An AI MOOC Toolkit

Owned by John Swope
Last updated: Sept 27, 2024
5 min read

The list of tools, prompts, and approaches that leverage AI to support teaching and learning is growing rapidly. This toolkit focuses on items that support the specific needs of MOOCs with their asynchronous, online student students and generally prioritize a lower-maintenance approach. Some items on this list have not been fully vetted, so please do your due diligence when deciding what to use for your course.

AI to Create

How can educators and course creators use AI to accelerate the speed and improve the quality at which they create courses? How can AI continue to free faculty up from the tasks of content creation and output checker, and focus on higher order tasks?

LLMs (ChatGPT, Bing, Bard, others)

  1. Draft your video scripts based on existing documents or learning objectives.

    1. Sample Prompt: “Topic: [insert topic]. Write a video script explaining how to [insert topic details] for beginners. Limit video length to 3 minutes. Use a screencast narration style and explainer tone. Include lived experiences from the perspective of [insert persona]. Include common pain points. Include clear step-by-step details. Have a bias for impact value statements with numbers. Highlight pro tips. Add a call to action. Add 3 resources to learn more. Use “Global English” to make content and context accessible for non-native comprehension. Don’t use idioms. Be literal and stay away from metaphors and colloquial language. Keep sentences short. Standardize terminology to minimize changes. Avoid directional language. Use inclusive, accessible, person-first language.” [Source]

  2. Create a series of MCQ questions based on a topic

    1. Sample Prompt: Write [number] low-stakes multiple choice assessment questions with hints and feedback options on the topic of [topic details or raw content].

  3. Write a choose-your-own-adventure scenario simulation and plug that into something like H5P, or Twinery, or SCORM.

  4. Create stories, jokes, real-world metaphors, etc about the concepts you are teaching.

    1. Sample Prompt: Suggest 3 metaphors to explain the concept of [concept details].

Image Generators (DALL-E, Bing, Midjourney, others)

Use image generators to generate custom images for your course.

Elicit.org

Elicit is a research assistant. You can ask it questions in plain english and it will return the most relevant papers and journal articles with summaries so that you can quickly find the right research to utilize.

Humata.ai

Humata.ai is also a research assistant that allows you to upload your own papers and articles and ask specific questions about that content. Humata can answer questions about the articles or simplify difficult concepts.

Video Generators (Synthesia, Flickify, Steve.ai and others)

Video generators can take on many parts of the video production at this point.

Synthesia creates talking head videos with ai-generated avatar using text-to-speech.

Flickify is presentation-style explainer video with auto-matched images

Steve.ai is cartoon-style explainer video with auto-created cartoons and text-to-speech.

Text-to-Speech (ElevenLabs, Play.ht)

ElevenLabs allows you to clone your own voice and then generate text-to-speech in your own voice.

Play.ht has a large library of ultra-realistic text-to-speech voices, including voices in different languages other than English. (Suggested by University of Alaska Fairbanks Center for Teaching & Learning)

 

AI to Support

How can AI speed up and individualize support for a student throughout their course journey.

 

AI to Assess

How must our existing assessment landscape change in this new era of AI? How can we leverage AI to build better, more authentic assessments?

 

LLMs (ChatGPT, Bing, Bard, others)

  1. Have a debate with the AI:

    1. I am learning about [concept]. As an exercise, I’d like to have a debate with you about the topic. I will take the side of [one side of the argument] and I’d like you to take the opposing side. Let’s go through three rounds of back-and-forth and then conclude. When we have finished, please provide a brief summary and revisit the key points we each made.

  2. Teach an AI!

    1. Sample Prompt: I am learning about [X]. As an exercise, I'd like to act as the teacher and teach you about this topic. Please act as a new [student/employee/etc] who is learning about this for the first time. Ask me to describe the topic generally, and then once I have answered, ask me followup questions which I will answer. Ask me three followup questions and wait for me to answer each before moving on to the next one. Once I've answered all three questions, we are done. Please rate your newfound understanding of the topic once the conversation is over. 

  3. LLM as a tutor who asks guiding questions without giving answers, and asks students to explain their thinking. The assignment ends when the student has an adequate explanation at the end.

    1. See this article for a sample prompt. 

There is also this interesting hack. If you are concerned about AI supported writing in your course, you can use Google Docs (or Microsoft word) version history to have a log of activity which is easy to distinguish between human or AI-powered writing. More from this source.