Speaking of Higher Ed...
About The Podcast
Speaking of Higher Ed exists to create a resource that will inspire and assist faculty in creating engaging and meaningful learning experiences. We hope to provide higher ed faculty with a platform for sharing research related to the scholarship of teaching and learning, spark new instructional ideas, and promote interdisciplinary instructional methods.
Season One (Episodes 1 - 12) Season Two (Episodes 13 - 24) Season Three (Episodes 25-36)
Episode 41: Faculty Burnout, Recovery, and Reconnecting With Purpose with Dr. Patrice Buckner Jackson
May 20, 2026
What happens when the work you care about starts to wear you down?
Dr. Patrice Buckner Jackson, also known as Dr. PBJ, joins us for a conversation about faculty burnout, recovery, and reconnecting with purpose. Drawing from her own experience and her work as an educator, executive coach, speaker, and author of Disrupting Burnout: The Professional Woman鈥檚 Lifeline to Finding Purpose, Dr. Jackson helps define burnout as more than ordinary end-of-semester exhaustion.
The conversation explores compassion fatigue, boundaries, guilt around rest, and the pressure many faculty feel to keep going even when they need to stop. Dr. Jackson also shares practical ways faculty can reset their rhythm through daily rest, purposeful pauses, and time away from responsibilities before returning to the next semester.
This episode includes an optional Continuing the Conversation Activity. Use the button below to request the activity for episode 41.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Learn more about
Dr. Patrice Buckner Jackson, also known as Dr. PBJ, works with educators, leaders, and service-oriented professionals on strategies for disrupting burnout and doing purposeful work in a sustainable way. Visit her website to learn more about her speaking, coaching, podcast, and resources.
Listen to the
Dr. Jackson鈥檚 Disrupting Burnout podcast includes more than 100 episodes focused on burnout, recovery, boundaries, purpose, and sustainable service for high-achieving professionals who often give deeply to others.
Explore
Dr. Jackson鈥檚 book expands on several ideas discussed in this episode, including releasing expectations, building boundaries, rediscovering purpose, and leveraging your brilliance for meaningful work.
Featured quotes in this episode:
鈥淲hen I define burnout, I call it the involuntary automatic shutdown. Something stops, something breaks, and you can't control when you can't control what, and you can't control who's who's impacted because burnout is rude. It shows up how it wants to when it wants to.鈥� - Dr. Patrice Buckner Jackson, around 12:23
鈥淗ere's the thing none of us get into this without caring about the success of our students. If you do, you don't last long. We get into this because we care about helping students get across the finish line. We know the impact of this education on generations of their family, not just this individual student. We know that having that knowledge as pressure, because we want to fix all the problems, and we consider ourselves responsible for fixing all the problems.鈥� - Dr. Patrice Buckner Jackson, around 18:55
鈥淪o when we talk about boundaries, I encourage faculty members to create boundaries that are connected to pieces of your life that you are unwilling to lose. Meaning, family members, friendships, your physical health, your mental health. Personal values. If you don't connect that boundary to what means most to you, you won't have the fortitude to keep it.鈥� - Dr. Patrice Buckner Jackson, around 22:23
Previous Episodes from Season Four
Episode 40: Dr. Rafael Pacheco on Using AI to Personalize Learning
April 15, 2026
How can faculty use AI to make learning more personal without losing the human side of teaching? In this episode, Arthur Takahashi talks with Dr. Rafael Pacheco about the adaptive learning tool he developed to help students move through content at their own pace with immediate feedback, branching pathways, and opportunities to build confidence as they learn. Their conversation explores how AI can support more engaging and responsive teaching, why these tools should serve as a supplement rather than a replacement for strong instruction, and what faculty may need to prioritize as critical thinking and human judgment become even more important in higher education.
This episode includes an optional Continuing the Conversation Activity. Use the button below to request the activity for episode 40.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
To learn more about the ideas discussed in this episode, faculty can contact Dr. Rafael Pacheco by email, explore Claude by Anthropic, try ChatGPT, and visit GitHub to learn more about hosting and sharing HTML-based teaching tools.
Featured quotes in this episode:
鈥淚 feel like our role as educators is not much about the technical aspect anymore of things. It鈥檚 more the critical thinking aspect of things.鈥� - Dr. Rafael Pacheco
鈥淭his gives them the chance to be sitting down there and taking their own time and getting feedback personalized to them without even being exposed.鈥� - Dr. Rafael Pacheco
鈥淚 had to give up on the idea that a very well-constructed lecture and giving just my slides is...is enough for the students.鈥� - Dr. Rafael Pacheco
Episode 39: Bringing Gamification into Your Courses with Monica Cornetti
March 18, 2026
In this episode, Jeff Mastromonico talks with Monica Cornetti, President of Sententia Gamification, about what it really means to bring gamification into higher education. Their conversation moves beyond the common idea that gamification is simply about points, badges, or leaderboards. Instead, Monica explains why meaningful gamification begins with relevance, clear purpose, visible progress, and helping students connect course work to what they will actually do beyond the classroom.
Jeff and Monica also explore why gameful design can capture attention in ways traditional instruction often does not. They discuss how roles, consequences, progression, and narrative can help students engage more deeply with learning, and why safe failure matters when students are trying to build competence rather than simply protect a grade. The episode also addresses the limits of shallow add-ons and why attempts to dress up weak design still fall flat when they do not improve the learning experience itself.
The conversation is especially useful for faculty who are interested in gamification but are not sure where to begin. Monica shares practical ways to start small, including making progress more visible and thinking carefully about how course design supports motivation, fairness, and meaningful participation.
This episode includes an optional Continuing the Conversation Activity. Use the button below to request the activity for episode 39.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Sententia Gamification
If you want to learn more about Monica鈥檚 work, explore the for information about their approach to gamification, events, and learning design
resources,
The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
Monica mentions this book while discussing how visible progress and small wins can
help keep people motivated. Learn more at .
Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara
Monica brings up this book while talking about surprise, delight, and the importance
of meeting people where they are. Visit the for more information.
Featured quotes in this episode:
鈥淏ut we really need to connect for them how they鈥檙e going to use this in real life.鈥� - Monica Cornetti
鈥淎cademia does not encourage failure, which is actually how we learn the best.鈥� - Monica Cornetti
鈥淚f you really want to learn and experience what this is like in the real world, then we鈥檙e going to play. And games provide that safe place to fail.鈥� - Monica Cornetti
Episode 38: Vibe Coding in Higher Ed: Practical Course Builds with AI
February 18, 2026
In this episode, you will hear how we are using 鈥渧ibe coding鈥� (coding by conversation with generative AI) to build interactive learning elements for courses in D2L Brightspace. We talk through what this approach can do well, where it can cause problems, and how to keep the work grounded in good instructional practice.
We also share the guardrails that matter most: start with clear learning goals, test often, and treat accessibility as a requirement from the beginning. Along the way, we discuss common trouble spots, including color contrast, revisions that unintentionally break what was working, and why it helps to document and maintain code so it remains usable over time.
This is a visual episode with demonstrations, including a gamified misinformation activity built with Gemini, a faculty-informed physical therapy simulation built with ChatGPT (including AI-assisted image prompting), and a quick example of using AI to create a clean HTML announcement you can adapt for your LMS.
This episode includes an optional Continuing the Conversation Activity. Use the button below to request the activity for episode 38.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
For help with color contrast, visit the .
Featured quotes in this episode:
鈥淰ibe coding is coding by conversation. And, you know, telling AI what you want and trusting it to build it.鈥� - Jeff Mastromonico
鈥淚 think that's going to be probably the buzzword of the episode is test, test, test, you know, and make sure that you vet, the content and, all the interactivity and everything that you, you are getting from a GPT.鈥� - Jeff Mastromonico
鈥淚n our context, we're talking about instructional design, course design, helping faculty create, instructional materials for their courses. So that's exactly what we're doing. We're using vibe coding to create to code. Interactive instructional materials for our courses and also for, our faculty clients as well for their courses.鈥� - Arthur Takahashi
鈥淓ven ask ChatGPT, right. I have this module. Perhaps students are not engaging. As much as I wish in this particular module. What are some activities that I could create? Something that is interactive using vibe coding?鈥� - Arthur Takahashi
Episode 37: Reflections on Teaching and Learning with Dr. Bonni Stachowiak
January 21, 2026
Dr. Bonni Stachowiak is the host of the , a long-running podcast focused on the art and science of teaching. In this episode, she joins us to reflect on what years of conversations with educators have taught her about teaching, learning, and faculty growth.
Our conversation explores curiosity and presence in teaching, the role of relationships in learning, and why failure is often an essential part of meaningful learning experiences. Dr. Stachowiak also shares insights on faculty development, navigating change in higher education, and approaching emerging challenges, including artificial intelligence, with intention rather than urgency.
This episode includes an optional Continuing the Conversation Activity. Use the button below to request the activity for episode 37.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
The following books and thinkers were referenced during the conversation:
by Ken Bain
by James Lang and his writing on teaching, learning, and academic integrity
by Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A. Rettinger
by Sarah Rose Cavanagh
and his work on becoming and reflective teaching
and research on retrieval practice and learning
and his work on writing and artificial intelligence
The concept of relationship-rich education, including research by
The is a large collection of diverse resources related to artificial intelligence in higher education
Featured quotes in this episode:
On curiosity as a starting point for learning
鈥淚 think human beings are naturally curious, you know, you just kind of have to spark it and point it in a direction.鈥� - Bonni Stachowiak
On assumptions we carry about teaching and learning
鈥淲e鈥檝e really been socialized to believe a lot of wrongheaded things about learning, about relationships, about, and I go back to the writing that I鈥檝e done about productivity.鈥� - Bonni Stachowiak
On the limits of the instructor role
鈥淚 failed at that because I couldn鈥檛 show up and be everything to everyone. No one can show up and be everything to everyone, but we can cultivate these relationships.鈥� - Bonni Stachowiak
About the Hosts
Andrew Everett is a Faculty & Instructional Developer in the Center for Instructional Innovation
(CII) with a focus on video and multimedia production and is the producer of Speaking of Higher Ed. Andrew is also an adjunct instructor in the Department of Social Sciences. After
nearly a decade in TV news, Andrew came to 黄瓜短视频 in 2019 as a video producer
for Communications & Marketing before moving to the CII in 2022. Andrew has been awarded
numerous Georgia Associated Press awards, an EMMA award from the National Academy
of Television Arts & Sciences, and two silver Telly awards for his work on the short
film Augusta Gives: Back to the Future and for an educational video for physical therapy students. He also holds Sententia鈥檚
Gamification Surveyor Certification (Level 1). Andrew earned a BS in Digital Cinematography
from Full Sail University and a Master of Public Administration degree from Augusta
University.
As a visual storyteller, Arthur Takahashi has worked in TV, public relations, and now instructional design. In his professional
career, he has seen how visuals can touch people, how stories can stick with them
for a lifetime and how shared emotional experiences can create a strong bond among
them. His work has led him to three Southeast Regional Emmy Awards nominations for
promo, documentary, and animation. He has also won a regional Edward R. Murrow Award
for hard news, two Georgia Association of Broadcasters awards for best locally-produced
program and best use of digital platforms, two Georgia Associated Press Awards for
investigative reporting and general reporting, a bronze Telly Award for documentary.
As an instructional designer, he also placed first at the 2021 Adobe eLearning Design
Awards and won a silver Telly for best use of 2D animation and a silver Telly for
an educational video in the health and safety category. Since Arthur joined CII, he
has helped create faculty development offerings that have impacted hundreds of AU
faculty. He holds the Sententia鈥檚 Gamification Surveyor Certification (Level 1) and
is a QM-certified APPQMR online facilitator. Arthur has a bachelor鈥檚 degree in mass
communication, a master鈥檚 degree in history and a master鈥檚 degree in public administration.
Jeff Mastromonico, EdD, is the Director of Instructional Innovation for CII. Jeff is celebrating his 24th
year in higher education and his 14th year with 黄瓜短视频. Jeff has a BS
in Business Administration, an M.Ed in Educational Technology from USC, a master's
certification in gamification and game-based learning, and is currently pursuing a
doctorate in Educational Innovation. Jeff has been awarded numerous awards for his
work in the design and development of multimedia, e-learning, and game development,
including the international Serious Play award and Adobe's Golden E-Learning Award.