Educators can benefit from leveraging AI tools to streamline their workflow and processes, and improve the resources made available to students. AI has the ability to critique and help to refine course materials, and to save labor on reinterpreting existing content. Educators must be vigilant and thoughtful in their usage.
Table of Contents
Tools and Prompts
Class Recordings, Summaries and Transcripts
Preparing Course Content
Syllabus Development
Case Studies and Practice Problems
Quizzes
Rubrics and Assignment Design
Multiple Formats and Modalities
Interactive Learning Tools
Revising and Testing Materials
Drafting Routine Communications
Revising Classes Year on Year
Research Assistants
Tools and Prompts
Google has recently released a set of AI tools, accessible through Google Classroom, that are structured for particular educational approaches. Pacific staff and faculty will have access to these tools with their Pacific login.
The key to setting up an effective interaction with an AI is careful and thoughtful prompting. For more on the components to consider in order to write an effective prompt for each of these tasks, visit our Introduction to Prompting, and the GenAI Chatbot Prompt Library for Educators published by AI for Education offers prompts designed for a wide variety of tasks.
Class Recordings, Summaries and Transcripts
It can be beneficial to provide recordings of your classes to students for easy revision and access, and if you do this via Zoom, you will have access to additional resources provided by Zoom AI companion. Individual students sometimes have an accommodation that allows them to produce their own recordings, but it can be desirable to produce recordings yourself for three reasons:
- The in-room audio-visual equipment is often well set up to capture your voice and slides. For information and instructions for the AV equipment found in Pacific’s classrooms, see Podium Setup Instructions.
- You retain control of the muting and camera direction, and have the ability to edit the video if needed, to promote the privacy of all students.
- You can provide those recordings to all students for revision.
Some students have concerns about being recorded. In many cases, the recording can be focused on you and your slides and voice, and student contributions or sensitive discussions excluded by pausing or muting. Often, an educator can have a conversation with a student about their specific concerns and reach an agreement about what will and will not be recorded and how it will be shared.
Zoom is capable of producing full transcripts of classes, live and recorded. This may help any student who could benefit from a written version of the class content, to access content in a different modality, to easily revise materials, and to search through transcripts to see where a particular topic is covered. This can be enabled in a side panel for live meetings. Post-class Zoom summaries can similarly offer all students the ability to quickly recap what was covered in a class, as well as offering an easy summary of their next tasks. See Zoom AI Companion for full instructions on how to access and enable each feature.
Preparing Course Content
There are many opportunities for AI to play a supporting role in developing course content, working from an educator’s existing ideas and resources.
Syllabus Development
Example tasks:
- “Suggest a 15-week syllabus structure for an introductory marketing course covering market research, consumer behavior, branding, and digital marketing. The course should have a midterm project and a final exam.”
- “Here are my lecture notes for the first two topics. Suggest a reasonable weekly schedule for covering this material, including time for in-class activities or discussion.”
AI tools can help you to shape the material you want to cover in a class into a plan for the semester or a module.
If you have a general idea of the topics you want to cover, AI can help organize them into a logical flow. You can provide it with a list of core concepts, desired learning outcomes, and the length of the course, and it can suggest a weekly breakdown, potential module themes, and even draft initial learning objectives for each section. If you have existing lecture notes, readings, or a textbook, AI can help you map out how to pace the material over the semester.
AI can be particularly helpful for critiquing and improving the plan you have, especially for identifying gaps or conflicts that you are missing. It can serve as a helpful second set of ‘eyes.’
If you are working on writing learning outcomes for your class, a cross-institutional team of researchers developed a valuable tool for developing learning outcomes, entitled LOGEN. This tool was developed using the ARCHED (AI for Responsible, Collaborative, Human-centered Education Instructional Design) framework, and offers a structured interface that incorporates Bloom’s taxonomy to aid educators in writing, revising, and evaluating learning objectives/outcomes.
Case Studies and Practice Problems
Example task:
- “Create three short case studies for a business ethics class that illustrate a conflict of interest. Ensure one is set in a tech company, one in healthcare, and one in a non-profit.”
AI can generate diverse examples, scenarios, or problems tailored to the concepts you’re teaching, which can otherwise be a time-consuming task. These might be examples you use in a lecture, or set as practice problems for students.
It is extremely important to check these examples for accuracy, relevance, appropriate difficulty level, and any potential biases. If you are using the AI to suggest a treatment of or solution to the case study, it is essential that you check that the AI’s analysis is correct. AIs regularly make mistakes, and could mislead students.
Quizzes
Example task:
- “Based on the attached chapter on cellular respiration, generate five multiple-choice questions and two short answer questions suitable for a college-level biology quiz.”
Provide AI with your lecture notes, readings, or specific sections of a textbook, and it can draft appropriate quiz questions. This can be a significant time-saver, and can also help ensure you’re creating questions that cover a broad range of the provided material.
Ensure that they accurately reflect the learning objectives, are unambiguous, and that the correct answers are indeed correct. AI might not always grasp the nuances you intend to assess.
Rubrics and Assignment Design
Example task:
- “Develop a rubric for a research paper assignment that requires students to formulate a thesis, support it with scholarly sources, and analyze counterarguments. The paper should be 5-7 pages.”
If you have an assignment description and clear learning objectives, AI can help you outline a grading rubric. AI can suggest categories for assessment (e.g., clarity, argumentation, use of evidence, critical analysis) and help define different levels of performance (e.g., excellent, proficient, developing, needs improvement) for each criterion.
This practice can also be very valuable for making sure that your assignment as written directly aligns with your learning outcomes. The AI will work literally from the description given, which can be revealing. Review the generated rubric carefully. Consider whether it reflects your learning outcomes, and if not, look back at the assignment description and consider both your assignment design and communication. You will also need to refine the language and adjust the weighting of criteria to ensure it accurately reflects your standards and priorities.
Many of us learn a lot the first time we receive submissions for a new assignment, and see for the first time how our instructions have been received. Using an AI to generate one or several example assignments that fulfil your description and rubric can help you to check whether your requirements and expectations are adequately communicated (and also help you to think through potential ways that students might use AI to fulfil an assignment). In addition, many students appreciate having concrete example assignments to get a clearer sense of your expectations, and these can be difficult to provide for a brand-new course; a carefully chosen, edited AI version might help you to provide that resource on the first run.
Multiple Formats and Modalities
Example task:
- “Take this paragraph explaining the concept of ‘opportunity cost’ and summarize it as a single sentence, then as three bullet points, and finally, create a small table comparing it to ‘sunk cost’.”
A principle of Universal Design for Learning is to offer multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression to craft learning experiences that anticipate diverse needs from the beginning. AI can help you to fulfil this goal by:
- Tailoring your course materials to the people you have in class, such as by creating examples that engage their interests and offering choice
- Presenting course materials in multiple formats
- Helping to suggest alternative formats for assignments that fulfil the rubric and learning outcomes
The ability to quickly reformat materials according to different requirements can allow educators to offer more options and flexibility to their students. Some might grasp a concept best from a concise bulleted list, others from a short paragraph, and some might benefit from seeing relationships in a table. AI can quickly generate these variations. These different formats can serve as excellent study aids for students preparing for exams, and help you to design learning materials that offer multiple means of engagement.
At the beginning of a class, you might consider surveying students about their preferred formats for learning materials. You can then try to meet those needs in the resources you provide, and even check in with students later in the semester to see which are proving most helpful. Answering those kinds of questions about their own learning can help develop students’ metacognitive awareness.
At times, students will request alternative formats for assignments, and it can be tricky to come up with options on the spot. You might consult AI, providing the assignment description and rubric, and ask for a list of possible alternative formats that would fulfil the same learning outcomes.
Interactive Learning Tools
AI can be used to create simple games from a natural language description, writing functional code for engaging activities without any coding required from the educator. For an example, in this video Mitchell B. Weiss of Harvard describes how he used ChatGPT to build an html game that challenges students to solve a real-world traffic problem; Ethan Mollick at the Wharton School used AI to build a simulator that explains the central limit theorem.
Revising and Testing Materials
Example task:
- “Review this assignment description. Are the instructions clear? Is the workload appropriate for a one-week task? Can you identify any potential points of confusion for students?”
A great use for AI is as a critical collaborator to review teaching materials. Provide an AI with an assignment prompt, a lecture outline, or a set of instructions and ask it for feedback. AI might be able to point out areas where students could misinterpret instructions or where concepts might need further explanation.
The strength of this method is that the AI will work from the literal meaning of the instructions given and the provided context. It is often difficult for an expert to set aside the contextual knowledge they bring to bear on a problem, and see it as a beginner does.
Educators can also ask an AI to critique their study materials from an accessibility standpoint, and suggest improvement. It may be helpful to prompt the AI to look for common issues, such as use of color and descriptive links, to write image descriptions for alt text, and to suggest other areas for improvement. An example of a prompt for this like of task is the Enhancing Accessibility prompt from AI for Education.
Drafting Routine Communications
Example task:
- “Draft an announcement for the class reminding them that their research paper proposal is due next Friday, and about the reading for next week. Mention that they should refer to the guidelines on the course website and that I’ll hold extra office hours on Wednesday.”
AI can help draft standard emails, announcements, or reminders. An AI can provide a reasonable draft of routine reminders about upcoming deadlines, weekly announcements about module topics, or answers to frequently asked questions, which you can then review for accuracy and personalize before sending.
This can allow you to place your focus on connecting with your students in communications, say with a sentence or two about your latest in-class discussions or upcoming challenges, as above the routine task of listing deadlines.
Revising Classes Year on Year
Example task:
- “Here are my teaching notes from last year’s course, and a summary of student feedback. What specific assignments might I want to adjust? What aspects of the course seemed most successful?”
AI could potentially assist in analyzing past course materials, your own reflective notes, and even key insights from student evals to help improve the course for the next iteration. If classes have been summarized, per the section on Class Summaries and Transcripts, you may be able to look back at those summaries to help you to recall past approaches.
If you want to create a place to save your reflections on a class over the course of the semester, you could set up a Gem or a Notebook for the purpose, which will save the history of the conversation to look back on later, and can even write you a summary of key points to address.
Research Assistants
Some AI tools, carefully used, offer interesting capabilities as digital research assistants.
- NotebookLM is a tool designed by Google to act as a research assistant, working from uploaded materials to produce mind maps, summaries and audio overviews.
- Connected Papers is a tool that searches and visually maps out the relationships between research papers to help researchers to find research relevant to their projects.
By integrating AI thoughtfully in these ways, educators can spend less time on routine tasks, and gain valuable feedback on their learning design.
For more guidance on how to use these tools, visit:
General Considerations for Using AI in Teaching and Learning
Course Policy Guidance
Introduction to Prompting
Applications for Student Learning
Assignments in the Context of AI