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 the growing availability of openly licensed teaching guides (OER), we proposed creating our own resource—with some assistance from generative AI tools.

This guide is a synthesis of various open educational resources, lightly revised and edited 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 formats. While grounded in research and well-established frameworks, these strategies are presented with an emphasis on real-world application. Readers are encouraged to explore citations and engage with the growing field of teaching and learning scholarship within their own disciplines.

This guide rests on a few key assumptions:

Core principles of good teaching apply across contexts. While an economics course and an art history seminar differ in content and methods, both benefit from well-structured discussions that encourage student thinking. Likewise, while online and in-person teaching involve different tools, foundational practices such as clear expectations and timely feedback remain universally important.

Teaching is fundamentally about learning. This is a student-focused guide. As a participant at a recent CTE event said, “Teaching is not telling.” It is not enough to present content; effective teaching requires understanding where students are and helping them reach learning goals. This belief shapes the structure of the guide, beginning with attention to student background and experience and emphasizing access to learning opportunities. 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 highlight the importance of learner engagement and variability. These shifts reflect a broader emphasis in teaching practice on adaptability, transparency, and responsiveness.

AI-assisted content creation offers unique advantages. Some may find it counterintuitive or even unsettling to use AI in the creation of a resource rooted in human connection and teaching. However, this approach offers several benefits:

• Timeliness: AI allows us to quickly generate, revise, and refine content.

• Consistency: The guide draws from multiple OER sources, written at different times and for varied audiences. AI helps synthesize ideas and ensure coherence in tone and structure.

• Local relevance: We can adapt content to highlight institutional resources, reflect local teaching practices, and provide examples relevant to ETSU.

To maintain transparency and academic integrity, each chapter includes a “Sources & Attribution” box detailing where content originated and how AI was used—whether through direct adaptation, summarization, or revision. For example, the chapter on Designing Meaningful Multiple-Choice Questions is based on Vanderbilt’s Teaching Guide, while other chapters have been streamlined or updated for clarity and usability.

This guide is both a practical teaching resource and an experiment in AI-assisted development. It reflects our ongoing commitment to supporting instructors, improving student learning, and exploring new tools and strategies in educational development. As a digital resource, it will continue to evolve through feedback, updated research, and emerging best practices. Periodic reviews will ensure that any print versions remain current and relevant. I hope you find this guide useful, adaptable, and thought-provoking in your own teaching journey.