R3 3.6 July 1, 2025 New Book and Podcast Roundup; Reflection on the Future of Tech-Enhanced Education

Three of 2025's best reads on pedagogy, a few podcasts to catch up on, and looking ahead to where online, hybrid, and technology-enhanced teaching might be going in the future.

This past month was a time for me to take a break, unplug, and enjoy an extended back-country trip in the company of my spouse (who, as a fifth-grade teacher, needs a summer vacation even more than I do). It ended up being an excellent time to reflect, plan, and also to catch up on some of the new books on college pedagogy that have come out in 2025. Later in today’s issue I’ll share some brief impressions of those works - not formal reviews per se but simply what struck me as their strengths and why you might want to pick them up as well.

Traveling put a lot of reading time on my schedule, but it also took me out of my podcast-listening routine, so catching up on those is next on my agenda. Here are a few I’ve got queued up, along with the descriptions listed on their respective sites:

Social Learning Amplified - John Warner: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

Live from Perusall Exchange® 2025, author and educator John Warner discusses how AI is reshaping writing instruction, assessment, and the role of human connection in the classroom.

Tea for Teaching - UDL 3.0

The Universal Design for Learning (or UDL) framework is based on research on how students learn. In this episode, Tom Tobin, Lillian Nave, and Jennifer Pusateri join us to discuss the most recent evolution of the UDL guidelines.

Teaching in Higher Ed - Myths and Metaphors in the Age of Generative AI 

Leon Furze shares about myths and metaphors in the age of generative AI on episode 572 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

Intentional Teaching - Take it or Leave It with Stacey Johnson, Liz Norell, and Viji Sathy

Once again I’ve invited three smart colleagues on the show to discuss recent op-eds that address the challenges that colleges and universities and their teaching missions are facing here in 2025. For each essay, we decide if we want to Take It (that is, agree with the central thesis of the essay) or Leave It (that is, disagree). It’s an artificial binary that generates lots of useful discussion about the state of higher ed.

Along those lines, you may want to check out this episode of the Academic Life podcast, which I had the pleasure of recording earlier this year. Nominally, it’s about learning students’ names (the subject of my last book). But in the end, host Christina Gessler and I ended up exploring some deeper issues in teaching, including some stemming from my own early-career experiences and the barriers I had to overcome in order to become the teacher I am today.

This brings us back to the new books I wanted to tell you about. Each offers fresh and useful takes on issues within teaching and learning, especially issues of the big-picture sort that many of us are mulling over in the time between semesters.

Smart Teaching Stronger Learning: Practical Tips from 10 Cognitive Scientists

Edited by Pooja K. Agarwal

This is an edited collection of chapters by cognitive psychologists who have a strong focus on teaching. Editor Pooja Agarwal is the perfect scholar to pull together such a group and give continuity to their various points of view. She is the author of multiple highly-regarded research articles on topics such as retrieval practice, along with a resource I recommend in nearly every talk I give: retrievalpractice.org. Each chapter manages to seamlessly blend professional experience and practical advice with cogent explanations of relevant principles and research. Retrieval practice comes up a lot, as you might expect, but so do other important phenomena such as transfer of learning and interleaving. One last complement I’d like to pay the book is the tight structure and consistent style of the different chapters. Granted, one of the draws of an edited collection is the variety of voices, but as a reader I’m sometimes thrown off when different authors approach the guiding question or topic in completely different ways, or even contradict one another. It must take a light and expert touch to coordinate across a group of expert teachers with deep and highly individualized perspectives, but that is what Agarwal has deftly accomplished in this work.

Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience

James M. Lang

This book is for any academic who’s eyed publishing opportunities outside of traditional scholarly outlets - which, if we’re being honest, is probably most of us. Lang offers advice based on his own long and successful publishing record, but just as importantly, on the behind-the-scenes knowledge he’s developed through his extensive work as an editor and faculty developer. All of this speaks to me not just as a fan of Lang’s work, but also as a compulsive reader of books about writing. (Seriously. A quick scan of my e-book library reveals at least a dozen such titles, which if nothing else, have given me something productive to do while procrastinating putting words to page myself.) Besides the practical tips and welcome inspiration, Lang’s book also offers some completely new insights on remaking one’s writing style for non-specialist audiences. This is built around a concept he calls “invitational language,” which I found to be a refreshing alternative to the usual advice about “accessible” prose. That typical accessibility advice tends to be taken as writing exclusively in short sentences with limited vocabulary, something that too often comes across as baby talk when well-meaning academic writers use it to convey complex ideas. I don’t think I can do justice to Lang’s invitational language framework here, but I’d characterize it briefly as involving many of the the same perspective-taking, enthusiasm-sharing, and relationship-building moves that great teachers use to entice students into challenging material. And of course, the book itself models these moves, carrying the reader along on currents of explanation, examples, and storytelling that result in a brilliant reading experience. I can’t imagine the challenge of writing a nonfiction book about how to write really good nonfiction, but this work sails right over that stratospheric bar.

The Opposite of Cheating: Academic Integrity in the Age of AI

Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A. Rettinger

Disclosure: This volume is part of the book series that I co-edit, although I didn’t work with these authors directly.

This is a timely book that’s firmly anchored to the new realities of teaching (both online and face-to-face) in a world where ChatGPT and its ilk can complete just about any kind of traditional assessment or assignment in seconds, untraceably and to shockingly high standards. That said, this is not just a book about defending against AI cheating, but rather about issues that are bigger than that reactive stance. I’d characterize it as a holistic approach to academic integrity overall, with interesting angles on dealing with contract cheating, homework sharing, and even old-school schemes to copy off the exam of the student sitting next to you. What (naturally) also appealed to me was the in-depth discussion of the psychology of dishonesty, which can only help those of us who will need to continually adapt to new, tempting alternatives to the hard work of learning. I also respected the authors’ call for additional instruction on scholarly and professional ethics, backed up with concrete examples of what such instruction might look like in different disciplines and settings.

All of these works did what good teaching-and-learning books ought to, which is to spark productive rumination of sorts. For me, this took the form of making resolutions for my own future teaching, reminding me of research I want to get up to speed on, and refining my future focus as a scholar of teaching and learning. The Opposite of Cheating, in particular, resonated with something that has been on my mind a lot lately: the future of online and hybrid teaching and with it, the future of technologically-enhanced education at large. This is something that’s always in the back of my mind, but it’s moving more to the forefront as one of the key topics I want to keep an eye on in months to come.

I don’t know that “crossroads” is the right term for where we are at right now with all of this, but I do sense a few tensions. On the one hand, there is no way that demand for this style of course is going to go away, especially now that online and hybrid coursework is a cornerstone of professional development, degree attainment, and credentialing in so many fields. We’re also better positioned than ever to create really smashing online courses for students, thanks to the decades of scholarship, research, and innovation in the field. Even the pandemic gave us a leg up by making videoconferencing, collaboration platforms, and the like universally familiar tools rather than specialty software that only a few people seemed to know how to use well.

At the same time, not even the most idealistic advocate for online education (and I count myself as one of these) can ignore the potential of AI for undermining the whole enterprise. This goes well beyond the issue of looking up test answers or generating papers; for example, I’ve heard of whole AI-generated student personas infiltrating degree programs as a way of fraudulently completing online courses, beginning to end.

I would argue that we are also overdue for some serious innovation in how we set up and teach online and hybrid courses. Besides setting up threats to integrity, stagnant approaches mean missed opportunities to develop relationships, elicit deep and intensive intellectual work, and put into practice hard-won insights about how humans learn, both on- and off-line.

I’ll be mulling these questions over more (and paying a lot of attention to the work of online teaching experts like Flower Darby, Kevin Kelly, and Michelle Pacansky-Brock) in months to come. And finally, this feeds into another near-term goal of mine, which is to - in some way or form - revisit my now-decade-old book Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology . Whether this ends up as a formal second edition, a sequel, or some other type of reboot will be partly up to the publishers, editors, and reviewers that all have a major say in book projects. But hopefully, I’ll have a better sense of that form soon, and when I do, I’ll keep you posted here.