Listen to Season One here or Season Two here.
Season Three
Instructors across the University of Missouri campus are experimenting and innovating with ways to help students think about AI and it impact on our society.
Season 3 of the Teaching for Learning Center’s AI Critical Literacy podcast brings a collection of AI-and-teaching innovations, exercises, and assignments together from different parts of campus to provide ideas and inspiration as we work to help our students—and ourselves—grasp the role and place of AI.
Episode 1: Virtual Teaching Assistants:
Guests: Dr. Sarah Orton, Director of Undergraduate Studies | Dr. Hessam Yazdani, Associate Professor
This episode features Dr. Sarah Orton and Dr. Hessam Yazdani, both from the Missouri College of Engineering. Together, they discuss a departmental initiative focused on integrating customized AI virtual teaching assistants into engineering courses to enhance student success.
Episode 2: Contending with What AI Thinks it Knows About You:
Guest: Renee Henson, Associate Professor, School of Law
Professor Renee Henson shares an in-class activity she uses to teach students about AI, inferences, and privacy. Henson explains how she shows her class the surprisingly spot-on—and sometimes uncomfortably personal—inferences a chatbot draws about her using only public information. Then students work with the Show-Me AI tools to evaluate and reflect on the types of inferences tools make and what they mean for U.S. privacy protections.
Episode 3: Nice Lesson Plans – Gee Thanks, Just Taught It:
Guest: Keri Jones, Assistant Teaching Professor, School of Information Science & Learning Technologies
Can AI help generate lesson plans and assessments? Keri Jones discusses how AI tools can streamline lesson planning and the creation of student assessments by providing a starting point for faculty. A starting point. While these tools offer efficiency and time savings, human expertise remains essential to verify the accuracy of discipline-specific content.
Episode 4: A Technology Journal:
Guest: Liz Lucas, Associate Teaching Professor & Houston Harte Chair, School of Journalism
This episode is about intentionality. Liz Lucas and Houston Harte share an assignment that challenges students to log their digital device usage for a full day to develop self-awareness regarding passive screen habits, unexamined technology use, and persuasive software designs. Our conversation also covers broader considerations for higher education, including faculty AI training, the transition from conversational chatbots to agentic AI, associated cybersecurity risks, and fostering classroom trust and intrinsic motivation.