It’s important to consider our purpose when we choose to use AI for a task. What is the problem you are trying to solve? You are essentially hiring AI as your assistant, so what tasks would you pay for and what would satisfactory performance in that role look like? As someone who has spent thousands of hours developing curriculum, I can say that it’s always such a daunting task to start with the academic benchmark and idea. The layers of complexity involved in making a complete resource is rare, even in vendor content. I know that nothing I ever do is finished, but is always in a constant state of revision and improvement. I currently teach a course I wrote over a decade ago, and each semester I am making changes and improvements.
I would argue that using AI from conception, to organization, to content and every little micro-decision in between would be an unethical use of these tools. The idea is to enhance ourselves not replace ourselves. I am going to flesh out some of these ideas in their own posts in the coming weeks, but let’s take a brief overview of what I’m talking about. What follows is a list of specific areas that I feel AI can help us make improvements over what is already available for content. These are some of the aspects of building and improving course content that I would say are required in order for something to be good enough for piloting. In this first part, I’ll focus on developing content. In Part 2, I’ll discuss various ways of supporting learners through Accessibility, Adaptation and Modification, SEL/UDL, and Demonstration of Care.
(Keep in mind, if you are using vendor materials and your privacy settings are not sufficiently set in your LLM, that you may be violating the terms of use of that content if you allow the LLM to train on your prompts/responses.)
Content Development
Standards Alignment
The standards are really our guiding principles, so every conversation with an LLM should have this kind of topic woven into the discussion to give us direction and focus. LLM are great as a thought partner for pasting in instructional content, uploading the academic benchmarks and then having a conversation about the degree of alignment, what is missing and would could make for stronger and more focused alignment. I usually have the LLM present its findings to me in a table that includes the benchmark, the lesson, and the rationale for why the two are aligned.
I will spend some time reviewing and pushing back with two different LLM (typically ChatGPT and Claude) and then swapping the responses for analysis and review.
Open Educational Resources
One of the reasons I love starting with OER is that it allows me to take something that already exists and then customize it for my learners and setting. I can take these existing resources and then ask the LLM for suggestions for standards alignment, for engagement, for support materials, study guides, assessments, and even redesign to help it align with my existing materials. In the past, A course built with OER seemed disjointed because of the different tone and voice inherent in each element. LLM can help refine that and make if feel like a seamless part of the course. I provide a module with a more in depth exploration of LLM and OER on my site.
Interactives
If I go to Claude and am working on a timeline, or the cell cycle, or some other aspect that would lend itself to a visual component that evolves through some process I can have it create animations and interactives that I am not skilled at making myself. I can ask for those to be created in HTML so I can paste it into my learning management system, or I can even have ChatGPT create an H5P module for me! This is so many step beyond what most teachers are capable of producing that it really allows us to create engaging course content that finally competes with that we may have previously spent a lot of money subscribing to.
HTML/CSS
Design is important. So is consistency. Taking something you wrote and having the LLM provide you with engaging, visually appealing versions saves a great deal of time and also likely exceeds the capabilities of most instructors. Taking something from a simple block of text into something that is specifically formatted for the digital setting lends a layer of professionalism and authority to materials we create for our learners.
Inclusion
With your existing materials, as the LLM, what are you missing? Upload guidance for addressing specific aspects of inclusion. There are some handouts that address this on my resources page. Guidance like A Guide to Reliable Native American-Related Teaching Resources and the Minnesota Native American Essential Understandings for Educators from the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community can be a good starting place for having LLM make suggestions for improvements as well. These kinds of documents can help the LLM direct focus to aspects of inclusion when making suggestions for improvements. You will want to make sure that you have read and understood them as well so you can assess the effectiveness of the suggestions.
Organization
Have the LLM suggest proper organization of lessons, units, and any instructional materials into something that uses proper categories and order. It will break up material for you so that it is easy to navigate and digest. Taking time to review various suggestions may give you insights and prompt you into how you might consider structuring your courses.
Assessment
Not only getting ideas for multiple measures of assessments, you can also finally escape the incredibly tedious tasks of creating multiple choice quizzes for formative assessment and practice. That process of setting up a quiz, entering all the potential responses, feedback for each response, the additional questions for the quiz bank so you can allow for a random set of questions… it all takes hours! Now it take minutes and is a much needed addition to every class. Start working on bulking up those quiz banks so you can reuse questions from previous units as the course progresses so students are continually reviewing your course content.
This will also help us get away from the trap of doing the same kinds of activities over and over again. Getting LLM perspective and suggestions can open up all kinds of possibilities for how we might assess learners in ways that goes beyond things like essay responses.
Stay tuned for Part 2
Where I’ll discuss various ways of supporting learners through Accessibility, Adaptation and Modification, SEL/UDL, and Demonstration of Care. For a training module on supporting learners with LLM, see my website.