If terms like "Textbook Equity" and "OER" keep popping into your inbox and you need some clarity about them, tune into this conversation with Textbook Equity Librarian/Professor of Library Services, Anne Marie Gruber, and Textbook Equity Student Advisory Board member Amanda Pregler. Textbook Equity is a campuswide effort to make course materials affordable, accessible, and inclusive. However, cost is only one part of the story. You'll learn how these efforts can impact student success. You will get a plain-language description of the options with innovative examples, and learn where to find help exploring them.

Dr. Caran Howard and Dr. Gayle Rhineberger reframe online teaching around student needs rather than content delivery. For example, Dr. Rhineberger's students, many of whom work full-time in criminal justice, can't attend synchronous sessions, so she's built a course structure around flexibility, personal connection, and transparency that respects their constraints.

Faculty teaching asynchronous courses will find immediately usable ideas here: structuring discussion boards around student-generated questions, offering flexible meeting times for working professionals, and sharing personality through low-stakes introductions. These aren't theoretical suggestions: they come from years of iterating with real online students.

What gets lost when we automate? Dr. Kevin Mason, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern Iowa, uses an unexpected analogy: you can get an efficient cheeseburger at McDonald's, or a better one from someone who cares about the human presence in the process. Applied to education, this raises questions about what automation gains in efficiency versus what it sacrifices in human connection and judgment. In this episode of the CETL Podcast, the conversation traces this tension back through industrial history while keeping the focus practical. For faculty considering AI integration, Dr. Mason offers a framework: identify where human presence matters most in your teaching and protect it.