In Part 1, I discussed the importance of choosing the use of LLM with intent for the purposes of content creation. This time we’ll focus on areas of use that support your learners. For a training module on supporting learners with LLM, see my website.
Whether you are using LLM to help create materials that align with these topics or using LLM to act as a check on your own writing. The addition of an assistant is useful to ensure that you are meeting the needs of all your learners. It’s always good to have another set of eyes on something, even if those eyes are algorithmic. So often, teachers do not have the ability to collaborate to the extent we would like. Using these tools as assistants can help us fill in some of our own gaps in some of these complex topics.
Accessibility
Are you up on your WCAG 2.1 AA compliance? Maybe some of you have no idea what I’m even talking about. It’s the current standard for web content accessibility we should be holding ourselves to. I can’t list them off the top of my head. In some cases, I have no idea how to meet some of the standards through manipulation of HTML or CSS without help. I have found that having conversations with LLM about this not only helps me get to what I need much faster, it also teaches me more and more about why these features are important and what things should look like. For instance, look at this guidance from NCADEMI on hyperlinks.
For WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, use the checklist to provide suggestions specifically for 2.1 AA.
Hyperlinked text should be descriptive and avoid vague phrases like “Click here.” For example, from Ncademi (CC BY SA):
Suppose you’re creating a digital document with a link to the homepage of National Geographic. Here are three versions of how you might present the hyperlink, followed by an explanation of each:
Version 1: Visit the homepage of National Geographic at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/.
Version 1 is an example of a naked URL. While the destination is embedded in the hyperlink (NationalGeographic.com), there’s additional unnecessary hypertext around it.
Version 2: Visit the homepage of National Geographic.
Version 2 is a good example of a descriptive hyperlink.
Version 3: Click here to visit the homepage of National Geographic.
Version 3 is a bad example of a descriptive hyperlink. The phrase “click here” does not describe the destination of the hyperlink.
This work on hyperlinking guidance by NCADEMI is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
Using a resource like Meeting the ADA Title II Web and Mobile Accessibility Requirements: A Roadmap for State and Local Educational Agencies from Ncademi will provide the structure and prioritization of web accessibility. For reference, these resources from that page are a good place to start in terms of course revision.
I share that because you can paste your content in a LLM and then paste this guidance and have it give you the proper HTML to paste into your page. It saves a lot of time and hassle if you don’t quite have this skill down yet.
You can ask for proper headings, color contrast, descriptions of infographics, etc. You can even ask it for guidance on alt text for images, though that one is still a bit controversial and there is a higher error rate with getting the descriptions down.
Adaptation and Modification
When I develop content, I try to anticipate the needs of learners by implementing common accommodations and modifications from the start. I use a list of common ones I’ve seen over the years and make sure that I am doing that by default. With an LLM, I can paste that link in and other content or OER and have it make those adjustments for me. Need something chunked, step-by-step directions, supplemental materials, teacher notes, reduced sets of questions while still meeting certain academic benchmarks? Those are just a few of the things that save time when using a LLM. The ability to create support materials and different types of directions is a great way to use these tools.
SEL/UDL
Including aspects of Social Emotional Learning and Universal Design for Learning Frameworks within your prompts will help align the text generation of LLM with something that more closely resembles the type of content you’d want to put in front of students.
Knowing all of the frameworks can be challenging if you aren’t familiar with them or having been using them regularly over the years. Maybe especially challenging for teachers just starting their careers. I have found it useful to put all of them together into a document and then uploading that document to Claude to keep alignment with those that are relevant for that lesson or task. It doesn’t let you off the hook for learning them and identifying if the LLM response was correct or not, but it gets you a lot closer and much faster than if you tried to do it on your own. I use many such documents in this way to guide the LLM responses.
Demonstration of Care
We know that students do better when there is a demonstration of care and empathy in the course. Pasting your content into a LLM and having it add this layer to the materials is a great way to get started. In many ways, these tools are better at that than many humans. Then it’s up to us to review the response to make sure it is something we want it to say. Sometimes they get a little over the top and need to be reined in.
Think about what other aspects of tone and voice you want. Think about using encouraging language and inclusive language. You can see that there are many kinds of layering techniques we can use to develop our content into something that is much more supporting and engaging for our learners. By aligning with all of these suggestions you also make your course a little more AI resistant. Some of the aspects of UDL will naturally align the content with things that are more personally related to your learners, making it less likely that they will use LLM to complete their submissions.
I feel like I have to do this every time, but please do not take everything the LLM gives you as truth! You have to review it and make sure it aligns with your expectations. While these tools provide important considerations for you to review, they’re not always accurate.
What other topics have you used? Is there anything you’d like to see me write about? Let me know! We need to work through this together.