we are these educational partners in NOVA.

Hector 6:04

Right, so when I think about educating in North Virginia, the first thing that comes to my mind is thinking about our students and really how complicated their lives are. Our students are obviously commuter students, but a lot of students at George Mason are commuter students as well, and they're working sometimes while they're going to school and sometimes even supporting the families. So students often start at NOVA and then continue on to Mason, and sometimes that transition is a smooth one, but sometimes it comes with challenges. And so because of that, teaching at either institution has a lot of ripple effect beyond just that single classroom. Faculty are often teaching students who are trying to figure out their next step, and so that means faculty have to be really clear and flexible in how they teach. And I think the partnership between NOVA and Mason help faculty better support those transitions that our students are facing. And that alignment will help our students move forward without feeling like they have to start all over. So when I think about teaching, thinking about where students are coming from and when they're going is really important.

Rachel 7:13

Yeah, I think that's a great point because especially as we talk about, it's not just about good teaching, it's about helping our students have those basically student or studenting type of skills and how we have similar things across. And I think here it's really comes back to that access to education. We're educating the very diverse, very populated, very high cost of living Northern Virginia area. And I think that has a lot of impact, especially in how our students learn, how they show up, how they engage. Just like you said, even if they're a student and supporting their families and working full-time or whatever that might look like. Certainly we have a whole range of students as well. So let's talk a little bit about one of the big topics of interest in education right now certainly is artificial intelligence or AI. So as we do this, let's explore our approaches to faculty professional development. In this space. I know, Indigo, you already mentioned that conference that you so kindly allowed me to present at. But let's talk more broadly about your approaches to faculty professional development and maybe ground it a little bit in that conversation about AI.

Indigo 8:24

This is a topic that I really like to talk about. What I remember, was it 2022 when chat GPT became publicly available to everyone all at once? And I was an English professor and I thought, Oh, I'm just gonna ignore this for a year and wait until my discipline has a white paper on it, and then I'll just do whatever that is. And of course, the next week I had students using ChatGPT in my class. And so I thought, Oh gosh, I'm just gonna change professions. Maybe I'll go back to waiting tables or something. Uh, and instead I became the Director of Faculty Professional Development, where 30% of my job is working with this incredible team. And we think about how do we support faculty in this, you know, I call it a hellscape, but a different way to call that it might be a landscape. As an intersectional feminist, I have so many concerns about generative AI. Its costs on the environment, on communities, on land, on learning, on curiosity, on thinking, on intellectual property, on autonomy, et cetera, on privacy. And so what I think is really important and something I'm really proud about with our approach to professional development is that we're not asked to just tell everybody, use it, use it, use it. We are empowered to create a space for really like authentic engagement and learning around it. So part of what we try to do with our professional development with AI and faculty is to have this inclusive approach to where faculty are. And part of the way we do that is NOVA has sent a faculty team to AAC&U's Institute on AI Curriculum and Pedagogy. And we're attending this year long institute to create an action plan. And one of the things that grounds our action plan and our current faculty development is this inclusive framework that was created by Dr. Tazin Daniels. And this framework creates a real space for people wherever they are, from skeptical to resistant, to super engaged. And one of the things that Tazine talks a lot about is it's okay to not use AI in your teaching or in your curriculum, but it's really important to have an informed perspective on why you're making those choices so that you can tell your students if they ask you. And one of the things that we learned at Mason when we came to the Stearns's Innovations in Teaching Learning is, and we took that back to NOVA, is how faculty, if they're going to create a lot of GenAI (generative AI) assignments or assessments in the curriculum, they also need to have an opt out. And I thought, Oh, well that's so logical, but we hadn't even thought of that. So this framework really makes space for all of that. And at the end of the day, we just want faculty to make informed, thoughtful, evidence-based decisions about how we are or are not using Gen AI and to support them wherever they are. And so that grounds all of the work that we do, and I really appreciate that we're able to do that. So we have the AAC&U Action Plan Team, and then Tazin Daniels gave the keynote at our inaugural virtual AI summit in the fall, which you were at. And that virtual summit was a really nice space where we had grounding work in the framework. Then we were able to offer interactive workshops for different disciplines or perspectives. And then we had faculty and experts like yourself come in to give presentations about very specific Gen AI topics and teaching and learning so that we could really support our faculty all over the spectrum. And that's something that we'll be continuing to do, having a virtual AI summit.

Rachel 11:59

Yeah, it was great presenting at your AI summit and I think you make a lot of really good points here. So let's also talk about, I'd love to hear more about some of the other aspects of wraparound support, like your grants programs are very cool. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Indigo 12:14

We also have a lot of wraparound support. So one of the things that we do at CATE, and I talk a lot about, is this wraparound support, borrowing sort of from student affairs and student services, where it's not just a one and done, like, come to this workshop or this training and you're done. And even with our grants, it's not just apply for the grant and we'll see you at the end of the year. I hope you got your project done. Instead-yeah, well I was like, that doesn't work for me as faculty. Like I have like meetings and deadlines and accountability, people I can ask for help, places I can be vulnerable. So we really strive to create that model in our communities of practices, our grant cohorts and the workshops that we offer. And I just wanna touch a little bit on the grants that we are able to manage at CATE. So our president's office gave us two grants to offer. And so that grant is an AI incubator grant that has three phases. Faculty can integrate AI or machine learning into their teaching. And what is beautiful about this model is you don't have to know what that means yet. You just need to know that it's needed. And then the first phase is learning all about your discipline specific, industry specific needs, because AI has changed things so quickly and you know, it seems like you go to bed on Thursday, you wake up on Friday, and something has changed the landscape. So the first phase of that grant is just creating this supportive space of learning, and then you go into a proposal development. And then you go into the piloting. So that's a really wonderful model of how we're doing things. Then the two grants from our president's office, one is the assessment in the age of AI, and this could be redesigning part of your course to integrate some sort of AI into the curriculum and your teaching. But really this is geared towards supporting faculty who want to redesign their course in light of the challenges that Gen AI has created in assessing student learning. So this might mean shifting to alternative grading, which as I think we all know in this room, it shifts the focus to feedback and student growth rather than points on an exam or a midterm. So that's a nice way to try to redirect how we assess teaching and learning in light of AI. Or maybe you wanna break down a major assessment, like a research paper into parts and, and go back to annotating a document either in hard copy or digital annotations, but having students submit those annotations as part of the process rather than assuming students do that and skipping ahead. So there's all sorts of different ways that we can redesign our courses in light of the challenges of AI, and this grant supports faculty as they figure out the right way for their teaching, their discipline, and their students. And then the other grant that we have available is our developing discipline based AI microcredentials grants. And this is very cool. We are creating five micro-credentials in non-technology disciplines. And so this grant, we're really thinking like, okay, when students leave NOVA and join the workforce or leave NOVA and transfer to their four year, what specific AI skills do they need to succeed and thrive? And then how can we create a microcredential that prepares students with those skills? And so these are team-based grants that support the discipline in creating these micro credentials that we'll have a record of these microcredentials and this is something students can put on their LinkedIn or their CV or, I like to joke, on their dating profile, which probably is not what students do, but I like the idea, like, yeah, and I have my microcredential

Rachel 15:52

AI fluency.

Indigo 15:54

Yeah, exactly right. I don't know, like maybe that's so, um, so those are some of the larger things that we're doing on our framework about the wraparound support and the inclusive approach. And Hector and other people on our team have been doing some really great on the grounds work with faculty.

Hector 16:10

Yeah, so my work with AI faculty development sits really close to faculty day-to-day practice. Faculty come to our AI professional development from very different starting points. Some are just curious about how use AI, others are concerned about the impact of assignments and assessments. So a big part of our work is creating spaces where, like Indigo said, those conversations can happen openly. The AI community of practice that we've been holding has been one of the most important spaces for this work, I think because it gives faculty a place to talk openly about their concern, share what they've been trying, and learn from each other across disciplines and campuses. And we focus mainly on conversation and reflection before we focus on any tools that we're going to use. And that really helps lower the anxiety and helps build confidence. Another approach is to support faculty who go deeper through funded experimentation, like those programs that Indigo just mentioned. They give faculty permission to rethink their teaching, but we're not starting from scratch. We're always building on things that faculty have used in their teaching in the past. And the goal is not quick answers.

Rachel 17:24

I think these are really great points, especially as we come back to what teaching really can and should look like. And that's certainly not a one size fits all. That's not always a click here, try this tool. But how do we help our students authentically engage and actually learn things. And how do we help our faculty feel empowered in a very challenging environment to do the things that they need and the things that they need to do in assignments or activities for their students' learning. I think these are such great points and great opportunities as well. I think it also echoes a lot of what we're doing here at Mason in terms of grant opportunities, a lot of professional development programming. And like we've mentioned, having some exchange of ideas, having some participation in your conferences and your participation in our conferences, I think brings us a lot of opportunity, especially in this area. And we have a kind of interesting, kind of unique area, especially when we think about all the data centers that are here in Northern Virginia. When we think about, when we talk about those environmental impacts. The local impacts, local economy, the jobs, all of those different things kind of coming together here. Not to say that everywhere else isn't also struggling with how do we teach with all these different AI tools. So I think here again, thank you both so much for everything you've shared. The opportunities, the information, the framing, especially, for how we approach faculty professional development. I think here we're looking at really our keystone concept of authentic engagement. Not only helping our students have that authentic engagement, but what does that look like for faculty professional development? How do we spend our time wisely? How do we look at what's going to be most useful? And really, I love that approach of building from a framework, building from a very structured, thoughtful approach to how do we do this? How do we not just jump in, maybe not throwing everything out the window kind of thing. So with that, any final thoughts that you'd like to leave us with today?

Indigo 19:29

I think one of the things that our team talk a lot about is building and sustaining trust with our colleagues. And when I think about how faculty are responding to the work that we're trying to do around supporting teaching and AI, we're starting to see some preliminary trust come forth, emerge. And this is really a beautiful thing when faculty, we'll put on a workshop and they, for example, we had this incredible workshop with Krista Wojdak from Appalachia State, and she was about AI universal design and course design and using AI as a way to begin designing a course and to integrate universal design principles and OERs, open educational resources. And so some faculty emailed me and said, you know, I don't really know how I feel about using AI to design a course. I feel really skeptical and stressed, and I don't think that AI should do that. That's our job, but I'm willing to try. And so they were willing to come to this workshop, and then they could see that we were trying to use AI in this really ethical thoughtful way. That didn't do the work of faculty, because faculty are the ones who do the work of faculty. Gen AI does not, and I maintain, cannot do that work. But it's a way to start drafting some of that. And I think those conversations where faculty feel comfortable saying, I don't think this is a great idea, but I'll try, I'll come to the workshop and see, are so meaningful because it feels like faculty are willing to take us at our word that we really mean. You can be wherever you are on the spectrum. I really credit Hector, Megan, and Kaitlyn, who are the other members of our team with doing this work because they are working with faculty one-on-one and small groups consistently over the semester to listen, to advocate for them and to create the spaces of collaboration and discussion that are so meaningful. And Hector, you have such great experience with faculty.

Hector 21:28

Yeah, so the faculty responses to AI really run the full spectrum like we all know. Some are curious, some are experimenting, cautious, skeptical, but really they're all trying to understand what it actually means for their teaching. And what I often most hear is not excitement or resistance, but uncertainty. So they're asking actual questions like, what's reasonable to expect from students now, what still counts as learning? And really importantly what Indigo touched on, how do I keep up without burning out? Because there's a lot of emotional load, cognitive load on them right now. Many faculty are already stretched thin and trying to figure out, AI feels like one more thing that they have to try to figure out. So that's why I think the community based spaces, like the community of practice matters so much because when faculty are struggling with the same questions this really lowers the pressures, like we mentioned. That helps shift the conversation from like, I have to solve this now to something where we can all figure this out together.

Rachel 22:36

Yeah, absolutely. That community is so important. So whether you are a faculty member at NOVA and wanna check out their resources, especially those things that they've been highlighting here, or if you're a faculty member at Mason, we have many cool things that mirror quite a bit of what our colleagues here from Northern Virginia Community College have been talking about, or if you're somewhere else and wanna check out the community in your area or build community in your area; these are all great opportunities. Before we wrap up, I do also wanna mention another cool program that we have between George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College, which is the ADVANCE program. And so ADVANCE is a way for students to transfer from Northern Virginia Community College to George Mason University, basically to just complete their four year undergraduate degree. So there's a few different eligibility requirements, but I encourage you to check out that program as well, because I think these are all great things that show not only the community, but also the partnerships, what we're building here, what we're creating here, and educating in the area and really working together in very unique and collaborative ways. So, all right, with that, thank you both so much for your time. Thank you for being great partners, great thought partners, great collaborators. And you know, as we look at how do we create access to education and opportunities in education, particularly in the Northern Virginia area, I really appreciate that. So thank you both so much for joining us.

Indigo 24:06

Thank you very much. We look forward to working together more.

Hector 24:10

Yeah. Thank you so much. Really appreciate this.

Rachel 24:13

All right. And so check out our next episodes we post every two weeks during the spring and fall semesters, so you can find us on your favorite podcast platforms with the Keystone Concepts and Teaching. I'm your host, Rachel Yoho, and thank you so much for listening.