Preface

Each fall, the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) at ETSU welcomes new faculty with an orientation session, introducing them to the support and resources available for their teaching. As part of this, we have traditionally gifted them a teaching handbook—most often Barbara Gross Davis’ Tools for Teaching, an excellent resource. However, as providing this book each year has become less feasible, and given my familiarity with the wealth of openly licensed (OER) teaching guides available online, I proposed creating our own resource—with some assistance from ChatGPT and other AI tools.

This guide is a synthesis of various OER teaching guides, lightly edited and revised with the aid of generative AI tools to ensure consistency, clarity, and practical relevance. The goal is to provide a comprehensive how-to guide for those new to teaching in higher education, while also serving as a reference and source of inspiration for experienced instructors. Throughout, the focus is on practical strategies that apply across disciplines, course levels, and instructional modalities. While these strategies are grounded in research and theoretical frameworks, they are presented with an emphasis on application. Readers are encouraged to follow citations and explore the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) within their own disciplines.

This guide rests on a few key assumptions:

1. Core principles of good teaching apply across contexts. While an economics course and an art history seminar differ greatly in content and outcomes, both benefit from well-structured discussions that engage students in critical thinking. Similarly, while online and face-to-face teaching differ in delivery, foundational practices like providing timely feedback remain universally important.

2. Teaching is fundamentally about learning. This is a student-centered guide. As a quote from a past CTE participant reminds me—“Teaching is not telling.” It is not enough to lecture and provide resources; effective teaching requires understanding where students are and helping them reach learning goals. This belief shapes the structure of the guide, beginning with student identity and background and centering access and equity as foundational to learning. The guide also draws inspiration from updated works such as How Learning Works (Lovett et al., 2023) and the UDL Guidelines 3.0 (CAST, 2025), both of which emphasize learner agency and the role of identity in learning. These shifts reflect broader trends in pedagogy toward more transformative approaches to teaching.

3. AI-assisted content creation offers unique advantages. Some may find it counterintuitive—or even unsettling—to use AI as a ghostwriter for a resource rooted in human connection and learning. However, this approach provides several benefits:

   • Timeliness: AI allows us to quickly generate, update, and refine content.
   • Consistency: The guide draws from multiple OER sources, written at different times, for different audiences, and with varying levels of depth. AI helps synthesize key insights and unify tone and style.
   • Local relevance: We can customize content to highlight institutional resources, showcase insights from ETSU instructors, and provide relevant examples.

To maintain academic integrity, each chapter includes a Sources & Attribution box, detailing where content originated and how AI was used—whether through direct adoption, summarization, or minor revision. For instance, the chapter on Designing Meaningful Multiple-Choice Questions is directly adapted from Vanderbilt’s Teaching Guide, while other chapters have been streamlined or updated to ensure clarity and relevance.

This guide is both a teaching resource and an experiment in AI-assisted educational development. It reflects an ongoing commitment to supporting instructors in their teaching, fostering effective learning environments, and exploring new possibilities in educational technology. I hope you find it useful, thought-provoking, and adaptable to your own teaching practice.