Students will analyze article excerpts that demonstrate how the opioid crisis was fueled by a five-sentence "letter to the editor" that was uncritically cited as "evidence" that opioid addiction was rare. Indirectly this activity demonstrates why ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence platforms should never be…

Higher education has witnessed a paradigm shift from the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence (genAI). Basing its name on the television show, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, this single- class activity was designed to foster media literacy students' understanding of popular genAI tools. To compare and contrast the capabilities of…

Courses: Rhetorical Criticism, Contemporary Rhetoric, Argumentation, Persuasion, Communication Theory. Objectives: Students will (1) learn the basics of the narrative rationality as a mode of judging rhetoric, and (2) observe the ways in which humans use narrative fidelity and narrative probability to judge stories.

With increasing social media attacks on scholarship and individual academics, educators must be prepared to talk to their students openly about skewed threats from the ideological right. This assignment opens up dialogue against such attacks by introducing core tenets of information literacy in conversation with an instructor's academic work. The…

Courses: This unit-level teaching assignment was designed for courses on rhetoric, persuasion, professional communication, public speaking, and business communication. Objectives: By completing this activity, students should be able to: (1) identify and research a specific job, scholarship, or award they'd like to pursue within the next six…

Courses: Public Speaking, Interpersonal Communication, Organizational Communication, Introduction to Communication Studies, Business Communication. Objectives: The goal for this activity is not only to provide students with an understanding of their initial, derived, and terminal credibility when relating a personal, edifying story but also to…

Courses: Research Methods, Public Speaking, Communication Theory, any other course that requires college students to engage in a formal research process. Can be conducted in traditional, online, or hybrid courses. Objectives: In this original single-class activity, students will be able to evaluate source credibility for resources that extend…