Teaching Beyond the Podium Podcast Series

Teaching Beyond the Podium is hosted by the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Florida, and it treats college teaching as a craft that can be talked about plainly. The guests are faculty and staff from across UF, so the series works like one campus comparing notes on what works. Alexandra Baton-Bailey opens many of the episodes. Other interviewers lead some conversations, including Melina Jimenez and Nikki Lyons. The subjects vary widely. Megan Mako, a lecturer at the Warrington College of Business, teaches statistics, which her introduction calls a normally challenging topic. Her advice is about being honest with students: when a new activity turns out harder than planned, say so, tell students their grades are safe, and keep going. She treats those rough patches as chances to involve students as co-creators of the course. Dr. TehQuin D. Forbes, Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships Coordinator for the UF Honors Program, talks about play, from review-style games to open-ended group projects. In a one-credit course on The Song of Achilles, co-taught with an honors student, the final project could be almost anything except an essay or a PowerPoint. The series also looks beyond the lecture hall. Matt Gitzentaner of UF Research Computing talks about HiPerGator, the service his division makes available across campus, and pushes back on the idea that it demands heavy coding, since some applications run in a graphical interface. He mentions an art class whose students use it. Dr. Eleni Bozia, an associate professor of classics and digital humanities, works where the ancient world meets artificial intelligence, and she argues that students need to understand AI because it is already everywhere. A conversation on course design brings together instructional designer Brooke Bremer and Dr. Oliver Grunman of the College of Pharmacy, and it admits frankly that building a course is a bigger job than faculty often expect. Jennifer Smith, introduced as a costume designer turned teacher, followed a path from the Guthrie Theater to working for Prince to graduate school at UNC Chapel Hill and then to UF. Her episode focuses on communication, which the introduction calls the single thread that can make an experience go from mediocre to spectacular. In several episodes, narration comes in between the guest's remarks, sums up a point, and then hands back to the speaker. For a first listen, 'Innovating in the Classroom' has the most directly usable idea: admit a stumble out loud, and students will usually cut you some slack.